WordPress - Justin Foell

Garmin is the Apple iPod of GPS products. So when it came time to purchase a new GPS, I grabbed a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. It had a great feature set for a handheld unit: SD card expansion, turn-by-turn directions, etc. And because it’s a Garmin, it had the best “hacker” support, namely: free maps from Open Street Maps.

The one thing that I was dissatisfied with was the software support under Linux. Sure you could plug it in, and retrieve data, but simple editing of tracks (splitting, joining) was tedious. Garmin’s free MapSource software worked well, but I wanted to avoid booting into Windows just to use it. Luckily I found this thread on ubuntuforums.org. I rehash here much of the info provided there, and include some updates.
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An Aside about Strava

I use my GPS mostly while cycling. A while back a friend tipped me off to a site called Strava where you can track your rides and compete virtually with others.

I’m not a competitive cyclist. I ride more to shuttle kids to the library, or for picking up groceries. But I do like to use my GPS while riding and upload the data to Strava to track my miles, calories burned, etc. It’s also fun to see what sort of excruciating rides competitive cyclists are doing.

My beef with Strava is that they just recently shut down the version 1 & 2 API access to their site. They are launching a new V3 API, but your application must be approved to use the service. Unless a new version to any API is fully available, it’s customary to leave the old version(s) of the API accessible for a period of time so developers can update their software. Unless the old API is causing undue stress on server hardware and equipment, there should be no reason that an old API is turned off before the new one is available.

My guess is that they (like Twitter) want to control who can/can’t use their API. It could also be a stupid knee-jerk reaction, like I’ve seen many governments and businesses make. Recently there was a lawsuit brought against Strava. They may now want to control the exact wording of the competitive elements of the apps so Strava users aren’t feeling coerced into regaining their top time by riding dangerously. It all feels like a digital nanny-state to me. My guess is that no open-source projects will be able to use the V3 API because there’s probably some DRM key (or equivalent) required to connect.

Nevermind that I’m a contributor to the Strava plugin for WordPress (which no longer works thanks to Strava). WordPress only powers a billion websites and has the largest market share of any web publishing platform. Isn’t the point of having an API to promote the widest adoption possible?!? If Strava doesn’t change, maybe I can convince tons of WordPress cyclists to switch to Garmin Connect – they don’t seem to be ostracizing developers.

/end soapbox

Back to installing MapSource…

Installing Wine

The first order of business is installing Wine:

sudo apt-get install wine

Then run winecfg (as your normal user). This will create a ~/.wine directory:

winecfg

Just click OK when the dialog appears.

Installing MapSource

In order to install the latest MapSource, you actually have to install an older version of the software first because MapSource checks for the presence of an earlier version during installation. Fooling the earlier versions to the presence of MapSource is actually quite easy:

cd ~/.wine/drive_c
mkdir Garmin
touch Garmin/MapSource.exe

Get an older version, like MapSource_6153.exe from http://gawisp.com/perry/mapsource/

Then run the installer:

wine ~/Downloads/MapSource_6153.exe

Follow the on screen instructions. Accept the license and it will install. At the end of the install you can launch MapSource – don’t do this! Uncheck the check mark and just exit the installation.

Once you’ve installed MapSource the simple way, you can then update to a newer version of MapSource which looks for a “proper” MapSource installation. There may be some sort of secret sauce to having your upgraded MapSource fully functional. I initially had problems with the newest version crashing when saving a GPX file. But then it went away when I did a couple of incremental upgrades. If you have this problem, maybe try removing the latest version through the Wine uninstaller and installing a slightly earlier version. Please comment if you have any insight as to what works and what doesn’t.

Add Maps

Adding a drive

My maps exist on a Windows partition on my computer. Rather than reinstalling the (huge) files in Wine, I added a Wine system drive that linked to my Windows partition.

After mounting the Windows partition (simply by selecting it under devices in the nautilus file manager), I then made a symlink to my ~/.wine/dosdevices/ folder:

cd ~/.wine/dosdevices
ln -s /media/justin/OS "o:"

Replace /media/justin/OS with the correct path to your Windows partition, once it’s mounted in Linux. I chose “O” as my drive letter since I normally mount the disk as “OS” – you can choose whatever drive letter you’d like.

Add registry keys

This is most easily done by exporting registry keys from Windows and importing them into Wine’s registry. Here is a screenshot from my registry from Windows:

In the UbuntuForums post, the author notes that MapSource looks for maps under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Garmin\MapSource\Families, where as my installation (Windows 7) had the maps installed under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Garmin\MapSource\Families. So I exported the keys from Families in my Windows installation and then installed them in the same place in the Wine registry.

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/regedit.exe

After installing the key(s) into the Wine registry, I updated the values and changed any references to C:\ to O:\ – my custom Wine device that links to my Windows partition.

