Wednesday, February 05, 2003
Yet more preparations for war driving
Yet more wardriving equipment. I borrowed a GPS unit from Gregory to hook to the laptop. Yet after an hour of fooling around I could not get anything from the GPS unit. Not one byte of data.
Searching around for a possible answer, I read where you might need a NULL modem cable to talk successfully to a GPS unit. Great! While I have a NULL modem adaptor, it's buried with the rest of the computer equipment that I've yet to unpack. Even if I had that, the adaptor itself is a DB-25 form factor, while the cable (and serial port on the laptop) are both DE-9† form factors so that would require yet more adaptors.
But it's a specially constructed cable for the unit so you would think the wiring would be correct. So, using that logic (and not wanting to dig through boxes looking for adaptors) I tried hooking the GPS up to my older laptop.
It worked. I can see data spewing forth from the GPS unit.
But the serial port on the new laptop doesn't appear to work.
Bummer.
† Although commonly referred to as “DB-9,” DE-9 is the correct designation—the letters refer to the physical size of the connector while the number referrs to the number of pins. A VGA monitor cable uses a DE-15 connector, for instance.
Just how do you markup foreign words in HTML?
Jonathon Delacour wrote a response to my entry about semantically marking up foreign words in HTML (and why, when viewing that entry, certain browsers kept asking users to install Japanese Language support). The comments on that response spilled over to another entry Jonathon wrote about the problem.
Reading the comments is interesting as there doesn't seem to be a real
consensus as towards The Right Thing to do, especially when using romanji
to write Japanese words. Do you use <SPAN> like I do?
Or is <I> with the LANG attribute correct?
What about <CITE>?
I think we're still quite a bit away from the semantic web at this point.
Update on Saturday, September 23rd, 2023
I think the consensus, and what I'm doing now (and going back and fixing
previous posts like this one) is to use <I> with the
LANG attribute (and TITLE to provide the
translation).
To the land with the funny Ø
Spring is off to Sweden again and once again, this time for a week.
I can't wait for her to get back.
