kfir

Thanks for the info. Another good reason for me not to bother with testing what extended characters may or may not cause errors on the PN-40.

I am not a paid member so the "GPX File" option is not available to me. I did a search and verified that. I discovered why Notepad was not showing the TM character for me. Notepad does not automatically select the type of character encoding. But when I chose the UTF-8 encoding option on the Open dialog then the TM character is displayed in Notepad. Thanks guys, for all your help.

Thanks for pointing me to this. I hope Delorme gets around to fixing it. I tried it and found the following. It does change the offending character. It changes the single hex character 0x1A to 3 hex characters 0xE2 0x84 0xA2. Notepad displays those as 3 separate characters (the ones in the ASCII chart). The file does pass XML validation. The file does read correctly on the PN-40. The character displayed on the PN-40 is a single question mark which is not one of those 3 hex characters. I used my own editor to change the original offending character from 0x1A to 0x99 (the 'TM' character). Notepad displays the character correctly. The file does pass XML validation. The file does not read correctly on the PN-40. I'm going to create my own Windows program instead. I want to be able to select a single file or a directory of files. I also want to exclude / convert the following characters (specified in hex): 0-1F - control characters 26 - ampersand (fails XML test) 3C - less than (fails XML test) 7F - delete character 80-FF - extended characters I have tested the remaining character set on the PN-40 and they all allow the GPX file to open and the characters are displayed correctly. Edit: Come to think of it, I cannot check for '&' or '<' since those are used by XML. The only way to detect those properly is with an XML parser. These being displayed properly in HTML might mean they are already encoded correctly in the XML file. I found an occurence of & and it is encoded correctly.

It does not pull full cache data. It does not retrieve the description or hints for unpaid members. I have to copy those into the GPX file by hand.

I am not a paid member so cannot download a gpx file from the website.

Now that is interesting. I ran the same GC3GGN3 cache through the Delorme plugin, ran the resulting .gpx file through the validator (I'v been using the same one as you), and it failed on the 'tm' character. When I look at the file with my hex editor the ASCII code is 0x1A which is a control code. Thanks for helping with this. The extra data helps.

Delorme uses XML files. When I copy the XML file that the browser plugin created, then run it through an online XML validator, the validator complains about that character. If the validator complains it makes sense that the GPS firmware will have a problem. I don't know enough about XML to track down character encoding problems. I can post the XML file (300 lines) created with the steps in the original post if that would help.

Cache GC19NBY Log entry dated 1/29/2009 Look for the 'TM' character before the words "Happy Caching" If the characters sent to the browser plugins were restricted that would be a good solution.

Thanks, I went ahead and contacted them. That is exactly what is causing the problem. There is a character in the visitor log that is not a valid XML character. I used an XML validation website to help me understand the problem and it pointed me to the offending character. The DTD for the Delorme XML file must have a reduced character set.

This week I loaded up 17 caches into a file on my GPS, drove 100 miles up to the mountains, opened the file on the GPS and it listed 0 caches. Argh. Back home with my PC I look inside of the file and all of the caches are there. The bug is in the Delorme browser plugin. Who do I contact to get this bug fixed?

I recently got a Delorme PN-40 and while trying to use the Delorme send to GPS plugin I was having geocaches disappearing. After several hours I tracked it down to a geocache log entry with a character which is not valid in the gpx XML file. To reproduce on a PN-40, 1. Create a new geocache file and give it a name. 2. On the website find cache GC3383 and send to GPS. This will give us something which will disappear. The GPS lists 1 cache and reports 1 cache in memory. 3. On the website find cache GC1A7FR and send to GPS. The GPS now lists 2 caches and reports 2 caches in memory. 4. On the website find cache GC19NBY and send to GPS. This one has the invalid character in the log. The GPS now lists 3 caches and reports 3 caches in memory. So far so good. 5. On the GPS close the geocache file which saves the caches in memory to the file. The GPS now lists no caches and reports 0 caches in memory. 6. Open the geocache file you just created and the GPS lists only 1 cache and reports only 1 cache in memory. The geocache file you created on the GPS really does have 3 caches in it. What happens is that when the GPS is reading the cache file, as soon as an invalid character is seen the rest of the caches in the file are skipped. I ran the XML file through an online XML validator which showed the problem. When I opened the file in an editor and removed the offending character ("TM") and reopened the file on the PN-40, all the caches showed up. I don't know if the website should filter illegal XML characters or if the plugin should do it. Windows 7 Internet Explorer 9 Latest Delorme Plugin PN-40 version 2.8.543156