Once this is done you can test that your maps are being read correctly.

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Garmin/
wine ./MapSource.exe

If your maps are installed correctly, they’ll show up under View > Switch to Product. Even if you have no maps installed, MapSource may still be useful to you for downloading tracks from your Garmin and exporting to other formats such as GPX.

Set up a COM device

In order for MapSource to be able to upload/download anything from your GPS, we need to set up a COM device so they can communicate. First load the garmin_gps kernel module (which strangely didn’t autoload in Ubuntu):

sudo modprobe garmin_gps
lsmod | grep garmin

And you should see something like:

garmin_gps 18212 0
usbserial 36911 1 garmin_gps

Turn on the GPS and connect it to the USB port. Then do:

ls /dev/ttyUSB*

You should see a device called ttyUSB0

Now we have to make this device visible as com1 port under Wine:

cd ~/.wine/dosdevices
ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 com1

When you want to transfer data from your GPS, plug in your Garmin, then run:

sudo modprobe garmin_gps
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Garmin
wine ./MapSource.exe

In the Transfer menu, select Receive From Device. You should now see your device and can transfer tracks, waypoints from your GPS into MapSource.

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I like to think that I’m not sexist, but my reputation may precede me.

At some point during my college years, I started using a reverse-psychology approach with women I knew (usually girlfriends) – telling them they couldn’t do something – in hopes that they’d be motivated to prove me wrong.

Ask my wife – this is the wrong approach. Reverse psychology only works on a certain type of person, usually enemies, and (hopefully) they’re not the majority. People want to be built up, not torn down. The other bad part of this reverse-psychology habit was that as I told women that they couldn’t do something, I was slowly and subconsciously telling myself that they couldn’t.

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I had to stop doing it. Then, a wake-up call came. I learned I’d be having a daughter. Was this my punishment for my transgressions? Would this mean all of the secrets of the female psyche would be revealed to me? Probably not. But I want to make sure both my son and daughter, if they choose to follow my footsteps into a technology field, are both given the same opportunities and the same treatment.

As soon as I learned I was having a daughter, the articles about sexism in tech became immediately more personal and relevant. A lot of attention had recently been paid to conferences, female speakers (or lack there-of), and conference behavior. I took this all to heart as I was planning a conference that was held right before my daughter was born – WordCamp. I made a conscious effort to have a good representation of women speakers.

In the WordPress community, it’s not difficult to find and meet amazing women doing amazing things. Look at Lisa Sabin-Wilson, my neighbor to the east – she wrote a book. I’ve thought about writing a book – but she actually did it! However, you don’t have to be a superstar or “internet famous” to add to the conversation. Maybe that’s why I enjoy working with the WordPress community. It’s easy to meet all types of people doing great things.

Even though WordPress is written in PHP, I found that there’s a big difference between these two communities. I’ve only been to two PHP conferences: php|tek in the mid-aughts and most recently MidwestPHP 2012. At both conferences, the only female speaker was Sara Golemon. Maybe it was just coincidence. Sara is a highly respected contributor to the PHP community and she’s also a published author. But my feelings concluded that she had become the token female spokesperson for PHP conferences.

So what can we (especially men) do? First you need to change your mind. If you don’t have a daughter, imagine one of the few women in your technology field as if she were. Is she being treated fairly? Are you treating her fairly?

Then start leveraging your power for good. Be your own superhero. If you’re organizing a conference, go out of your way to include women. Pay it forward: my business partner teaches a class called Black Girls Code. For those who don’t know him, he is neither black, nor a girl. If you’re involved with the interview process at work, bring some women in. I guarantee they’ll bring new perspective to your old boys club. It may only take a couple of GI Jane’s in a male-dominated field to turn the tide and welcome a new wave of female geeks.

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Disclaimer: this is not meant to offend any Mormons. My wife’s family is predominantly Mormon (though we are not). However, I’ve witnessed several of her cousins announce their engagements after only weeks of dating. And their wedding date was typically 3 months out from there.

I would never plan a 3 month-long engagement because I don’t think it’s enough time to plan a decent wedding and maintain your sanity. Weddings only happen once (if you do it right). Get it right the first time.

Like young, naive lovers, WordCamp organizers also need to suppress their hormones. We tend to get over-excited about WordPress – like evangelists that have been given a free podium. Pocket your emotions, and follow the advice from those who have come before you.

This post could serve both groups as a guide on how fools rush in. It’s possible to plan something this big in 3 months, but believe you-me, it is much less stress to take your time. I wish we had followed this advice – but we didn’t. In 3 months, despite the odds, we still managed to pull things off.

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Let’s do a WordCamp!

