Didn’t think I’d have another update on the GPS software so soon. But on my way back from Utah I was informed that the plane had GPS tracking available online. Now because the flight also had WIFI I had to check it out.

The site that did the tracking was http://www.flightstats.com and it did an amazing job with updating where we were in real-time. Now being me, I found a quick and easy way to grab the GPS coordinates from the site and import them into my database. It was a quick and dirty shell script that was all of 3 lines of code. So I won’t be sharing it, however I do think it is something that should be added to my overall GPS tracking suite.

I’m going to start looking into other GPS type location services, such as FourSquare, and FireEagle and try to build a framework around all of them that allows one to update all of them by updating one. So if anyone can think of any other apps or services out there that allow one to share their GPS location with friends or just track it, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Also, one last thing I’d like to share. With the flight tracker I decided to have my script run every minute to pull the information. It’s pretty amazing how far planes get in a single minute. Here is a screenshot of when I started the script.

GPS Flight Points