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

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.
(continue reading…)