Tom Printy’s Blog

Happy Geography awareness week to one and all. This awareness week started 13 years ago and it meant to help people, especially those in k-12 grades, rediscover what geography is.

“The primary goal of the week is to promote awareness about the importance of geography education while demonstrating the breadth of geography and its relevance to almost any other subject. Each year approximately one and a half million students participate in activities related to the week.”

You can find out more info on the offical website of Geography Awareness Week.

A couple weeks ago I received a new Garmin Nuvi 250 as a gift. I have been wating a personal navigation device but I decided that I was going to wait to buy one until the Dash.net devices became available. However I have really enjoyed using the Garmin Nuvi 250.

In the three weeks that I have had the PND, the devices has worked as it is supposed to. It show my current position on roads and will give me turn by turn directions to addresses that I either input or select from the POI database. As this is my first PND I didn’t expect a whole lot from it, bit it has mostly met my expectations of a device like this. I continue to be impressed with the POI database that is in the device. The couple of times that I have used it to look up a hotel or restaurant I found the location without too much hassle. Once the location was selected I was guided to the front door without any problems.

While driving around familiar locations the device doesn’t have much value, however I do like the ability of the device to act as a trip computer. It calculates average speed, top speed, amount of time stopped, amount of time moving and total tile. I relaly like this information as it gives me an accurate picture of how long it takes me to drive to and from work.

Another nice feature is that the device has a light sensor in it. As it goes from day to night the device will adjust the map background from white to black to help your eyes compensate. I thought that this was a nice touch and noticed the maps being redrawn when as day turned to evening.

If I had to change something about the device I would make the battery last a bit longer between charges. I can usually go about 4 days (8 hours) before giving it a charge. Also I would let the user disable all the warning screens, they are annoying. Lastly I would improve the satellite search feature. If you turn the device on in your garage then pull out it has a hard time getting a lock on satellites. If you turn it on in the open it locks on right away. All these are minor annoyances and don’t change my opinion of the device.

All in all this is a great entry level PND and I am glad to have it. If you are looking for a basic PND this is great one to buy. With a starting price of about $250.00 you can’t go wrong.

Recently I had cause to setup a new Wordpress blog on a system that was hosted by Hostway. We ran into problems getting the permalinks to function. The .htaccess file that Wordpress generates for permalinks was causing Apache on the Hostway system to through a 500 error or give a 400 error. To find out what was going on I looked at the Apache error log and saw a line like:

Permission denied: cannot read directory for multi

After a bit of googling I came up with the following .htaccess that fixed Wordpress Permalinks:

Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes -MultiViews

#BEGIN WordPress

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Notice how in the options line I turn off MultiViews and Indexes? Once I dropped this .htaccess in place Wordpress and Apache were able to play nice. My guess is that Hostway has Multiviews and Indexes on by default such that you can be lazy about the files that you place on their server. It isn’t a terrible way to go just that I wish they had a document showing what options they have enabled. As a side note I can see what mods they have enabled on the server by looking at /etc/apache2/mods_enabled .

I hope that this helps someone else out.