During my free time, I’ve been spending some time getting to know the Google Gadgets and Google Maps API. I’ve decided that I needed to start putting this knowledge to use, and therefore decided to finally get started working on one of my pet projects.

According to the Guinness Book of Records, Playa del Carmen is currently the world’s fastest growing town (by a rate of 26 percent per annum). Paper maps of streets, restaurants, bars and hotels in the area are outdated long before they hit the tourists. And, unfortunately, this area (by area, I mean Mexico) does not yet have a wonderful resource like Yahoo! Yellow Pages to easily find and display this information.

So, when I’m out taking my frequent walks, I’m going to try and take my handy Garmin GPS unit with me and try to start plotting some of the area’s attractions. Who knows, maybe one of these days Google or Yahoo! will wake up and realize that Mexico needs this type of service as well, and they’ll pay me lots of money to provide them with the data I’ve collected.

Currently, my work in progress demonstrates how to add custom overlays (street names) on the satellite images of the area. This is where the I’ve spent a bulk of my time thus far (it’s isn’t obvious yet!), since Google has made it a painstaking process to piece together the image tiles and make a map to work with.

Another piece of my project is the use of markers. I’ve added some markers showing some bars, restaurants and hotels. In the future, I hope to use different colored markers for each attraction, and possibly toggle the display based on user preferences.

I’d like to discuss my accomplishments and hurdles, but it’s late. I’ll hopefully get around to that in future installments. Until then, check out my progress at In The Roo Google Map – Playa del Carmen.

As I mentioned in a previous article, I was anxious to get a new machine down here so I could once again have a serious development environment. I’m happy to say that I’ve now been up and running with Fedora Core 5 for close to two weeks. It wasn’t all fun and games.

First off, I had been using RedHat and Fedora Core versions of Linux for more than 5 years. I wanted to try something new, just to see what was out there. I heard wonderful things about Ubuntu, so I thought I would give that a shot. After verifying that the install would work with my hardware, by using the LiveDVD, I installed Ubuntu 6.0.6 and got to work. I am not sure exactly what I did wrong, but when I tried to install new applications using their package manager, I kept running into dependency mismatches that were not automatically resolved.

I honestly spent 2 days trying to get my system up and running with Eclipse, Postgres, IntelliJ, Apache ant, and the Sun JDK 1.5. It did not go smoothly, and things just constantly felt broken. Probably the biggest decision to bail was the fact that with a fresh install, Ubuntu did not recognize my dual core CPU. I wasn’t about to go down the path of recompiling the kernel for smp support. If I had more time, I would have attempted another install, in case I had selected a wrong option or something, but I had work that needed to be done.
So, I downloaded the FC5 DVD and got to work. After installing and applying all of the latest updates, I was ready to roll. The installer even recognized the 2 CPUs and installed a pre-compiled smp kernel. Nice!

Unfortunately, I soon discovered, that the brand new Shuttle I had custom built did not include the built-in internal 802.11g adapter. The nice folks at Shuttle offered to fix the problem for me after 7 days of phone tag. Their solution involved me sending the machine back so they could install the adapter. I explained that this was not an option as I am now living in Mexico, and shipping packages to/from the US was too much of a gamble. Well, at least they will refund my money… it’s been over 10 days and I still haven’t seen a credit, so I’ll be bugging them again this week.

Unfortunately, due to setup of our network, the router is located in our bedroom, and all our computer equipment is out in our living room. Therefore, I had a few options… 1) Run a long cable across the apartment to hook into the LAN connector (my wife would kill me), 2) Move my computer into bedroom (there’s not enough room, and my wife would kill me), 3) Buy a USB wireless adapter (can I find one in this part of Mexico?), or 4) Bridge my Windows XP machine so that I could access the network.

I decided option 3 was going to be the best, but I needed to find an adapter first. So, in the meantime, I was stuck with option 4. Suprisingly, Windows XP made the process quite simple, I’m quite pleased to say. Unfortunately, sharing a wifi connection bridged through another machine is probably a speed demons worst nightmare!

Eventually, a Belkin F5D7050 USB wireless adapter was located at the local Sam’s Club. Thanks NAFTA!

I had a bad feeling about Linux and USB and wireless cards playing nicely together. My fears soon became a reality. I spent the next 3 days trying to find a driver that would work with my adapter. The wireless chip on the card is supposedly a rt2500 (Ralink Tech 2500), although I can only access the card by using an unsupported legacy driver for the rt73. I was able to hobble along for a few days with using a tool called ndiswrapper to load the Windows driver… however, besides the fact that it didn’t work with wireless encryption, the stupid thing would cause a total system lockup after a few hours of use.

Luckily, I stumbled upon the Rt2×00 SerialMonkey website. These guys took over the maintenance of the Ralink proprietary driver when Ralink open sourced it. They are currently in the process of rewriting, from scratch, the drivers for all of the Ralink chips. Excellent. After I solved a few problems, namely compiling the driver on Fedora Core (it involves a manual patch), and finding the mislabeled firmware for my chip on Ralink’s site, I was up and running. It’s now been 2 days without a lockup.

Although I’m up and running with the SerialMonkey driver, I’m sad to report that any high volume network traffic (bittorrent) will cause the driver to freak out and unload. Luckily, I don’t need that to do my work.
I love the stability and reliability of Linux, the massive amount of open source and free software available; however, I am not shocked that more people haven’t made the switch just yet. Although things like the LiveDVD from Ubuntu will help some people get a feel for Linux, getting the system functional and easy to maintain still needs some work. I am positive that things will continue to get better. I look forward to it.

Since I left my job 8 months ago and decided to move to Mexico, I’ve been able to spend more time doing things that I want to do, and a lot less doing things that I needed to do. Over the months, I’ve been keeping up on technology by reading people’s blogs and finding out what topics are currently on people’s minds.

I’ve discovered many cool new things, such as

• del.icio.us for social bookmarking
• Gmail for your domain for managing my domain’s email.
• TWiT.tv podcasts for technology news.

I’ve also been trying to keep up on technologies that I think are over-hyped, but people keep buzzing about… things like

• Ruby on Rails. Sorry folks, I just don’t see the fascination with it.
• Acegi security for Spring. Wow, everything and the kitchen sink. It may be useful if the documentation was easier to read.

But hopefully, this blog won’t just be about technology…

My wife and I left our jobs to get away from our 9-to-5 jobs in Chicago. Our plan was for a 6 month sabbatical in the small city of Playa del Carmen, Mexico. 6 months has come and gone, but we’re still here. Although we already have a blog dedicated to Our Mexican Adventure, I’ll post some ramblings about what it is like to live without many of the technologies that I’ve grown accustomed to. Such as

• My 52 inch, widescreen HDTV
• ReplayTV – most of you probably own a TiVo, aren’t you special?
• Google maps, Yahoo! maps, and MapQuest maps – useful for finding where places are, and how to get there.
• Reliable snail mail – yes, sometimes you actually need to get something that someone sends you.

I hope that’s a good enough introduction for you. Thanks for stopping by. Until next time…