jon & miki

It doesn't re-order the logs-- it gives you a link to your logs on the upper right corner of the screen (like in this post and this post) Do you see it? Yep, I was just looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. Nice feature (and I hadn't noticed it before)

Hmm, I've got both scripts installed and I don't get my logs at the top of the cache page, just sorted into normal order. Is there another setting I need somewhere to get my logs at the top?

Our rule for hiding caches is similar - is this place interesting enough that we would take a an out of town visitor to see it? Most dumpsters don't make the cut. For the finding side, we've taken to only going out to hunt regular size caches and micros that have been recommended by friends. We still download the run of the mill micros to our gps, but only go look for them if they happen to be on our way to a regular cache or we'd be stopping there anyway. A friend of ours uses a different filter - caches that have been in place at least a year. That tends to filter out quite a few of the caches placed with little thought and/or maintenance. Haven't tried that one yet, but it's a promising idea.

By way of comparison, Florida's 2004 population estimate was 17,397,161 folks and they have 9610 caches (from gc.com stats today), so their statistic is 1810 citzens per cache. I wonder if caches per square mile might be another interesting statistic?

A quick web search showed North Carolina's population estimated at 8683242 (2005 census estimate). So the ratio calculates out at 1510 citizens per cache for North Carolina.

never mind

Anybody else smell socks around here? Well, maybe I'm just imagining things, but a 2-day old geonick from "anytown" with "finds" back to 2004 sure sets off my sock alert.

The closest I know of is Spider's Eye - outside of your 30 mile radius I know (more like 50), but the area has quite a few interesting caches.

Thanks for interesting starting points for further research. Are you aware of any of these being used in geocache clues? That's the domain I'm primarily interested in targetting, and some of these would likely push a difficulty rating over the five-star limit The monoalphabetic appears to be what I'm referring to as a substitution cipher. I know of caches using the Playfair and Vigienere ciphers. Plus Beale ciphers (which are not character substitutions). Being multialphabetic, Vigienere does not easily fall to frequency analysis, at least not unless there's a fair amount of ciphertext and the key length can be established. I've also seen "non-standard" ROTxx rotations used on caches, sometimes using several different offsets within different sections of the same ciphertext. I have even heard of DES ciphers being used, but I haven't personally seen one. I would recommend Simon Singh's "The Code Book" for a thorough discussion of encryption and decryption techniques for classical ciphers plus some info on newer ones. Your library probably has a copy, but it's an excellent resource to have on your bookshelf when considering strategies for puzzle caches. Martin Gardner has also written a book on codes and ciphers, but I'm going to leave you to find that one on your own. There are some neat techniques in there that I haven't seen used elsewhere yet and I want to spring them on hapless puzzle cache addicts without giving them much time to prepare and research.

Yes, but it's not nearly as easy to determine when a query that should have run hasn't done so on schedule. In the original sort order (by date run) it's pretty easy to identify queries that didn't run without inspecting every date. My main curiousity though is why it keeps changing back and forth. I'd rather adapt once to whatever the order is going to be and quit discovering that my last workaround doesn't work any more. So if there's a poll, I strongly support date-run order or or if it's workable, an option or a button to sort either way. But I also would like some stability. Please let us know which way it's going to be and keep it that way? This suggested feature probably deserves it's own thread, but here it is anyway - it would be nice if the icons on the query summary page showed whether each PQ is "uncheck after run" or repeats.

I ran into the same problem as Miragee today while updating my pocket query schedule. All my queries that don't need to run and won't be run until my next visit to an area are now mixed in with the regular queries and it takes much longer to sort them out from the current presentation. Please put it back to most recently run order? Or at least give us the option to have the list presented in that order?

Yeah, I see what happened - the extra parenthesis got into the URL, glad you got to the proper link. Your suggested approach should work, though I'm not sure what you gain by not using two cables and little of your namesake "fastener" to make it into "one" cable (or use any other method of semi-permanent attachment). Let us know how things are progressing?

I'd be interested in finding out how it is done if you figure it out. The stuff I can find makes it seem as though some intervening protocol converter is necessary. If it's any help, Wikipedia refers you to a schematic of a serial-USB converter (see http://pinouts.ru/SerialPortsCables/usb_se...r_pinout.shtml) that might be some help. (note, that link seems not to work when I tested it, try going through here instead. Looking around, I also noticed that some equipment (at least one Coolpix camera) has a communications port that will support both RS-232 serial and USB communications. Good luck and keep us posted on your progress

Assuming you really mean an Etrex Legend, and not a Legend C or something, the cable needs some smarts to handle the differences in the protocols. Also assuming you don't have serial ports on your computer, you'll need a serial/usb adapter to plug the standard Garmin serial cable into. Fortunately there are plenty of them out there at reasonable prices.

