It shows how exciting life has been recently that I’ve made no mention of my new GPS. The Garmin lost out to a Magellan at the last minute… the eXplorist 210 to be exact. The extra memory nailed it for me (22Mb vs 8), and easy USB connectivity.
After all the comments from friends about how rubbish built-in basemaps are, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how good/useful it seems to be. It seems to have most A-roads, train stations, and bus stations, rivers, railway lines, and so on. We’re going to the
York Maize Maze this week, so I’m going to put it through it’s paces there. It claims 5-10m accuracy, which is probably enough to be useful in a maze
On a completely different note, I’ve just finished a complete overhaul of these webpages. Not that you can tell from the front, but they are now entirely object oriented! Previously the PHP was built using a Perl template package – but now there is a PHP class which handles all the rendering and menus, and to create a page you write a subclass that overloads any given rendering function, principally renderCentre and renderRight, although if I ever wanted to replace the banner or left menu that’s easy too.
This approach just seems much cleaner – the PHP now only exists in one place, and it’s very easy to follow the rendering. I haven’t comprehensively tested it all yet, so there may still be one or two scoping errors to track down, so be patient if you see PHP errors!