It’s Scumrun this weekend and a mate has managed to get everything in place to make a go of it. I have the greatest of admiration for him since I tried to organize everything for last years run and; well failed!

I wish him good luck and if anyone reading feels like sponsoring him and his team then please go to http://www.justgiving.com/scumrun-ghostbusters; all money raised goes to Chase Hospice this year.

I’m admitting defeat and we are not going on the Scumball this year, I’m not proud of it but I am a little relieved. I have to admit that as I found out more information about the Scumball event I became less enthusiastic about going. Couple that with a lack of team work and I got to the point where I’d had enough and called a halt to it.

Seems that the event is going to cover about 2000 miles in 4 days, which is a lot of driving. Yes I know that’s the point but 10 hours + a day driving is not very appealing. Last year the event stopped over night in the Alps in tents! People a bloody skiing in the Alps this time of year not camping.
Good luck to all those going, I will be thinking about you while I have a lie in my nice warm bed on Sunday morning.

This is a rare moment. In the following post there may be some content that looks vaguely like IT. Since I pretend to know what IT is at work, it was only going to be a matter of time before work and petrol head obsessions converge.

I have been hatching a cunning plan over the past week to dynamically plot our location during the Scumball Rally in April.

Fact: I am basically tight when it comes to spending money on IT hardware and I hate gadgets that don’t work

Fact: What ever we take on the Rally runs a high risk of being broken, stolen, lost, soaked in beer or just left somewhere in Europe since it is too heavy to carry.

Combine these two facts and you can see that some imagination is required when developing a Global Tracking System. Anyway here is my Scumball Tracking Device (STD), codename the “HackaTracka”.

Basically I have a laptop running FC8 which grabs the GPS Coordinates from a Bluetooth GPS device with perl script. This then sends the GPS output via Bluetooth to my old faithful Nokia 6310i (probably the best mobile phone ever) which SMS’s them off to Twitter. Twitter kindly converts my SMS to an RSS feed for free thank you twitter. I then grab the output from the RSS feed with a bit of PHP and parse out the GPS coordinates passing them to Google Maps API and BINGO! A map with our current location.

A little refinement is required but HackaTracka 2.0 should be operational before we leave in April. Hopefully is will track us round Europe for 4 days and not stuck in Dover for 4 days.