TellAboutWhere

Spent the last few days exposing to the net some of the odd-ball GPS logic I’ve done for my own amusement in the last year.

Specifically, TellAboutWhere fronts for the alternate route finder, sparsifying, hikifying, and bikifying logic.

More to come, probably. For instance, I’ll probably expose distance measurement, which, if I recall, simply adds up the tracks’ distance between points after the tracks have been sparsified.

Under the hood, TellAboutWhere is kinda cool. The web page CGI script doesn’t do much. It just writes out the uploaded files to a data directory and keeps track of the “file sets” in Python pickle files.

A (soon to be cron started, screened) script runs on “spring” against the uploaded GPS files on the server, “asuka”. Other instances of this background processing script could run on other machines if there were ever any significant traffic to TellAboutWhere. The processing script simply looks at input file names and insures that the various processed, output files exist for them. If a particular logical process doesn’t create any track data – say, hikify finds no hikes in a track – then the processing script creates a zero-length output file as a place-marker so that the logic isn’t done again.

“File sets” are groups of files. File sets make it easy to combine tracks together for alternate route finding.

For alternate route finding purposes, files in a file set may be checked/included or not.

TellAboutWhere keeps itself from being overloaded by only allowing 8 files in a file set. If you upload more than 8 files, TellAboutWhere whacks, first, files that are unchecked, then files at random. Since the input files are stored by (CRC32) hash, duplicate files are automatically eliminated.

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