Teasel

That's great news, well done! Is this just for the whole Cairngorm estate, or just the area leased by CairnGorm Mountain Ltd for the ski resort? Either way, it's a lovely bit of land!

As well as the forum thread that Pharisee indicated, we're also adding agreements to the GAGB Landowner Agreements Database. Where possible, I'm trying to include the boundaries of the areas in GLAD, so that we can provide maps and information about the caches on that land. This is particularly useful where the conditions of the agreement stipulate a maximum number of caches (eg the New Forest Forestry Commission), or where there are small areas of the land which need to be avoided (eg the South East England Forestry Commission). Landowners can often provide files giving the outlines of their land from their computer systems. (They're most often called "shapefiles"). Eg Cheshire County Council and the South East England Forestry Commission have both provided shapefiles of the land where we can cache. I created one for the New Forest manually, but it was quite tedious. So if people negotiating with landowners could check to see whether they can provide any "shapefiles", I'd be really grateful to receive them! Cheers, Ian

I have the same problem. After a while, there's only so much excitement to be gained from finding McToy-filled-tupperware under rocks, but you're not ready to go looking for a new hobby. Personally, at those times, I look for something else geocaching related, but which doesn't involve tupperware. For me it's G:UK / GAGB. Geocaching has become a world of corrupted data flows, broken curl sessions, inconsistent summary tables and broken DNS zone files to be fixed. After a while, of course, staring at php programs starts to get to you (as does the inevitable political strife that comes from being noticed - no good deed ever goes unpunished) and you find that going out to find some McToy-filled-tupperware makes a nice escape from geocaching!

Sorry, duplicate post!

Unless I've misunderstood what you mean, a ticketing tracker doesn't sound like what's needed. Will it draw maps tracking locations? Will it know the coordinates of caches, or will it force people to enter them manually? If manually, will it allow GC.com style coordinates to be pasted in? Will it insist on allocating its own tracking numbers? Will it insist on consecutive numbers? Sounds like it could be more work to adapt, than to build what we need from scratch. I'll happily produce a system to initialise, activate and track coins if that'll help. It could be hosted at GeocacheUK, or on Si's machine, or perhaps GAGB if the new committee are willing. Another alternative would be to use geolutins, but I don't know how good they are. Last time I looked, it was a very clumsy user interface. Cheers, Ian

D'oh, duplicate post!

I've changed the DNS over to the new server, which might cure things, but I may have to do some fiddling once I get back from holiday. Ever since Mark died, getting control of geocacheuk.com domain has been a real headache and a bit of a worry. But the domain transfer finally happened a couple of days ago. However it looks like the old web hosting account has now been terminated, hence the problems. But we're now down to just 2 web servers (from 7 at one point!), so we're getting there! Cheers, Ian

Glad we got it sorted. Everything should be back up now, including the mobile midlet and all autoresponders. There's a problem with the versions of the cache pages with OS grid references, which only seem to be working about 80% of the time. I expect it's something to do with GC.com blacklisting us for excessive use, 'cos they don't know that our server IP has changed. I'll have a word with Elias when I get back from holiday in a fortnight's time; in the meantime I've set it up so that after 10s of inactivity, you'll get redirected to the GC.com cache page. So at least you'll see something. Cheers, Ian

According to the logs at least, your account hasn't accessed the site since 27th September, which explains why you're not seeing your found caches (the website is treating you as a guest). If you try this map, I presume you see the caches coloured correctly? What does it say in the top right hand corner of the web page, just under the MyStats link? If it's anything other than "Not logged in. login or register" then there's a bug in G:UK somewhere! What happens when you try to log in?

Hmmm, it works for me (don'tcha just hate it when people say that?!). Can you try logging off and logging back on again and let me know if you're still having problems. The database is now several days out of date and will take some time to fully recover, but any logs it knew about before the problems should still be there.

I've copied the files and database to the new server, but we're having some DNS problems at the moment (I've pointed the domain at the new nameservers, but the control panel of the new web server won't let me update the zone file). Not sure how long it will take to get fixed (it's with tech support right now), but once it's all working, I expect it to take a couple of days to get the sites fully working and perhaps another couple for the database to get back in sync with geocaching.com. I'll post again when it's all working once more.

