The Garmin "430/530"

 

 

Since their introduction in 1998, the Garmin GNS series GPS/NAV/COM products have been widely accepted, with over 100,000 of them flying the skies today. But 13 years later, the time has come to bid farewell. Due to decreased demand and limited parts availability, we announced this week that Garmin will soon stop accepting orders for new GNS series products and will discontinue the line. The GNS 530W or GPS 500W will be available until November 30, 2011, and the GNS 430W, GNC 420W and GPS 400W are expected to remain available through the first half of 2012. If you currently own a GNS series product, there is no need to worry. Rest assured that Garmin will continue supporting these products with repair services and maintenance software releases for many years to come. Most of all, thank you to all of our customers for your continued support of these products over the past 13 years.

The GNS series is a tough act to follow, but here at Garmin, we challenged ourselves to

come up with something even better – and we’ve done it in the all new GTN series, which will serve as the GNS series replacement for the next decade and beyond. The GTN series represents a significant improvement in features,

 

integration and simplicity. It does everything your GNS series products did, plus a whole lot more! Not only does the GTN serve as the GPS/NAV/COM, but it also is a full-featured MFD with moving map, traffic, terrain, weather information and more. It has a touchscreen graphical user interface for quick and intuitive operation. The graphical flight plan editing feature makes modifying your flight plan a breeze, and loading airways has never been easier. Selectmodels offer remote transponder and remote audio panel integration. And some GTN models have the ability to overlay an electronic approach chart right on the moving map. Plus, right now we’re offering serious savings on the GTN during a limited-time promotion.

 

Documents List API

 

There are a number of ways to add resources to your Google Documents List using the API. Most commonly, clients need to upload an existing resource, rather than create a new, empty one. Legacy clients may be doing this in an inefficient way. In this post, we’ll walk through why using resumable uploads makes your client more efficient.

The resumable upload process allows your client to send small segments of an upload over time, and confirm that each segment arrived intact. This has a number of advantages.

Resumable uploads have a customizable memory footprint on client systems

Since only one small segment of data is sent to the API at a time, clients can store less data in memory as they send data to the API. For example, consider a client uploading a PDF via a regular, non-resumable upload in a single request. The client might follow these steps:

  1. Open file pointer to PDF
  2. Pass file pointer and PDF to client library
  3. Client library starts request
  4. Client library reads 100,000 bytes and immediately sends 100,000 bytes
  5. Client library repeats until all bytes sent
  6. Client library returns response

But that 100,000 bytes isn’t a customizable value in most client libraries. In some environments, with limited memory, applications need to choose a custom chunk size that is either smaller or larger.

The resumable upload mechanism allows for a custom chunk size. That means that if your application only has 500KB of memory available, you can safely choose a chunk size of 256KB.

Resumable uploads are reliable even though a connection may not be

In the previous example, if any of the bytes fail to transmit, this non-resumable upload fails entirely. This often happens in mobile environments with unreliable connections. Uploading 99% of a file, failing, and restarting the entire upload creates a bad user experience. A better user experience is to resume and upload only the remaining 1%.

Resumable uploads support larger files

Traditional non-resumable uploads via HTTP have size limits depending on both the client and server systems. These limits are not applicable to resumable uploads with reasonable chunk sizes, as individual HTTP requests are sent for each chunk of a file. Since the Documents List API now supports file sizes up to 10GB, this is very important.

Resumable upload support is already in the client libraries for Google Data APIs

The Java, Python, Objective-C, and .NET Google Data API client libraries all include a mechanism by which you can initiate a resumable upload session. Examples of uploading a document with resumable upload using the client libraries is detailed in the documentation. Additionally, the new Documents List API Python client library now uses only the resumable upload mechanism. To use that version, make sure to follow these directions.

Google Maps Masups 18


Julien Levesque is a French artist who has created a number of interesting Google Maps experiments.

Street Views Patchwork mixes together three different Street View images to make a new imaginary landscape. Once the page loads – keep watching, as after a few seconds a new imaginary landscape will appear.

Some of these imagined landscapes are truly beautiful. It must have taken Julien an age scouring Street View to find partial Street Views that match so perfectly.

 


Rock Around the World is a Google Map shaped to look like a record. Click on the map and the record spins around and plays Rock Around the Clock. Once you take your mouse off the map the record slows its spin and comes to a stop and the song slows and grinds to a halt.

 


Marker Attack is a simple map that uses the marker animations in the Google Maps API v3 with lettered map markers to attack the world with an avalanche of Google Map markers.

 


Yellow Road places a large number of different Google Maps in a chain. Each map is centred on a different location but each location has been carefully chosen so that it contains a horizontal road across the map. Each road connects with the road in the map to the left and right of it. The result is one long imaginary yellow brick road.