Ted Logan

How to get lost while knowing where you are

I spoke for the Boulder Linux User's Group in June 2010. In my day job, I write drivers for wireless phones, which I find rather interesting but doesn't lend itself to talks on topics of interest to the local Linux user's group. On weekends I take my GPS receiver into the wilderness in pursuit of trails, lakes, summits, and stunning vistas, all of which can be found in abundance in Colorado. It's easy enough for my GPS receiver to calculate my position with respect to the equator and an arbitrary meridian, but it's harder to match those coordinates with other meaningful points. I structured my talk around three questions that I can answer with my GPS receiver:

The slides from my talk are available here. I've added notes explaining my point for each slide and inserted actual screen shots for the demos, so this is the idealized version of my talk; in some ways this is the presentation I wish I had given.

The presentation is 37 slides long. The first 37 pages in the PDF are the full slides, which are mostly pictures and demos. I tend to prefer slides that show, rather than tell; the real information is in the presentation notes, shown under the slides in the last 37 pages.

To let the reader follow along with the examples in the slides, I've included various files from the demos, including two Perl scripts (hereby released under the GNU General Public License, version 2).

Slide 13

Slide 15

Slide 19

Slide 20

Slide 25

Slide 26

Slide 28

Slide 34

Slide 35