Design by Committee: Geocaching

Great Sushi Race - Epilogue

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 01:08:25 GMT

Long after anyone but me cares, Ebi finally found his way home, a distant last place in the Great Sushi Race! Ebi is a Travel Bug launched in Yokohama in November 2005 with instructions to willing souls to move him even closer to our neighborhood cache.

On his journey, he traveled 8060 miles over 416 days, visited 15 caches in three countries (Japan, South Korea, USA), but despite this feat, failed to earn his doting owner a sushi dinner.

I'm hoping reigning champion FutoMaki will be up for a rematch in 2007! Keep your eye out for Great Sushi Race - the Sequel!

Solstice at N 45°

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 23:04:05 GMT

Paul and I seem to be developing a habit of celebrating the solstice with a bit of geocaching. This year, it was in Ottowa, and we pulled down a few while kayaking the Rideau canal. I left my SD card in my laptop instead of the camera, but Paul has a few photos up already...

Checkered Flag on the Great Sushi Race

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 21:21:26 GMT

It's over. I owe Paul a sushi dinner.

Futo-maki crawled the 6009 miles from Yokohama to Berkhamsted at an average pace of about 1.16 miles per hour. Come to think of it, that seems a reasonable speed for a sushi boat...

Ebi by contrast has been racing along at 1.38 miles per hour, but like the proverbial hare decided to nap in South Korea for a while.

Congratulations Paul! Fortunately we will cross paths in Ottowa next week, maybe I'll get a chance to pay up then. Or - double or nothing on another race? ;-)

Between the Esterels and Ile Sainte-Marguerite

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 17:16:36 GMT

At the tail end of the W3C plenary, Paul and I were able sneak away for a couple of stunning caches. First was one in the Esterel mountains, reached by climbing narrow winding roads through steep valleys topped by red rock outcroppings I and draped in sheets of blooming yellow Mimosa trees.

We eventually wound our way to the top of a ridge, looking down the length of a rugged valleys. A broad path, probably a logging road, led along the top and we traversed back and forth, trying to find the easiest way down the slope the last tenth mile To the cache.

At last we picked our way down through the wild lavender, tea trees, and scrubby cork trees, finding a boulder which sheltered the cache and wayposted a decent trail that led directly back to the car (oh well!)

As we opened the cache the wind sprung up with a vengeance, but died out again as we closed the cache back up. Perhaps someone left a genie in the cache? Photos are part of the Cannes set, starting here.

The second cache was a straightforward two-stage multi cache that led as on a circumnavigation of Ile Sainte-Marguerite, which is the "Angel island" of Cannes. A short boat ride, awesome views of the sea (complete with windsurfers and kites), the Esterel Mountains, Cannes, and the snowy alps in the distance. Very nice! Again photos are part of the Cannes set, starting here.

Great Sushi Race: Ebi has left the country!

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 17:49:45 GMT

Since my last update on the Great Sushi Race, Ebi has left the country at last! In it's race home to Auburn it has travelled 1200 miles in ... well ... pretty much the wrong direction. Meanwhile Futo-maki has made a beeline to England, over 5000 miles, with a mere 100 miles left to go.

Maybe there's an alternate prize for most tortuous route home. I know - the winner of that prize has to buy the other a sushi dinner (wait, did that come out right?)

Geocaching the Google Earth: Full integration!

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 03:23:35 GMT

Wow, if you haven't seen Geocaching.com's cache browser plug-in for Google Earth, get it (here) immediately! This is absolutely the coolest thing since the sport began. You zoom in on an area, and it connects and downloads the nearby caches, marking each on the map. You can click each for a short description, or open up a new pane directly in Google Earth with the full cache page. Awesome! For this, I'd at last pay the membership fee!

(A few rather artificial restrictions apply of course...)

Great Sushi Race Update

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:02 GMT

Both Futo-maki and Ebi Travel Bugs have started their homeward journeys. Futo-maki (orange) has only moved about 22 miles, but into Tokyo and close to the Narita airport. Ebi (yellow) has moved 245 miles-directly away from California! I guess it's still too close to call!

Earlier I loaded (with a lot of manual work) the movements of the Hufi Travel Bug into Google Earth to view them. Now there's a "View in Google Earth" link which gets the raw data into KML format - though the formatting has lots to be desired. Some improvements I'd like to see:

Name each step the name of the cache, instead of the unfriendly code of the cache.
Don't do two points for each cache (drop-off, pick-up), instead merge the log messages into a single point. It's especially disconcerting since one of the points is at a (random?) offset from the other so they don't visually overlap - but tweaking nice clean coordinates in this fashion isn't likely to be viewed very positively by geocachers (who by definition value precision measurements).

The Great Sushi Race

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 01:12:59 GMT

Paul and I did a little early-morning geocaching before our W3C WS-Addressing/WSDL Joint Meeting in Yokohama.

After a bit of bushwalking in the landscaping at Rinco park on the shore of Yokohama, and dodging these huge yellow-and-blue-striped spiders, Paul spotted the cache. Not having any trinkets on hand worthy of marking the occasion, we converted a couple of plastic sushi trinkets into Travel Bugs. A Travel Bug is a small object marked by a numbered dog tag allowing its movements to be tracked on the web. Our two Travel Bugs, Great Sushi race: ebi and Great Sushi Race: futo-maki will move from cache to cache, gradually (we hope) finding their way home to our respective backyard caches. The first one home wins a sushi dinner compliments of the loser.

