gopman

I came across a strange one last week. I was going to find the next intermediate cache in a large statewide multi, and I figured I'd see if there were any regular caches in the area. Turns out there were a few - but one was only about 30-feet (!) away. I didn't think much of it until I went to log the regular cache. I saw that many people looking for the regular cache had inadvertently found the cache that was part of the multi (it had no log or trinkets, just coordinates). Even the regular cache owner commented on it in the description... It's not clear who's at fault here or even if there is a fault. It's also not clear which cache was there first since the Regular cache owner mentions that he moved his cache. The regular cache is "Mouse Trap" in case anyone wants to take a look. Rich

Thanks. It wasn't a big deal. I was just wondering.

Has anyone else noticed that the TBUG notification emails ("Subject: [TBUG] was placed in") are missing the filled-in information for the TBUG name and the cache name? A recent one had the following as its first sentence: "User CCCooperAgency has placed into the cache ." The email subject is also missing the TBUG name... Thanks. Rich

We're digressing from the topic, but I believe in paranoid programming. Don't assume the data is correct even if you ensure that it is during the input process. Some day, someone will find a clever way to input bad data to the database. It will happen. Guaranteed. Rich

Thank you. I was hoping someone else would take a look at that log entry... Clearly, Geocaching.com needs to fix their GPX output routines to catch this sort of problem. That's much safer than assuming that all of the input methods will catch the problem. Rich

I'll give it a try, but even on the web page, there is clearly an unprintable character in the log entry - exactly where the GPX readers complain.

There appears to be a problem with a GPX file I received from geocaching.com yesterday. I tried to read it with GPSbabel and a home grown perl program using XML::Parser. They both complain about illegal characters. I narrowed the problem down to cache ID=9167, the log entry by JoeyBob. There appears to be some unprintable characters just before the word "sorry". I'm not an XML expert, so I can't guarantee it's a bug in geocaching's GPX extract, but that's what it looks like. Thanks. Rich