5 Caching Campers

I'd say that's more an issue of the implementation than the concept.... though it's possible that the .net framework is making it more difficult than it should be. One of many reasons I avoid it and stick with straight PHP (others being speed and cost).

In other words, if you don't pay big money to Groundspeak, don't expect to get anything more than simple pocket queries. Nevermind the fact that the data their being so restrictive about is data that was submitted by us...

IMHO, the part I emphasized is the real problem.... and the best solution to that would be a little bit of JavaScript similar to what's found in the Quick Hint greasemonkey script. It's not hard to build that in such a way that in a JavaScript enabled browser the decryption is instantaneous while still doing the page re-load for non-JS browsers... at least in pure HTML/JS it's not... I can't speak for Microsoft's development environment used by Groundspeak.

WRASTRO has the correct reasoning. Any link in a log or forum was put there by a user, not Groundspeak. In my opinion it is best practice to have user-generated links open in a new window since typically they are linking off site (as far as the forum goes it is beyond our control, but the reasoning is the same I believe). This isn't likely to change. I disagree with this reasoning. A person who clicks on a link should always expect that the page they are viewing will be replaced by the linked page. When I click the link to log my visit, the cache page is replaced by the log entry page. When I click on a search result in Google, the results are replaced by the new page. If I would like for something different to happen, then I can choose to make it so by either Ctrl+clicking or by right-clicking and choosing to "Open in new tab"... these are both instances where I use that option quite often, but would really dislike it if it were the default (and only) option.

Thanks for the info... I think the most frustrating part of it is the lack of information from Groundspeak... not so much the pace of development.

Personally, I'd leave 'em... it looks like an untidy start, but to be honest, it was. That happens sometimes... it's not the end of the world, though .

Having a sensible default (such as your username) prefilled in would not prevent you from changing it. I think as it is, a lot of people just enter their username into the field. Those that want to change it would still be able to. Having the default be your last entered cache name wouldn't be terribly difficult (just add another column to the table that holds profile information... the "last placed by" field could then be held onto indefinitely for very little extra storage cost. However, I personally would still prefer username.

OK, it worked.

It does seem to be the content type that's the problem... I put the files on my server (modifying the .jad file so it also pointed to my server) and fiddled with the content types. With the right one, it seemed to work... with the wrong one, it didn't. jad - text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor jar - application/java-archive

When I installed it on my pearl, I visted http://openwig.googlecode.com/files/OpenWIG.jad from my phone (to make it easier, I just emailed myself the link). What version of the software did you get. I get the same error listed for the current .jad link, "907 Invalid JAR HTTP Error 406: Not Acceptable" is this a problem with the new version? Thanks! I did this long again and it worked... I tried to update it recently and I got the invalid JAR message. My best guess is that it has something to do with the content-type as I was able to install it using a method similar to the one outlined by ziemer... that tells me that the JAR file is fine, it's just not getting transmitted OTA correctly. I haven't looked into it any deeper than that.

There's a series in West Michigan of paranormal caches... one that stands out in my mind is Paranormal Michigan #2 - Legends of the Hill. It's a cemetery cache, so there's no night caching, but it's still a fairly creepy location. After you park your first task is to walk up the Stairway to Hell. It's within the Grand Haven city limits, but also has a rather large deer population so you could hear them scurrying around in the nearby woods atop a very large nearby hill (the Stairway to hill takes you to a plateau on this hill, so there's still quite a bit of hill left once you reach Ground Zero). The first time we were there I swear it was like the squirrels were attacking us or something. It was probably due to tree cover, but our GPS also would never settle in on a location. All these things together just kinda combined to make it a spooky cache location.

Didn't know that about the library card... pretty cool. Mrs. HayleeBugg is 8.5+ months pregnant right now so we probably won't be getting to those caches any time soon. Still, really good to know... thanks.

Sorry to hear about your GPS... but on the flip side, once you get it going I should be able to check it out in person rather than just through links []. 'Course w/my luck it'll be published while we're out of town this weekend and we wont' even be able to try for the FTF.

Are you referring to the caches by Mickey and Goofy? Unfortunately I don't currently have a State Park sticker so I've been unable to do any of them, but someday.... I'm also curious where in MI the OP is.

I actually just did this today on my account and tried three times before I realized I had to include the "ID#" as part of the device ID... once I did that, I was able to link... not that I've been able to test yet as I haven't been out caching in the past hour .

Text messages are limited to 160 characters. That's not a phone or carrier limitation but rather a limitation of the SMS technology (Short Message Service). Like others, I'd recommend getting the notification emailed to you if possible. Depending on your email carrier you can set that up to do an auto-forward to your SMS email address if you prefer that notification type... you can then check your email address to get the full text.

Like niraD, I've been using the same email address for years. It gets a ton of spam. I've never used the tricks to track down leaks nor have I used temporary email addresses. My address is now hosted at gmail (using the Apps for your Domain service) and thus uses their spam filtering. I probably have about 1 junk message per day that makes it past the filter.... but I easily get a couple hundred spam messages per day. Good filters are your friend

OK, that makes sense. Maybe keep the entry screen decimal only and have a conversion option that pops up a new screen having another entry method.... perhaps multiple boxes that need to be filled in... [N/S] [__]° [__].[___] [W/E] [___]° [__].[___] I'd image if somebody needs to find coords in the field that'd they'd be listed in this format and not everybody's gonna either know how or want to mess with manually converting in the field. That would also solve the regex problem as the input boxes would enforce the entry format.