So, which is farther in geocaching terms? California or Berkhamsted? Often measured mileage isn't the most reliable measure of speed. A large hop isn't that uncommon. It seems that the crucial factor for speed may be the strength of connections between "nodes" in the web of geocaches. It may be difficult (based on the behavior of geocachers) to move from one network of nodes to another network. Weak network connections may happen anywhere, not just at the most obvious geographic boundaries (like oceans). In fact airport-to-airport connections appear to be pretty strong. For "ebi," the network edge I'm worried about is the boundary between simple accessible (drive-up) caches and ebi's destination cache which involves a several mile hike.

Or it may be that network weakness is pretty even across the board, with cachers statistically likely to visit arbitrary caches. In that case just the latency between hops may be the limiting factor. 6 hops usually takes longer then 3 hops, irrespective of the distance of those hops. lf so, the most attractive Travel Bug might have an advantage, as more cachers will want to take it to a new home. Or they might feel sorry for an unattractive one (I maintain that's what has happened so far!)

In the end, I'm sure the compounded sequence of arbitrary decisions that propel a Travel Bug forward lead to an outcome that is pretty random.

200 caches and counting

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:52:52 GMT

Passed the 200 mark last night with a run of 6 easy caches along the San Francisco bay with Paul. The first hundred took about 6 months, the second hundred took nearly two years. Guess I'll have to step up the pace!

Geocaching the Google Earth 2

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 00:10:49 GMT

More fun tricks for combining geocaching with Google Earth!

I snooped around and discovered that Google Earth keeps track of place markers in XML format, under the .kml extension. That's pretty cool, since you can download waypoints from Geocaching.com in XML format too, under the .loc extension. For a long time it was my day job to define a language (XSL Transformations) for transforming one form of XML to the other. So I wrote a short XSLT (so short, I'll reproduce it here in it's entirety).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/">
  <kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0">
   <Folder>
    <name>Downloaded caches</name>
    <open>1</open>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="loc/waypoint[last()]"/>
   </Folder>
  </kml>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="waypoint">
  <Placemark xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0">
   <name>
    <xsl:value-of select="name"/>
   </name>
   <description>
    <xsl:value-of select="link"/>
   </description>
   <LookAt>
    <longitude>
     <xsl:value-of select="coord/@lon"/>
    </longitude>
    <latitude>
     <xsl:value-of select="coord/@lat"/>
    </latitude>
    <range>999.9999999999999</range>
    <tilt>0</tilt>
    <heading>0</heading>
   </LookAt>
   <styleUrl>root://styles#default+icon=0x307</styleUrl>
   <Point>
    <coordinates>
     <xsl:value-of select="coord/@lon"/>,<xsl:value-of select="coord/@lat"/>,0</coordinates>
   </Point>
  </Placemark>
  <xsl:apply-templates select="preceding-sibling::waypoint[1]"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

All this does is reverse the list of waypoints, and copy the latitude and longitude from one format to the other. Simple, but effective - you load the result (appropriately named .kml) into Google Earth and you can take a tour of the caches you've downloaded.

My sample was the last 20 caches I've visited. It's a pretty fun sample, as it jumps between California, Washington, Berlin, and Melbourne Australia. (Pathetic though that I've only done 20 caches since last December...) Try it out here, or get the XSLT above here.

Geocaching the Google Earth

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 06:19:07 GMT

I've been flying around the Google Earth for fun. It's not clear to me what the killer app is yet, but it really is pretty cool to visualize spaces and distances, and some of the imagery (like the salt flats in the south bay) is just awesome.

But I also found a cool visualization application. Here's the story:

Almost 2 years ago I dropped a horseshoe in our neighborhood geocache, with a travelbug dogtag. A travelbug is an object that hitches rides with geocachers to move from place to place. This horseshoe, named Hufi, was destined for a cache in Germany. Every few weeks, somebody moves it, logs its progress on the web, and I get a mail notifying me of the event. Pretty cool way to track an object around the globe!

Well, each cache has latitude and longitude coordinates, and Google Earth has markers that can be set by latitude and longitude. So I went through and put the history of Hufi's journey in. Now you can fly along with Hufi as he bounces around California, the UK, and Denmark. Hopefully spiralling in on his final destination in Germany.

Try it out, install Google Earth, and load up this file. Hufi's journey is pretty interesting!

Treasuring the solstice

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 23:52:01 GMT

The extra daylight around the solstice made it possible to pick up a few easy geocaches before the W3C XML Schema User Experience Workshop, and between the workshop and dinner. Even one during a lunchtime walk. Good antidote to whiteboards and LCD glow...

The enclosed shots have nothing to do with the caches, I just snapped them on the way.

First geocache of the season

Sat, 14 May 2005 18:26:14 GMT

Hard to believe that it's been months since I had a spare moment to seek out a geocache. The last ones I logged were in Australia last summer (well, January, which was local summer!). But with an hour to fill before picking up Gen at swim practice last night, my nephew Denali and I spent some time at the Auburn Library Garden Theatre. A very clever cache indeed - in plain sight but camoflaged in such a way that you wouldn't think twice about it unless you were looking for something slightly out of the ordinary. Can't tell more - that would spoil it!

So far I've found 180 caches in California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, North Carolina, Australia, Canada, England, and Thailand. I'm hoping to pick up at least one in a couple weeks when I go to Berlin.

It's nice to see a world-wide activity that depends upon the total kindness of strangers you will likely never meet, to create, publish, and maintain the "game board."