Month: February 2010

In my opinion, Google’s web-services and Linux go together like pie and ice-cream.  Though, there are some people in this very LUG that would disagree with me about Google’s benevolence, there is no denying the quality and convenience of gmail etc…  Moreover, even though Google’s web services themselves are not open-source, they are built on top of an open framework and toolset, and Google itself sponsors some great open-source projects (chromium, android, Kernel development etc).

If you are of a like mind, you probably already use google’s services like gmail, google-voice (the best thing since sliced bread) and google reader.  Like me, you might have been in a constant search for a notifier applet for your taskbar for these services.  I have used CheckGMail for a long time, and then docky’s builtin gmail applet, but I have now found a real winner after reading a post at OMG!Ubuntu.  It’s called googsystray; it’s one program that looks great and notifies you of new messages in gmail, wave, gvoice and google reader in your taskbar.  It comes with a lot of nice features.  For example, you can send SMS messages with google-voice right from the applet.

Here are a couple screenshots:

And here is one screen cap from the original OMG!Ubuntu Article where more details can be found:

Go ahead, follow the link above, grab the .deb and give it a whirl.

Skyhook Wireless is a company that does one thing, and does it well: wardriving. They send vans equipped with wifi-detecting equipment and GPSs (wait, is that the plural of GPS? Is it GPSii?) and log the data. Unfortunately, they do not make their data publicly available. What they do have, however, is a XML API.

With a simple HTTP POST, you can (quite accurately) determine the location of a computer based on the BSSIDs (MAC addresses) and signal strengths of the networks it sees. You receive back an easily-parsed XML document containing latitude, longitude, and street address. However, Skyhook is quite bad at figuring out street addresses; the latitude-longitude data is much more helpful.

Skyhook has a Javascript API for web apps with a special browser plugin. The C API is handy for C apps (even has a Linux version!). But those are both wrappers over the simple XML protocol.

OATT is a Sourceforge project to create an open antitheft tracker for stolen laptops. Full disclosure: I am the admin of the project. For laptops without (insert plural of GPS here), I decided to use Skyhook and created a handy Python wrapper.

To use this wrapper in other Python apps, you must do three things (not including downloading the code and cd’ing into the source.)

1. From a shell, run “sudo IWList.py”. This will save network information accessible only to root to a file. To update location, you must rerun this command.
2. In your Python program (the OATT source must be in your $PYTHONPATH), add “import lookup” to the top of the source.
3. In your Python program, read the contents of “lookup.results”. This is a dictionary with the following keys:
   • “address”: This is a tuple containing the house number, street, city, state, country, and zipcode, in that order.
   • “latlong”: This is a tuple containing the latitude and longitude (both with very many digits after the decimal) in that order.
   • “accuracy”: This is a value taken from the raw Skyhook data. It represents the accuracy in some sort of units.

I am not affiliated in any way with Skyhook. However, they are quite technically impressive and I believe the API should be in much wider use.