Since no one had organized a WordCamp in the Twin Cities since 2010, fellow MSPWP member Kiko Doran decided he would say “I do” – just to get the ball rolling. I decided to join him. My business partner, John Hawkins, has been organizing WordCamp Las Vegas since 2009. I figured he’d be a good resource to tap for questions. Besides, how hard can it be?!?

Kiko originally chose the date: 4/20. It came with an obvious Rastafarian theme, and he even had a logo put together before we locked in a venue:

WordCamp Rule #1

The first rule about WordCamp is that you don’t plan anything until you have a venue. Before Christmas in 2012, Kiko and I visited the downtown library and had the booking company save the date. Right before Christmas we were informed the space wasn’t available. The Friends of the Library get free reign of library rentals (as they should), and already had 4/20 wrapped up.

We quickly made an appointment with Minneapolis Community & Technical College, gracious host of the MSPWP un-conference event WordUP! They wouldn’t be able to meet until the first week of January. I wanted to keep our search momentum up, so we scheduled a visit to the University of St. Thomas (my alma-mater) around the same time.

St. Thomas’s downtown campus is great but all of the available large rooms were strangely spread out on different floors or in separate buildings. MCTC has a great space, and wanted to help sponsor the event. They weren’t available on 4/20 either, so our date had to be moved a week later to 4/27, which created scheduling challenges for my family in particular, but the show must go on!

Keep Calm and Carry On

After securing a venue things got crazy. We enlisted several people from MSPWP to help out. We let our organizing committee members run with whatever roles they felt they’d excel at. And excel they did! We had specialists for sponsors, venues, catering, and swag. Not to mention the normal kick-ass web development and design that comes with a group of WordPress geeks. I sincerely hope we can assemble a similar team next year.

We did a weekly conference call to make sure things were on track, and used Basecamp for all other communications during the week. I do believe the regular week-in week-out activity helped us keep our hormones in check.

The conference’s last day was 4/28 which was the due date of my wife’s pregnancy. Thankfully, she made it through the weekend labor-free.

Lessons Learned

If I learned anything, it would be to start planning a full year in advance. I think Kiko realized this as he started to talk to me about 2014 before the 2013 event had officially started. I like his enthusiasm but insisted that we first make it through our reboot of this conference before discussing the next year.

I hope we can continue to build long-lasting relationships so the whole community can benefit from a great event like WordCamp. One great partnership has been MCTC. They’re looking to add a WordPress course to their curriculum, and we hope that they can be a long time venue sponsor of WordCamp in the Twin Cities.

Also don’t expect that you, as an organizer, will get to enjoy the event. This same principle applies to a wedding. The best outcome you can have is that your guests enjoy themselves.

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There has been a lot of talk recently about WordPress (.org and .com), Automattic, WordCamp, and the GNU Public License. Hopefully without beating a dead horse, I can offer some constructive suggestions to the community so that the playing field at least appears level.

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My site gets an average of 30 visitors a day, so all this may just resonate like a single coffee bean in a tin can…

A hard-line for a hard-liner

Matt Mullenweg takes a hard-line on the GPL. To remain true to his vision, Automattic relinquished the WordPress name to the WordPress Foundation. I like to think this was the moment when he let go, but there are signs that he still has a very firm grasp on the WordPress community. With or without giving up the name as an act of goodwill, the WordPress community has become bigger than Automattic or Matt. I think it’s time for the community to additionally take the hard-line, and make some changes to WordPress core and WordPress.org.

So here’s my simple list of changes:

Provide transparency into the WordPress Foundation
Decouple Akismet from WordPress core
Remove links to ma.tt and WordPress.com from all WordPress.org sites

Unlike the changes that Collis graciously is making to Envato, my proposed changes could be accomplished by one person in one day.

A Transparent WordPress Foundation

It’s obvious that the community is eager to find out more about the makeup of the WordPress Foundation. Besides publicizing it’s membership, I’d additionally like to know how (or if) they vote on issues. Does everyone get a single vote or is it based on “shares” where Matt owns 51%? How does someone become a member of the foundation? I think it would be easier for the community to swallow decisions if we know where they were coming from.

Remove Akismet from WordPress core

I agree with Mark Jaquith when he suggested at PressNomics that Akismet should be uncoupled from WordPress core. There is first a technical issue: Akismet is already a stand-alone plugin and there could be the case where someone upgrades WordPress and at the same time accidentally downgrades Akismet because they’re on a slower WordPress upgrade cycle. Then there’s the fact that Akismet is useless without the service that Automattic provides for blocking spam. Yes, it’s technically free if you choose not to donate an amount when you activate it, but I clearly remember there being a frowny face 🙁 at one time when you pushed the slider to $0 – effectively guilting you into paying for the service.

