I learned quite a bit on digital signatures this weekend.I also generated a free email signing certificate from http://www.cacert.org .It is community driven non-profit organization running out of Australia.
After reading a lot and experimenting i finally stumbled upon this article of how to use it in Outlook 2007.Be sure to read about it @ http://wiki.cacert.org/EmailCertificates
Then I finally was able to send my first digitally signed email :-).
Then I thought of using it a lot but came to know that if you send any signed emails to a webmail accounts like Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail etc the end user gets an attachment(smime.p7m) with a blank body line.Now to open this attachment you will need to download a viewer for it from http://www.cryptigo.com/p7mViewer/

Overall after spending about 12-14 hours reading about it and experimenting about it I feel that it is too difficult for average used to use Digital signatures.
The idea is great and we should use it but i believe the learning curve for people is going to be huge and it will take sometime before people actually start using it.

posted at: 22:33 | category: /cuttingedge | permanent link to this entry

Gasbuddy.com is a website which allows individuals to update the price of gas for any gas stations.
This helps in knowing where the cheapest gas station  in the area you are looking at.
Remember, that the data there is as best as the number of people updating it .So please consider updating the gas prices when you see it :-).Welcometo crowdsourcing.

posted at: 14:09 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

As you know with Firefox 3.5 geolocation is in-build into the browser.However I was extremely uncomfortable with the fact that I have to use Google as the geolocation provider instead of the GPS which I have.I felt it was a little silly because GPS is more accurate then wifi based geolocation.And I was looking out for ways to integrate my gps with Firefox or for that matter any websites.
Let me give a brief use case of Geolcation .So if you are in a city while driving and you are looking for the nearest hotel of your favorite cuisine.So till now you would have to type in your location etc.But with geolocation , if you allow Firefox to give your location to a website you can get context sensistive searches.You can read more about geolocation in a browser @ http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/

Now coming back to the original post that you want to use your own gps , to provide your location to firefox then recently someone has checked in a fix for it in firefox.So I anticipate for it to show up in 3.6.I will try out the nightly builds as Im extremely excited about this fix.

posted at: 04:30 | category: /firefox | permanent link to this entry

Finally the port of gpsd is working on Windows.Yuo can read more about it @ http://home.arcor.de/ulf.lamping/gpsd/gpsd.html#mozTocId282581
This is a pretty important development because quite a few gps's only work on Windows and this allows you to stream nmea data to various Linux GPS software which have been ported on Windows.

posted at: 04:16 | category: /windows | permanent link to this entry

For those of you who might have played with OSM , might have always felt a need to download and view it on their laptop offline.
The files are typically at a contry level or a state level and most of them are pretty huge and memory hogging.
In any case if you feel a need to extract out a bounding box from a huge .osm file here is what you can do.

First download Osmosis from http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmosis#Downloading
Since it is java based it will pretty much run on all platforms where java will run.
Then download the state or country maps in osm format from  OSM or from Cloudmate
The file format which we need to download the file will be something like <Country or State Name>.osm.bz2 like in my case it is california.osm.bz2
Once you download that file you need to unzip it using a command like bzip2 -d california.osm

Now say for example you want to only extract OSM data from a bounding box between Top Left Longitude -122.093566 / Top Left Latitude 37.39062 and Bottom Right Longitude -122.093566 / Top Right Latitude 37.39062 which is an Area of Sunnyvale and Mountain View, California you would give a command like

./osmosis --read-xml /mnt/officedesktop/maps/california.osm --bounding-box top=37.39062  left=-122.093566    right=-121.939929  bottom=37.318027  --write-xml svl.xml

The output of the command will be called svl.xml

This way you can extract out bounding boxes for areas of your interest and use it in applications like Gosmore

posted at: 22:14 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

If you use the Operator Extension  for microformats and whenever you come across a Geo(Microformat) encoded URL  and want to lookup that location on our beloved  Open Street maps , I have written an Operator  plugin for doing just that.
The plugin is available @  http://bhavesh.freeshell.org/downloads/osm.js .You can save the text file using your browser with the name as osm.js.
Once you download it you need to copy the osm.js file in your operator folder.It wiill be something like <Firefox Profile Folder>\profile\operator on Windows and <Firefox Profile Folder>\operator
Please note that you need to install the Operator Extension before you can copy the osm.js file.Once installed you will be able to see the file in the Preferences or Options of Operator like below

You will then need to restart firefox to have Operator load the new plugin.

If everything goes well you should see the following in the Menu of Operator inf Firefox.


If you run into any issues you can send me an email @  Please mention osm.js in subject line so I can distinguish between spam and real emails.

posted at: 22:46 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

posted at: 01:12 | category: /lodgingreview | permanent link to this entry

***We stayed in this lodge for 2 nights for our visits to Zion National park and Bryce National park.The location was very good because to go to both these parks it is a convenient drive and as it is to Drive to Bryce national park you have to go thru the Zion Natioinal Park.
It is conveniently located to some restaurants and grocecry stores.
The rooms were clean and overall for the price we paid we liked this motel.

0.3

posted at: 00:58 | category: /lodgingreview | permanent link to this entry

posted at: 00:38 | category: /reviews | permanent link to this entry

posted at: 00:23 | category: /lodgingreview | permanent link to this entry