tags: all,

apache, apachecon, apacheweek, bryce, cve, fedora, fudcon, geocaching, gps, ha, jabber, metrics, microsoft, nashville, north carolina, oscon, red hat summit, security, trips

On the PocketPC:

• Make sure the GPS Intermediate Driver is enabled, on the MIO there is a built-in "GPS Settings" utility where I have it set to COM4 and "Manage GPS automatically"
• Use the GPS2Blue utility. Make sure it's set to GPS on COM4, 4800 baud, with logging only of GGA/GLL/RMC/VTG NMEA, and select 'Log processed raw data...'. You don't need to enable the "2blue" bit, we're just using it to write the tracklog.
• Make sure your camera has a date and time that is close to the one being shown by GPS2Blue from the satellites
• Start TomTom. Make sure it's also set to COM4, 4800 baud. This will work because the GPS Intermediate Driver is opened by GPS2Blue. You can't start TomTom first, but you can exit GPS2Blue and leave TomTom running.
• After finishing you end up with a NMEA track log with an hour of logging taking up about 1.6Mb. Transfer it to your Fedora machine.

On my Fedora machine:

• Use gpsbabel to convert the NMEA track log and clean it up a bit. I used:

  gpsbabel -i nmea -f GPS_2008-03-03_122630.log -x discard,hdop=10,sat=5 -o gpx -F out.gpx
  

• Use gps2photo.pl to add the geocoding to your images. This script looks at the time and date the photo was taken and tries to match it up to an entry in the tracklog, so you may need to play with the timeoffset to deal with timezone differences. Although we have snow, being in the UK in the Winter has it's advantages as we're UTC+0, so I just used:

  gpsPhoto.pl --geoinfo=osm --dir ./ --gpsfile out.gpx --timeoffset 0 \
      --city=auto --sublocation=auto --state auto --country auto --kml out.kml
  

The exif metadata inside each jpeg now contains the approximate co-ordinates of where you were when you took the photo along with a guess of the location (city, country, etc). You can load out.kml into GoogleEarth to see the tracklog and photos on a map. If you've allowed Flickr to read the location data from exif then uploading a geotagged photo will automatically place it on a map. (Make sure you consider the consequences before enabling that option or you may end up unintentionally leaking information like the location of your friends houses or parties you've been to). Here's a quick pic taken in the snow today to test it out:

output from exiftool: GPS Position : 55 deg 46' 58.21" N, 4 deg 0' 5.50" W City : Motherwell Province-State : Scotland Country-Primary Location Name : United Kingdom

American Airlines Experiences Suck
More American Airlines Experiences Suck More

First was the debacle which was a 7 hour delay getting to Nashville after a flight was cancelled. Now, at 9pm the day before my 6am flight from Nashville to London tommorrow they cancel my flight and are unable to get me to London in time for my Monday meeting. So I miss my meeting and total for the week I'll have had 18 hours of delays. Although perhaps I shouldn't blog this until I'm home as I'm still in Nashville and, nice that it is, don't want to spend another year here. So thats four out of my last six AA trips that have gone significantly wrong, and I only used AA this time because I wanted to upgrade and had miles left.

However, rant aside, this trip was all about the Red Hat Summit. I was pleasantly suprised by how smoothly it ran and how useful it was to have face-to-face meetings with some of the people I interact with daily by computer. There's a few cool things that the trip acted as a catalyst for, but you'll need to wait to find out ;) I tried to speak to many different attendees over breaks in the days, and consensus was positive with all the first-timers wishing to attend again in the future.

a few of my photos from the summit

• Security Vulnerability Management (PDF, 1Mb)
• A year of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (PDF, 1Mb)

Earlier today we made public a new service from the security team: OVAL patch definitions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4. Some summary information is available at our OVAL FAQ, or if you are at the Summit pop along to my talk starting in about 45 minutes.