A long time ago I decided to mess around with the redirect_program feature of squid. If you’re not familar with squid I suggest looking up the wiki on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_(software).

What exactly does redirect_program do? No one knows for sure, some say that it is the very reason the internet works, while others speculate that the previous statement is nothing but rubish. The world may never know, however just because we don’t know what it does doesn’t mean we can’t use it!

Ok but seriously what does the redirect_program tag actually allow us to do. This tag is used to specify the location of the executable for the URL redirector. So you can basicaly create a program that can rewrite the requested URLs that are passing though squid. So one could play around with the data that is passing though squid pretty much on the fly. What is great about it, is that it’s very easy to program for and has many real world uses.

None of which we will talk about here.
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So it seems I have to write this post again because my server crashed.. leaving everything alone but my sql databases… Oh well, could be a lot worst.

So after my post yesterday about how I update my location on my site I got a reply from @andre_vans that told me about a project called “PlayNice”. The GIThub source is at http://github.com/natfriedman/playnice and the the creator of it has a blog post about it at http://nat.org/blog/2009/08/playnice-google-apple/.

Now I mentioned in my post yesterday that I wanted to be able to use some sort of push notification on the iPhone so that my site could ask for an update and the phone would comply. This would require a custom app on the iPhone to automatically execute something when it has a push notification. Now I’m not even sure if that is possible at this stage as that would almost be like the app is running in the background, which apple does not allow yet. However, Apple has such a service built into the phone that allows anyone with a MobileMe account linked to their iPhone to get the location of the device.

So with that PlayNice will basically log in as you on your MobileMe account and launch the locate phone feature. Now the neat thing about this is that it also updates to your Google Latitude account. This make’s it pretty much perfect for what I want to do. With the source code freely available and easy to understand it was a breeze adding 3 lines of code to update my map backend whenever the PlayNice script is ran. If you wan’t to do the same with most of the code from my post yesterday then follow me past the break. Otherwise, ignore me.
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I presented my secret project at the 2600 meeting. I was hoping for a much bigger response to it than the one I got. I felt that there was to much to go over and so that made people bored\unimpressed. Or maybe I am the only person that thinks controlling an 8 year old system with a web browser, or Wii remote is cool. Eitherway, I had fun working on it, and I learned a lot from this one project. So at least I can take the knowledge of this project and use it towards other things. I already have a few ideas but won’t be working on them until I move to my new apartment, whenever that might be.

I recently got a UT-41 at http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=UT-41&cat=GPS