You have a problem with folks making constructive suggestions based on decades of their own experience? As I read it, the posters simply said that based on their experience and direct knowledge, the site would run faster and with less maintenance at a lower cost on other operating systems. Based on my 30+ years of experience with high availability real-time systems on multiple platforms including Windows and Unix-based systems, I agree. Unfortunately, the migration costs and the impact of the potential downtime during the transition probably outweigh the benefits in both the short and medium term.

Something odd seems to be going on with the pocket queries. One query that is supposed to run daily has not run since the 17th. My routine pre-weekend pocket queries that are scheduled to run on Fridays have not run today yet, although the last time they ran was the 14th - I suppose they may still run today though.

Any left over at the end of the day don't run. Actually we have a PQ Generator that runs to catch any that didn't get finished the day before and to process them as well. -Raine Hmm, good idea, but somehow at least one of my small daily queries (new caches) is slipping through the cracks. It's scheduled daily, but hasn't run for 4 days now. I tried rescheduling it, changing it a bit and resaving, etc with no effect. I've set it up for weekly now; maybe it will do better next week.

Thanks, I'll give that a try.

My palm database has accumulated a lot of deadwood, caches that no longer exist etc. I don't want to overwrite the entire database since I have quite a few notes for various caches that I have found or am in the process of finding/decoding etc. It would be nice to have an "import notes" option that loads exported notes back into the database. Then i could export the current notes, reload a clean database with just the caches I want, then import the notes back into the database. Perhaps it's already a feature and I've just missed it, but it seems like it would be a handy feature to have around.

Depending on how long ago the unit last acquired satellites, you may need to leave it turned on in your back yard with a clear view of the sky for 10-15 minutes. Don't move it around, just leave it in the same place sitting on a pot or something. You should be able to see whether it's getting ANY satellites on the page that shows the satellite positions and signal strength. You may also have to tell it to keep looking for satellites if the initial search times out.

If you can get a jpg image of your puzzle, you can upload it and link to it if you use the HTML option on your cache description. There are lots of ways folks have used to get puzzles posted as part of the cache page. If you can find a cache description doing something similar to what you want to do, view the source of a page and you can often figure out what HTML to use to get the same effect.

I'm not at all certain what that message means, but it might mean that the same exact file is already in the queue for downloading. One thing to try is to go to the program folder, look under Palm (or PalmOne) for the folder with your name on it, look in the quickinstall folder and see if the file is really already there. Maybe you can delete the problem file there and try again. That's not the only place files can be in the download queue though, so the problem could still lie elsewhere. Since you're using GSAK, I'd suggest you make sure you're up to the latest rev, then check in at the GSAK forums. The gurus hanging around there are very helpful and quick to respond to problems like this one.

funny thing is that the page works perfectly on firefox too anywhere else. It even works on internet explorer on his PC, just not on his PC using firefox.

I should have realized that spoofing the user agent wouldn't work since I can see your stats just fine on your test page with my version of Firefox (I'm on a Mac though if it makes any difference). Sorry about sending you down that blind alley. I'm out of other ideas. As near as I can tell, something on your machine is modifying your HTML on the client side. If there were a proxy server in the mix, I suppose it might be doing it, but I would expect it to do the same thing to Internet Explorer. So if it ain't an extension or Greasemonkey script mangling your html, I'm out of ideas. Anybody else?

I sure hope someone who knows something will check in here soon. I'm afraid we're looking into blind alleys while someone with more experience could point you in a better direction. While we wait for the real experts to show up, I'd be inclined to investigate whether this is a server-side problem. There are seveal ways a server can tell what type of browser you are running, but one common (and easily spoofed) way is via the User Agent string. There's a firefox extension called "user agent switcher" which will make firefox send the user agent string mimicking Internet Explorer (or linux or Mac or opera or netscape or whatever). The extension should be a minimal impact on your browsing and you can toss it away when you're done testing. Anyway, if I was in front of your system struggling with this one, my next move would be install the user agent switcher and see if the problem goes away if the web server thinks you're someone else. It also looks like you might have some remnants of an old copy of Greasemonkey lying around. If you haven't uninstalled it (and the uninstall process just left a preference behind), you should probably upgrade it or uninstall it. I don't see how it would bear on this problem though. Also probably irrelevant, but something I would look at is returning the network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to the "normal" value of 8, at least temporarily. I sure can't see how your value of 30 could cause a problem like the one we're seeing, but it is different from "normal". Good luck!