Gregory Szorc's blog

Greenie Tracking Finally Up

I went to greenie.case.edu and found that the Greenie tracking service is up and running! Check it out at http://www.nextbus.com/?a=case-western. For some reason, the first time you access that link, Nextbus chose to display a "welcome to Nextbus message." Just reload the page and you get Case's site like you intended.

The site is pretty cool. They have their own map utility, like Google Maps. They have a tracking map actually using Google Maps. Finally, they have a schedule that is supposed to list times (it is non-functioning at the time of this entry).

So, what's the problem with the service? It doesn't let me see the actual latitude and longitude of all the Greenies! The good news is that since the tracking utilities are client-based (they use tons of AJAX), it is only a matter of inspecting the requests to the server to find the method needed to obtain these coordinates. The first thing I will do when I get back home is to inspect the code and write a webservice to return the coordinates for all the Greenies in XML format. Then, I will publish this script somewhere, so anybody at Case can write his or her own tracker.

In related news, I had this pet project of creating some cools maps for campus and hosting them on a central service. I had registered the hostname 'maps' to myself a few months ago. This morning, I got a call from the Help Desk informing me that I couldn't have the hostname any more. Oh well. All I can say is the person who is taking 'maps.case.edu' better have a better reason than me...

Post script

You can find details for obtaining the coordinates at Debugging Nextbus.

You can ping this entry by using http://blog.case.edu/gps10/mt-tb.cgi/5566 .

This entry will serve to explain my progress with debugging Nextbus's interface for obtaining the GPS data of objects. The...

I'm not having any problems accessing the data with the url http://www.nextbus.com/s/COM.NextBus.Servlets.XMLFeed?command=vehicleLocations&a=case-western&r=circlelink&t=0. Either something changed since you looked at it, or I'm accidently circumventing the key requirement by some other means.