Permission settings

By default users must not read or write from/to the device:

frisi:/ # l /dev/ttyUSB*
crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 188, 0 Dec 29 10:00 /dev/ttyUSB0

We change the permissions so ever user can read and write to the device:

frisi:/ # chmod o+rw /dev/ttyUSB0

Other maybe more elegant solutions can be found here: http://www.gpsbabel.org/os/Linux_Hotplug.html

Recherche

I’ve been doing quite some research on applications to load data to
and from my garmin gps device.

Some of the links i found are listed on http://del.icio.us/frisi/gis.

The apps i’ll describe in this section are GPSMan and GPSbabel.

I’d love to have a kde application for this, so i considered using GRASS GIS
(which i did not yet try out).

KGIS started in 2002, had no development the last years, so i don’t think this is
very promising.

GPSMan

You can download GPS Manager from it’s official website http://www.ncc.up.pt/gpsman/.
GPSMan is very well documented, a PDF describing it’s features, installation and usage and giving
information on the data types waypoint, track, route and group can be found on the
website too.

Start GPS Manager by providing the device your garmin is located at:

frisi@frisi:~> gpsman usb=/dev/ttyUSB0 &

You will see the main window with buttons named Data, GPS receiver, Map,
Definitions and Options.

GPSbabel

GPSbabel is an application to convert spatial information given in
a certain data and projection into various other formats.

You can download the most recent version on the homepage http://www.gpsbabel.org.

I’m using GPSbabel not only for conversions but also to upload waypoints
of http://geocaching.com caches to my garmin.

The format of these *.LOC files is geocaching.com-specific
and supported by gpsbabel too: http://www.gpsbabel.org/htmldoc-1.3.0/fmt_geo.html

I used gpsbabel to convert the file GCN8A0.loc and upload it to my garmin device:

gpsbabel -i geo -f GCN8A0.loc -o garmin,power_off=0 -F /dev/ttyUSB0

to get a waypoint file you can use with GPSMan try something like:

gpsbabel -i geo -f GCN8A0.loc -o gpsman -F GCN8A0-gpsman.wpt

you can also download data from your device using gpsbabel, see http://www.gpsbabel.org/htmldoc-development/fmt_garmin.html for more details.

Statistics

I’m interested in some statistical information on my bike tours such as
distance, average speed, vertical meters up/down, elevation charts.

GPSMan can do a lot of this already:
In the Lists view double click a track. In the track menu that will
pop up you can click the Compute button to get some statistical information
and a menu for generating plots such as elevation sideview by time or by distance.

Maps

GPSMan can display waypoints with different icons and tracks in a map (see screenshot).

GPSMan can also use maps in the background, but i need to find out how to obtain and
use maps for this.

There are also some online services that let you upload tracks and generate
a map with your track.
One of these is http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/map.

There is a tutorial how to integrate a route in google maps on http://www.marengo-ltd.com/gps/.

MapSource

I did not yet play with the map support of the 60Csx (eTrex Summit did not have it).

I need to check if there are any applications for linux, of if i can use it with an
emulator.

According to the Garmin FAQ garmin does not plan to ship mapsource for
other operating systems than windows atm.

Create a Instance

Installing IM is well documented in INSTALL.txt and works like a charm.
It takes some time to find your way in the master configuration file
~/.instancemanager/userdefaults.py and the derived project configuration
file (~/.instancemanager/plone25.py in this example)
However, all settings are well documented - you just need to read a lot at
the beginning.

Backups

instancemanager –backup plone25 creates an incremental
backup of the database to the backup_basedir_template set in
your configuration. if the database has been packed (instancemanager –pack)
in the meantime, a full backup will be created.
(you can create full backups by invoking instancemanager –repozo=full plone25)

As assumed in the beginning, IM acts as a handy wrapper around repozo
similar to the bash wrapper scripts for repozo i use by now.
You can use these actions for your backups by invoking them in a
cronjob (a pack every weekend, and a daily incremental backup).

Restoring backups is damn easy, too: just use the restore action
to get back to the state of the last backup.
you can even choose to restore the database state of a certain
date and time.

restoring a database will stop the zope and zeo server and restore the database
(you have to start zeo and zope again after that):

frisi@frisi:~/instances> instancemanager --restore-date=2007-01-01-21-10-43 plone25
INFO  zope: stop on port 8102.
daemon process stopped
INFO  zeo: stop on port 8100.
daemon process stopped
INFO  Restoring database file /home/frisi/instances/zeo/plone25/var/Data.fs from /home/frisi/instances/zeo/plone25-backup.

I don’t know yet if the transactions within the database are taken into account, or if repozo
is just taking the backup file that fits best, the only thing i tried was to provide the date
and time of the backup file in the format above and the backup file with the given filename
was chosen: 2007-01-01-21-10-43.deltafs was used although 2007-01-01-21-44-27.deltafs existed
in the backup directory.

Collaboration

To really exchange an instance (including products) with other developers,
it should not be necessary to have the product packages downloaded to the
same directories on the probably different machines.

the following only works if every developer has the plone2.5.1 bundle
in the directory /home/<developer>/download/plone:

archivebundle_sources = [{'source':'Plone-2.5.1-final.tar.gz',
                          'productname':'', # not relevant for bundles
                          'develop':False,
                          'droplist':('Five'), # drop Five from this bundle
                          },]
archivebundle_basedir_template = ‘%(user_dir)s/download/plone/’

If IM would support urls here, i could just exchange the
product configuration file and other developers could create exactly the same
instance on their machine.

I’ve had a short chat with reinout and he pointed out that there actually
is a - yet undocumented - way of doing this using
the ‘url’ key in archivebundle_sources. It should work somehow like this, but i did not get
it working in my testsetup:

archivebundle_sources = [{'source':'Plone-2.5.1-final.tar.gz',
                          'productname':'', # not relevant for bundles
                          'url':'http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/plone/',
                          #download it from here, if source is not available in archivebundle_basedir_template
                          'develop':False,
                          'droplist':('Five'), # drop Five from this bundle
                          },]

Development

For the next Zope2 project i work on, I’ll use IM.
I’ll have to figure out a nice structure in svn to check in
configuration files in the repository.

The one button product update and quickinstall multiaction:

instancemanager fresh <projectname>

and the possibility to transfer databases from development to production instance:

instancemanager --repozo=sync <projectname>

will save a lot of time, i think.

There are handy actions for intermediate "I’m going to do something dangerous right now" backups:

instancemanager --repozo=snapshot and
instancemanager --repozo=restoresnapshot

The testing facility will not completely replace the Makefiles I’m currently using
for product development. (see my TemplateProduct for more information)

svn browser does not work yet, but you should be able to check the product out:

svn co https://svn.lovelysystems.com/repos/public/lovely-products/TemplateProduct/trunk TemplateProduct

Zeo and Multi-Database support

Defining multiple mount points using instance manager is possible
in principle:

IM does support custom configuration files. I’m anxious whether
settings influencing zope.conf and zeo.conf such as port are completely
ignored when using zopeconf_template or zeoconf_template

and invoking instancemanager –upgradezope.

In the next days I’ll try to find a way to have different projects
using the same zope instance and report my findings in this blog.