Remove unrelated links from WordPress.org footers

WordPress.com and ma.tt links should be removed from all WordPress.org sites. By giving up the WordPress name Matt has sent the community off into the wild, sent us afloat, but now WordPress.org is a cruise liner and Matt is left on a dinghy. As such, I don’t see a reason to advertise WordPress.com or ma.tt on WordPress.org.

Why not have my blog listed in the footer? Oh yeah, it only gets 30 visitors a day…

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The Domain Name System (DNS) is arguably the best (and most used) service that the internet has spawned. Why leave all the fun Top Level Domain (TLD) stuff to ICANN & your registrar? You can have your own TLD using Dnsmasq.

This is part one of a three part series covering Dnsmasq’s uses regarding:

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The only prerequisites for running Dnsmasq is a Unix-based operating system (including Mac OSX). The only prerequisite for reading this article in the series is interest in doing any sort of web development locally. I’m going to cover a simple example using WordPress, but the principle is the same for any web site or service software written in any language. Basically, if your normal local development addresses look something like http://localhost/~me/bobscountrybunker/ then Dnsmasq is for you.

Installing & Starting Dnsmasq

I’m going to cover installation & configuration for Ubuntu 12.04, but over time I haven’t seen a lot of changes in the way Dnsmasq is configured. So configuration should apply to OSX and other Linux distros.

To install on a Debian-based system:

$ sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

Dnsmasq will probably start automatically the next time you boot, but to start it now execute:

$ sudo service dnsmasq start

Systems that don’t use upstart will probably start it like this

$ sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq start

Even with no configuration changes, your computer still should work as normal, but if you inspect your /etc/resolv.conf it probably now has a line like this:

nameserver 127.0.0.1

Dnsmasq is already up and running, taking in DNS requests from your computer and at this point just forwarding most of them to your upstream DNS provider. Nothing groundbreaking, but now we can control DNS ourselves and have a little fun.

Configuring Dnsmasq

The configuration files will be in /etc/dnsmasq.conf and/or /etc/dnsmasq.d. The addition of the /etc/dnsmasq.d directory is new to Ubuntu 12.04 (not sure which Dnsmasq version it corresponds to), and it’s a welcome addition because you can put your customized files in there without worrying about /etc/dnsmasq.conf getting overwritten during the next release upgrade.

The files in /etc/dnsmasq.d are executed by the order of their filename, so it would be wise to number your most important configuration with a `01` prefix, such as /etc/dnsmasq.d/01_localhost

Top Level Domains – not just for the big-boys (anymore)

You can invent a new Top Level Domain for use on your local system. On some distributions the convention is to use ‘.lan’ but you could name it what ever you’d like. I don’t recommend anything too long or the ‘.local’ extension which is used by multicast dns. Here’s a simple /etc/dnsmasq.d/01_localhost configuration file:

address=/lan/127.0.0.1

Now every address that ends in ‘.lan’ will belong to your local IP. After (re)starting Dnsmasq, try it out:

$ ping wordpress.lan
PING wordpress.lan (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.021 ms

Pairing Dnsmasq & Apache Web Server

Now let’s combine this with some Apache configuration for a real-world development example. I don’t want to get into the specifics of Apache configurations amongst different OSes and distributions, but on Ubuntu I put a config file in /etc/apache2/sites-available and symlink it to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled, however it can really go anywhere that Apache will read it:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName wordpress.lan
    ServerAlias *.wordpress.lan

    DocumentRoot /home/justin/wordpress
    <Directory /home/justin/wordpress/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Once I’ve restarted/reloaded Apache, I can visit http://wordpress.lan in my browser on my local system to bring up an instance of WordPress. You may have noticed the ServerAlias *.wordpress.lan line in the configuration. With mod_rewrite enabled in Apache, I can take the set up a step further and turn this single WordPress installation into a subdomain network installation. This is a great set up if you are working on several sites but want to maintain a single main codebase for your content management software.

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Justin Foell

Technology, Bicycling, Hobbies, Kids, Life.

Category Archives: WordPress

Garmin MapSource in Linux (Wine)

An Aside about Strava

Installing Wine

Installing MapSource

Add Maps

Adding a drive

Add registry keys

Set up a COM device

Women in Tech: My bout with Sexism

WordCamp Minneapolis – My Mormon Wedding

Let’s do a WordCamp!

WordCamp Rule #1

Keep Calm and Carry On

Lessons Learned

That awkward moment when you give up control

A hard-line for a hard-liner

A Transparent WordPress Foundation

Remove Akismet from WordPress core

Remove unrelated links from WordPress.org footers

Pimpin’ your dev env with Dnsmasq

Installing & Starting Dnsmasq

Configuring Dnsmasq

Top Level Domains – not just for the big-boys (anymore)

Pairing Dnsmasq & Apache Web Server