GPS, the Global positioning System, was designed in the 1970s under hardware-cost constraints that would seem ridiculous today. This makes interpreting the data it sends into a black art, and produces some really painful edge cases. There’s one edge case in particular that I’ve come to think of as the Rollover of Doom. This morning… Continue reading The Rollover of Doom: a Trap for Good Programmers
Tag: GPSD
Plug and Pray in GPS-land
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another darkly humorous tale of the seamy side of GPS interfacing. GPSD working with USB GPS mice has, when properly installed, lovely plug-and-play self-configuring behavior. That is, you plug a USB GPS into a USB port, the hotplug system notifies the gpsd daemon that the GPS is available, the daemon… Continue reading Plug and Pray in GPS-land
NMEA 2000 and the Obverse of Open Source
In discussion of the GPSD project, a commenter suggested that its role might be going away in part because the NMEA 0183 protocol historically used in GPS sensors is being replaced by NMEA2000. So far, this is not true, and the reasons it’s not true are worth a look because they illustrate a sort of… Continue reading NMEA 2000 and the Obverse of Open Source
My open-source project is cooler than yours
Yes, GPSD is way cooler than your project. You know how I can tell? Because my latest feature request is from a scientist who wants to use GPSD as part of the control software for an autonomous robot submarine. That’s how I can tell. No word yet on whether the robot submarine will have a… Continue reading My open-source project is cooler than yours
Autotools must die
Me, on the GPSD mailing list: Once upon a time, I did not hate autotools. Yea verily, it was the morning of the world and all things (even autotools) seemed fresh and new). I’d say this innocence lasted until about, oh, 1995. But autotools was a kluge. And it did accrete kluges and crocks around… Continue reading Autotools must die
Scenes from the Life of a System Architect
I’ve been doing some heavy work on the core code of gpsd recently, and realized it would be a good idea to explain the whys and wherefores to my co-developers on the project. After I wrote my explanation and reread it, I realized I had managed to generate something that might be relatively accessible, and… Continue reading Scenes from the Life of a System Architect
Subversion to GIT Migration: A Tale of Two Gotchas
I’ve been wanting to migrate the GPSD codebase off Subversion to a distributed version control system for many months now. GPSD has a particular reason for DVCS; our developers often have to test GPSD sensors outdoors and aren’t necessarily in range of WiFi when they do it. GPSD also needs to change hosting sites, for… Continue reading Subversion to GIT Migration: A Tale of Two Gotchas
LORAN, we hardly knew ye
There’s been some upset in the blogosphere over the shutdown of the LORAN system of radionavigation beacons. This post at Chicago Boyz is representative (hat tip to Instapundit). The author worries “I’m not totally sure that this was a good decision.” and various commenters are much more emphatic, bemoaning the lack of a backup for… Continue reading LORAN, we hardly knew ye