Project Currently on Hold

A problem with the internet connection of my laptop has prevented me in the past two weeks to further develop and test the software - hence there have been no new image uploads since 23.February. This problem is unrelated to this project: many of the web request somehow return a "page not found" error, despite the fact that the internet connection is available and the page really does exist. This problem also has affected my other internet activities: web browsing became a nightmare, every page had to be "reloaded" several times before it finally showed up. Initially I attributed this to a problem of the servers or the connection, but later I began to suspect that this is related only to the laptop computer I am using. Have now changed settings for DNS query timeout, and the web interaction now appears to run better. It might have been that one of those Windows Updates or browser updates has messed with the default settings... after doing an activity trace back I noticed that I did install on that day Google Gears for Firefox, and after that action the connectivity problems occurred. Now that may not have been the immediate reason, but something related to this install might have caused the problem.

In the meantime I have worked on separating the web interaction if the software into a parallel thread, so that it can be queued in case of connection problems. This has not yet been tested, as I have been sidetracked by other projects. I will report here when this is working.

I plan to release this capture software, as an OpenSource project. For this image and GPS capture I did use a few other OpenSource components, and therefore I will release both the executable as well as the code for it. Before I can do that, I will have to "clean" the code from my hacks - the main obstacle for me posting software code is that then everybody can see my sloppy style of software authoring...

Using Google Maps V3

The first step in preparing a display of the GPS location of the camera images has been implemented: in the single picture display mode, below the image a map is shown, in the instance when a GPS coordinate is available.

I have used the latest version of Google Maps, which is V3. This is supposed to work also on mobile phones - however, on Windows Mobile Internet Explorer the Google Map does not show up (same problems as with version 2), and in Opera Mobile, the whole image area did not show up (this might have to do with this area being in an IFRAME, I think that Opera does not like Iframes). So as for now, despite all my efforts on automatically resizing the web page down to mobile phone screen size, I do not have this yes working. I may have to replace the IFRAME with an Ajax method, and have to query if it is running on Windows Mobile IE - then disable the Google Maps display. Quite annoying...