Text may be ugly to deal with, but using Regular Expressions (I assume Java supports these) it's not terrible bad... this code sample is in JavaScript as I still haven't gotten very far into my learn Java experiment: function valitate_north() { var north = document.getElementById('north').value; if (north.match(/^\s*[ns]\s*\d{1,2}.?\s+\d{1,2}\.\d{1,3}'?\s*$/i)) { alert("DDD MM.MMM"); } else if (north.match(/^\s*-?\d{1,2}\.\d+\s*$/)) { alert("Decimal"); } else if (north.match(/^\s*[ns]\s*\d{1,2}.?\s+\d{1,2}'\s+\d{1,2}\.\d{0,5}"\s*$/i)) { alert("DDD MM SS.SSS"); } else { alert("Bad input for north"); } } Of course this code can use some cleanup and it doesn't do anything useful with the data other than check what format its in.

I guess I haven't looked to see how many are actually in existence... Next time I'm in GR I'd like to try out OpenWIG and see if it will work on one of those caches by Conman. In an ideal world, I'd figure out how to make one in Muskegon .

When I installed it on my pearl, I visted http://openwig.googlecode.com/files/OpenWIG.jad from my phone (to make it easier, I just emailed myself the link).

Any help you can give somebody who has basically no Java experience but knows a fair amount of PHP/perl and a very little VB.net on where to start with this? I get the impression from above comments that there's some kind of a framework that you used to do the programming... where can I find more information about that? You made mention that the BB tools were Windows only and that gave you a problem so I assume you don't program on Windows. I have Ubuntu and CentOS installs of Linux available if the devel tools are on those platforms. I also have VMWare so I can can pretty much anything other than MacOS.

Garmin Rino 120 (GPS I bought years ago to take to Iraq w/me and never used) BlackBerry with CacheBerry (for the Paperless aspect) Backback with small trade items and any TB's we happen to be in the process of moving

This is definitely progress!! Much better than the "It only works on WiMo and the Colorado" that seems to be answer up until now. I did the OTA install on my BlackBerry pearl (8130 from Sprint) about 20 minutes ago, so everything here is just initial impressions. I'm at work right now and inside a building, so I can't really test it. However, I was able to get enough of a GPS lock in the building that OpenWIG was able to tell me my coordinates once. My initial nit is with navigation. This may be something that's BB specific, but it seems that for every action I want to take I have to click twice. For example, when it first comes up, I get a screen that says Start GPS Options Quit I can roll my trackball and the selected option changes as expected, but when I click the trackball I get a menu that gives me choices of: Select Close Copy What I'd expect to happen at this point instead is that it would just automatically "Select" the choice I have highlighted. If I wanted the menu, I'd hit the Menu (or BlackBerry) key. So anyway, I choose "Start" and browse to the .gwc file I downloaded (whereigo_player_tut.gwc) while clicking through the security warnings (I understand the why these are here and can live with it). (FYI: At this point, the "double click" issue mentioned above is still an issue.) The main screen that talks about the tutorial comes up fine (at least I assume it's fine, I've never seen Wherigo actually working!!) I doubletap to get it started. (Now I notice another BB specific nit... typically, on my phone if I hit the '9' key it's a page down for faster scrolling than rolling the trackball. Not that this is the first app I've used that violates this... in the gmail app that same key mutes the conversation... frustrating when what you really wanted to do was scroll!) So I read though a couple screens and get to the point where it wants me to put on the space suit. I select menu item of "Actions" that brings me to a screen that has one action defined. To me, it would have made more sense if the menu that came up gave me that one option. I click through a couple more screens and it wants me to move 50m. Now's where I have to stop because I don't have a reliable GPS signal in this building... I'll have to play more later. I want to be very clear that I am not complaining on any of the nits I've mentioned above. OpenWIG has gotten me much, much, MUCH farther than anything else to date has with Wherigo on my BlackBerry. I wish I was a BB app developer so I could assist more... but I don't even know Java. Perhaps if nobody smarter than me pops out of the woodwork I can attempt to get the devel tools installed and learn some basic stuff.

So you'd have a problem if I were on non-work related sites during my lunch hour and breaks? FYI: Wherigo.com is in the Hobbies category now (I just looked it up). Websense actually has a decent solution for this "lunch hour and breaks" problem that some of the other filtering software doesn't. They call it quota time. Your IT Dept can set certain categories (such as Game, Hobbies, Sports, etc) to have limited availability throughout the day. IIRC, by default it's 60 minutes that can be used in 10 minute chunks. So, when you try to visit Waymarking.com it says that the site is only available on quota time and asks if you want to use some of your quota time. If you say yes, it deducts 10 minutes from your days total (doesn't matter if you're only on for 1 minute). Anyway, that's a little outside the scope of these forums and really more up to your companies policies. Keep in mind, that generally speaking, the IT Dept doesn't make up these policies but is tasked with setting up the technology and enforcing them. (Yes, I work in IT).