dfx

looks like at least some people around here have some common sense after all. of course that's exactly what the TOU are talking about, and i'm well aware that i'm not supposed to query dozens of cache pages per second. since it seems to be such a big deal, here's the details. i have a notification for newly published caches set up, which (through an e-mail gateway) pops up those notifications as instant message on my PC. now the information in those notifications is very thin and i have to click the contained link to get the essential information such as the coordinates. instead of that, i'd like to have a script which reads the notification emails, follows the contained link for me and augments the emails (and thus the instant messages) with a few more details, such as cache size and coordinates, saving me some trouble. all this is in place already and works like a charm, with the exception that every now and then i have to manually update the cookie information when it became invalid. and now i predict a totally pointless discussion sparking off about the usefulness or uselessness of such a setup...

nevermind then, i'll figure it out myself.

you might need to use UTM coordinates to solve that. you can convert the regular latitude/longitude to UTM, and then use regular cartesian geometry to do the calculations. for example, if you had to move 500 meters to the west, you'd simply substract 500 from the easting of the UTM coordinates. at the end of it, you convert the UTM coords back to longitude and latitude.

Its automated ("other automated means") - not a browser and it collects information - therefore scraping. No need to argue with me about it - I just happen to know that it violates the TOU - take up the issue with the folks at HQ. But until you get permission - it definitly violates the TOU. it's not any more automated than a web browser making the request when you click the button. it's not collecting any information either. you don't know what i want to do with my script, so you don't know if it violates the TOU or not. or in other words: if you don't have an answer to my question, you're free to ignore the question.

it's not a "robot, spider, scraper" i'm talking about. it's the same thing as me viewing the page and copy/pasting the contents into a script. it's not doing any mass queries, it's one page at a time.

Occasionally I want to load a cache details page in an automated manner via a script, and so far I've been using the userid=xxxxxxx cookie to accomplish that. The problem is that every time i re-login to my account with my browser, the value of the userid= cookie changes, and the one i have stored in the script will be invalidated, causing the script to fail. Is there any way to get a script to have access to your own account without having to update the value of a cookie all the time?

sounds alot like an EXIF puzzle. checked and didn't see any. most likely the site "zapped" the EXIF datas when it "optimized" the photograph. there are many ways to hide stuff in a photo but if the servers modify even one byte it can render the puzzle unsolvable. not only that, the same applies to information hidden by steganography in the pixel data or color values of the image, which usually requires the image to be in BMP or GIF (or similar) format. when uploading that to gc.com, it's converted to JPG, thus destroying the data. non-tech-savvy people might not be aware of this and might still think it's solvable.

one thing you can try is create a copy of this PQ and use the copy instead of the original. it might come earlier in the day then, or maybe later, worth a try anyway.

the forum uses the latin-1 character set yes, but the cache listings are utf-8. the html of the pages doesn't say so, but the http headers do: Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 so, you can just use any utf-8 characters in the cache listings and it should work right. that includes all polish characters.