The current forum software only runs on Microsoft servers, and I have no intention of exposing any of the windows servers on my home lan to the internet, thank you! Sometime in the next year, I hope to work out how to transfer all the details out of the current forums onto a nice, unix based system such as phpnuke. There are a few other windoze based bits, such as the poll manager that I'd need to find or write php equivalents for, but there's no urgency for that. The priority right now is getting the site back!

Not much left to bring down! I've not yet got ownership of the geocacheuk.com domain name, and the site it's hosted on is now in arrears, so that's another potential headache on the horizon. But hopefully within a few weeks the consolidation we started at the start of September should be complete and G:UK should be safe and stable (well, until Sept 2005 when we need to decide whether to pay another $250/yr for the forum server, or migrate them onto the unix server).

Sorry for the loss of the stats and trigpointing sites again! After the problems we had with lunarpages last time, you'd think I'd have learnt my lesson but, well, they were cheap and I stupidly gave them the benefit of the doubt. After all, there was a 30 day money back guarantee, so it was risk free. 30 days and 2 hours after I signed up, they informed me that G:UK was using too many resources for their server and that I'd have to buy a more expensive package. (Like 5 times more expensive!) They moved me onto a "non-production" server, accidentally deleted half of my tables, accidentally corrupted others and accidentally deleted all my subdomains. When I informed them of what they had done, they didn't bother to check but instead replied suggesting I clear my browser's cache and try again! Needless to say that when G:UK and T:UK are back up, it will not be on a lunarpages server! Grrrrrr!

Mark's funeral has been set for 11am next Wednesday, 13th October in Bradford. I've been asked to keep track of how many geocachers to expect, so if you wish to attend please email me for full details of where it's being held. Thanks, Ian

Now if only it could include JUST unavailable and archived.... Here's a basic cache list of Archived Caches. But you'll still have to update GSAK manually, I'm afraid. Actually, I have a working Pocket Query system on GeocacheUK which will instantly give you a GPX file of all these caches, ready for loading into GSAK (assuming you're a premium member of GC.com, of course!). I just don't have permission from Groundspeak to switch it on. The reason given is that they want to protect you from the perils of stale data. But..., but... b..b...but... !!! Temporarily unavailable caches can already be obtained through GC.com pocket queries, so that's the best way to get them into GSAK. But if you want, you can get lists of Unavailable or Archived caches, or alternatively just Temporarily Unavailable but not Archived caches from G:UK.

I'm collating the messages in the various forums into a book of condolences and will give it to Mark's family at the funeral. (No word on when that is yet).

I may be being thick, but once the overlay files are on the PPC, how do you get them into MemoryMap? I can do it by importing them into the PC version of MM, then using the "Export Data to PDA" menu option, but it'd be nicer to get the PPC version of MM to import from a file (that way I could automatically synchronise the PPC to G:UK without having to fire up MM on the PC).

Well, to be fair on GC.com, they have given G:UK permission to use their data in the way that we do. If they wanted to shut G:UK down, they'd presumably just withdraw that permission. The G:UK server was blocked because it was requesting so many cache pages from GC.com. But to be fair to G:UK, most of those pages were the result of real people clicking on cache names or dots on the interactive map. All these requests for cache pages go through G:UK so that streetmap links etc can be added. I explained to Elias that although we're heavy users of GC.com, blocking us doesn't significantly reduce the load on their server, and he unblocked us. If I have a gripe against GC.com, it's that they've not granted me permission to provide real-time GPX downloads to their premium members. If anything, this would encourage more people to become premium members, so it's got to be a winner for everyone!

I understood that GPSrs, and indeed the satellites themselves, use WGS84 internally as their master datum, so I'd expect that using OSGB would decrease, rather than increase accuracy. (Though I'm still an advocate of ridding UK geocaching of the nasty WGS84 and converting to good old OSGB, you realise! ) Either way, it'll only apply when manually keying in coordinates - all garmin downloads that I'm aware of use WGS84 and swapping the display settings on the GPSr afterwards shouldn't change anything. And if your GPSr uses the same conversion algorithm as GC.com, then it shouldn't make any difference anyway (assuming the conversion algorithm is symmetric).