Problems reported previously. - Checkboxes on the right still don't do anything in IE7 on WinXP. They work fine in FF2. - Disabled caches in the Show Cache Listing window still do not use the strikethrough font. Reasons why this is important were previously posted. FIXED - Print Preview in IE7 was not showing the icons on the map. - In the legend on the right, icons for Earch Cache and Mega Events Cache do not show up in IE6, IE7, or FF2. The only difference between the browsers is IE uses a placeholder for images not found. - Map still locks up in IE7. New problems noticed: - Checkboxes on the right don't show up in IE6 on WinXP, just the text next to them. - The pan and zoom controls on the left of the map are not displayed in IE6 even though clicking in those areas still works.

So that is when it happens! It happens in IE7 but not with FF2. I have to use Firefox just to print the page in that format. Just doing Print Preview makes it show up. Everything above "Short Description" is gone except for the waypoint id. The information gone includes: cache type icon, cache title, placed by, coordinates, size, difficulty, terrain, etc. Definitely a bug.

I only recently started caching and benchmarking so am coming late to this discussion. The two activities are different and are logged (online) differently and counted (online) differently. Under "My Account Details" it is possible to choose options to show caches found or benchmarks found, but not to show both at the same time. The stat bar only lists caches. Is it possible for the stat bar to also list benchmarks found and/or tb's found? (Not as one combined sum.)

Who know this thread would grow so quickly when I started it. (From a senior software engineer's perspective...) Summarizing a few negative things about the experience so far. This is not meant to beat up anyone, but to help find a way to improve the process. We appear to be the guinea pigs. The new map system was released to us with nothing to indicate the benefits you were hoping to accomplish. It appears we (the customers) were not asked about what features we use a lot and like, so you are asking after the fact (after they are gone). The new system was released to us a couple of times then removed. We are using this forum correctly in reporting problems with the website yet you want email instead. Now looking for positive progress. 1. People are doing a good job with confining bug reports against the new mapping to this one thread. Keeping it public lets people chime in with their concerns and additional information. 2. The old limit of 20 caches in a page was way too small. Even a small town like Canby, Oregon has a high density of caches (29). For such a small town you cannot display the whole town AND all of the caches in the town. So the higher limit is a big improvement. 3. The new 15 mile limit is too small in sparse areas. For example, in the Portland, Oregon metro area there are hundreds of caches. But move 20 miles west and the caches are so sparse the 15 mile limit is too small. The old solution worked better in this case. I do not have a suggestion on a solution which might satisfy both requirements. 4. Creating test cases from reported bugs, like the map locking, is a useful test procedure. Then test these on more than one browser. From posts so far, it appears the locking bug exists in IE6, IE7, but not in Firefox (no versions reported). No one has chimed in about Linux or Mac versions. The new system went away so I cannot do any testing myself on my Linux box. 5. My very first gut reaction when seeing the new mapping a few weeks ago was the icons were too small. Some of this is perception since the old map used large balloons containing the icons. Some of it really is that when I zoom in, they are too small, or at least don't have the pointer the balloon uses. 6. Expanding on one of my original complaints, the old system used a strike through font for disabled caches in the list to the right. This makes it easy to see at a glance which caches to avoid. A possible solution in the new system is to have a checkbox for hiding disabled caches. I would use this all the time. 7. Print Preview (at least in IE) shows that no icons are displayed on the map. I recently used a benchmarking website map which does print the icons and this kind of map is very useful out in the field. 8. From a testing perspective, is it possible to create a "beta" page containing the new mapping system? This would let us help you test the new system and give feedback without the all-or-nothing approach currently in use.

PilotMike, thank you for the pointer to the great tool. I will be using it for hunting. But the geacaching site still has the logging, including showing which benchmarks are logged and which ones I have logged. I agree. Displaying them should be configurable to be on or off --- just like waymarks.

I see the new interactive map now can show waymarks. Please add the ability to show benchmarks. Our metropolitan area was many times more benchmarks than waymarks. Thanks.

The new version of Google Maps being used for the interactive cache map has the following problems in WinXP IE7 1. Several times, clicking on any icon in the map causes the map to be frozen. Other times it works fine. The only way to "fix" it is to reload the page which also resets the map. 2. What is the purpose of the checkboxes in the cache type legend? They don't do anything. 3. The caches in the Show Cache Listing list does not show if a cache is disabled. I like that the new map gets past the 20 icon limit of the old map.