When I was done with the interview, I noticed that it had started snowing. The roads weren't really bad yet, but I saw a few accidents on the way back, including one overturned pickup truck. And that was before even an inch of snow had fallen! The truck didn't appear to have collided with any other vehicles but when I saw that, I decided it would be best to go directly home and stay home. In the evening, I went out to shovel the sidewalk and driveway. There was still less than an inch of snow on the pavement but I did that anyway and I was done in minutes.
With inclement weather comes a new software project. I actually started NuviGC a few days ago when I noticed that GSAK uses SQLite databases and wondered if perhaps I could write a script to query those databases directly and generate POI files for the Nuvi without going through GSAK. I'd been using this GSAK macro to generate POI files but it's a bit crufty and the author hasn't updated it in two years. The GSAK macro language is like Visual Basic with a lot of the good stuff missing, so I figured it would be better to reimplement it in Python and use that as a base on which to make my own improvements. And that's what I did. So far, I've added:
- Better linebreaks/formatting.
- Geocache attributes.
- Corrected coordinates in logs.
- Some workarounds for the Nuvi 295W.
- Substitutions for some HTML entities not recognized by POILoader.