It is with great sadness that I must share the news that Mark Thompson, TheCat, passed away last weekend. The details are still a little sketchy but it seems that Mark suffered a heart attack whilst in his new home on Shetland. Mark's boundless enthusiasm and endless optimism will be well known to everyone who knew him. Despite all the knocks he suffered (including four previous heart attacks!) he was always looking towards the next challenge. Mark was attracted to geocaching as a way to increase his exercise whilst still feeding his technical mind and, like everything, he embraced it wholeheartedly. Anyone who has met him will remember his enthusiasm for the sport. Perhaps his biggest contribution to caching in the UK was the setting up and running of GeocacheUK, a platform used by many UK cachers. For a while also Mark supported us all by providing a geocaching merchandise service, making it possible for us to get our caching stuff cheaper than before. Mark was always finding ways of putting his talents to good use to help others. Many of you will have caught him on one of his charity "Fox Hunt" caches. (His eagerness to be caught making him known as the kamikaze fox!) I'm sure you will agree with me that the UK caching community will miss Mark "TheCat", and join with me in expressing our deepest sympathies and condolences to Mark's family and friends. Cheers Mark! Ian [i'll post details of funeral arrangements etc as soon as I hear them]

Coast guards will be happy with lat/long coordinates. They have to be because OS grid references are not used offshore. But everyone else in the UK (except geocachers!) uses OS grid references. So if you're calling out mountain rescue, these are by far your best bet. (Though obviously, anything is better than nothing!) There are tales of people using mobile phones to call out mountain rescue having their calls diverted to a distant 999 call centre and being told "I'm sorry we don't do mountain rescue because we don't have any mountains here"! And anything you tell the operator has maybe 4 or 5 hops of chinese whispers before it gets to the person who'll be coming to get you. Against that backdrop, what are the chances of lat/long/datum/format all being correctly transferred? Better to rattle off an unambiguous string of 2 letters and 8 numbers. When you're bouncing around in a landrover with sirens wailing, it's hard enough to stick your thumb on a map given a grid reference. Now try it with WGS coordinates when you realise your GPS is locked away in the back of the vehicle...

If only! GeocacheUK is happy to be "recognised by Groundspeak" and, unlike Buxleys, we only list GC.com caches, but we still have difficulty getting the data we need. On the one hand, the guys at Groundspeak very generously allow any premium member to download large chunks of their cache database via PQs. Yet on the other hand, they get very twitchy about 3rd party sites like Buxleys obtaining data from GC.com. Why? Not for technical reasons, surely, as a simple "all caches in the world" GPX query available for download by specially licenced stats sites would be far friendlier on the servers than the current situation. Jeremy - all your data is already "out there" in the big wide world, available to all. Your control over it comes from the Groundspeak terms of use document, not from all those hours you've spent implementing throttling and URL obfuscation. Why, when you're so keen to promote offline apps like GSAK, do you not similarly encourage online services who add value to the GC.com offering?

Sort of! When the main G:UK server got blocked by GC.com, I modified the mobile phone programs to use a different server to access GC.com. However Mark's account on that server expired a while ago and I forgot to switch it back to our main server. Thanks for letting me know! Cheers, Ian

Nothing wrong with a cache that's difficult, so long as you warn people beforehand. Just as there's nothing wrong with a cache that'd be certain death to attempt without a rope and harness... but make sure it's down as a terrain 5! Maybe you just need to raise the difficulty level a bit? Sure, having a difficulty rating of 5 means that some people won't even attempt it. But from the sound of things, only the most determined cachers will actually find it anyway! You might even end up with more visitors to the cache, as people might drive that little bit further in search of a good challenge. Something I've done in the past to find the "correct" difficulty rating is to notch it up by 1/2 every time someone posts a DNF, until you settle at a value that represents the difficulty that people are having (rather than the difficulty you thought they'd have back when you placed the cache).