Author: Iron

ChatGPT, GPS, and Black Walnut Cake

Iron

Recently I decided to give ChatGPT a try. I created an account and logged in and ask ChatGPT to help me write some python code. I asked, “can you help me write some python code?” And it (“it”? see, it needs a better name. What about “Chatty-G”?) was polite and said it could help. Since we process map package areas for our OnScene Xplorer 4.0 customers, I asked if it could write me a popup window to select a package to process. We use folders to hold the packages, so I asked to select a folder. It created some python code and explained what it did. And it worked well. I also ask several times to make some modification, which it did….and again, it explained what it did.

What surprised me about ChatGPT was the conversational method of communication. I asked, “make me a popup window” and then entered “can you make the popup bigger?” Which of course it did. Add “Select Package Area” in the stripe.

I can say this with confidence….this is huge, it’s a game changer, just most people haven’t realized it yet. ChatGPT is in the news a lot lately, but when you think it through, you realize it’s bigger than you can imagine.

This reminded me of another event where most people didn’t understand the implications. It was when “Selective Availability” was turned off the Global Positioning System (GPS). OK, maybe you’re not a map geek and don’t recall this. I was on travel for MapQuest.com sitting in a hotel room when on the news it was reported that President Bill Clinton turned off “selective availability” in May 2000. “Selective Availability” was the intentional degradation of GPS accuracy, so it was only useful to our military.

It was a huge moment, with gigantic implications, and no one near me really understood it. I was so excited I called another colleague so we could share the excitement between those who understood just what this meant for the world. I knew at that moment that things like in-car nav would now be possible. Tracking stuff would be possible. And that the sky was the limit. Now think about it…..how does an accurate GPS signal improve your life? Do you even carry printed maps when you travel? Nah, your position is very accurate on your mobile device, and you just use the device to navigate. So now you understand, turning off “Select Availability” in May 2000 was a momentous event for the world. I got the same feeling when I tried out ChatGPT.

Now what does this have to do with Black Walnut Cake? My mom just turned 90 years old, and her favorite cake is Black Walnut Cake. So, while I was kicking the ChatGPT tires, I opened a new conversation and said, ” I need a black walnut cake recipe” and Chef GPT gave me a recipe with ingredients and instructions to bake the cake. It gave me some tips on baking 8-inch round pans versus a 9×13 inch cake pan. The instructions were very easy to understand, so I asked, “can you recommend icing for the cake?” It replied with four different options and explained the differences between them. Wow, it was so nice and polite, and helpful. You know, like real customer service!

Yes, I pushed myself back from my desk and said out loud to no one but me,” the game has changed..“

I guess it would be rude to talk about the Black Walnut Cake recipe without giving it to you, so here it is:

Ingredients:
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup butter, room temperature
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 cup black walnuts, finely chopped
Instructions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease and flour a 9×9 inch baking pan.
  2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
  3. In a separate large mixing bowl, beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
  4. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then mix in the vanilla extract.
  5. Gradually mix in the dry ingredients, alternating with the milk, until just combined.
  6. Fold in the chopped black walnuts.
  7. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.
  8. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
  9. Allow the cake to cool completely before slicing and serving.
     

And of course, here is Chef GPT’s reply to my question about the icing:

There are many different icings that would complement a black walnut cake, but here are a few popular options:

  1. Cream Cheese Frosting: This is a classic pairing for black walnut cake. Mix together 8 oz of cream cheese, 1/2 cup of butter, 2 cups of powdered sugar, and 1 tsp of vanilla extract. Spread the frosting over the cooled cake.
  2. Buttercream Frosting: This is another popular choice for black walnut cake. Mix together 1 cup of butter, 4 cups of powdered sugar, 1 tsp of vanilla extract, and 2-4 tablespoons of milk. Spread the frosting over the cooled cake.
  3. Maple Frosting: For a unique twist on a classic recipe, try a maple frosting. Mix together 1/2 cup of butter, 1/4 cup of maple syrup, 2 cups of powdered sugar, and 1 tsp of vanilla extract. Spread the frosting over the cooled cake.
  4. Caramel Frosting: Caramel frosting pairs perfectly with black walnut cake. Mix together 1/2 cup of butter, 1/2 cup of brown sugar, 1/4 cup of heavy cream, and 2 cups of powdered sugar. Spread the frosting over the cooled cake.

Ultimately, the icing you choose will depend on your personal taste and the occasion. It’s always a good idea to taste the frosting before you put it on the cake.

OSX4 Replaces OSX3, OSX3 Retires March 2024

Iron

With the release of OnScene Xplorer 4.0 for Windows PC and iOS, Iron Compass announces that OnScene Xplorer 3.x and the automatic software and mapping data updates for 3.x will end on March 1, 2024. This will give our current customers ample time to transition to OnScene Xplorer 4.0.

OnScene Xplorer 4.0 features all new mapping data structures with automatic synchronization between devices and includes out of the box support for assets tracking. The new 4.0 features improved automatic base mapping updates and modern automatic software updates from the Microsoft Store and the Apple App Store.

OnScene Xplorer 4.0 includes tools to import Facility preplans, Map Markers, and Hydrants from OnScene Xplorer 3.x. As customers transition into OnScene Xplorer 4.0, customers using Dispatch Monitor will have the Dispatch Monitor transition to 4.0 as well.

Customers current in maintenance or with their subscription have access to Iron Compass’s tech support to ensure a smooth transition to OnScene Xplorer 4.0.

Is 40% Cell Service OK for Responders?

Iron

After Hurricane Ida made landfall, the dispatch center in New Orleans reported problems with receiving calls and even told residents to walk to the closest fire station. Also reported were issues with cell service in Louisiana and Mississippi. AT&T reported 60% of it’s cellular service was working as normal. So, that means 40% was NOT working (go ahead, read that again). It does make one wonder, if your in-vehicle mapping and pre-incident planning app is internet based, and you need a cell connection for your app, is 60% coverage acceptable to you?

Here’s the article about the dispatch issues and cell service as reported by The Washington Post.

T-Mobile reported that 70% of its service was operating as normal in Louisiana and Mississippi. Sure we can assume the carriers worked hard to restore service. But emergency responders need their mapping as the event happens….when the call volumes are the highest.

OnScene Xplorer has always been design and used by our customers with all the mapping data local on the device. OnScene Xplorer 3.x and the coming OnScene Xplorer 4.0 use advanced data techniques to ensure you’re able to find your way, even when your cell service is knocked-out and the internet is unavailable on your device.

OSX 4.0 Asset Tracking in Place

Iron

Progress on OnScene Xplorer 4.0 is going very well. The work items list is shrinking and we’re getting down to a few remaining chunks of functionality.

Recently we added the asset tracking functionality. This support will be built-in to OSX4. Users will simply need to check a box and add a name of the unit to enable tracking.

While in-route to calls, all units in the department can be visible on the map display and aid incident commands to deploy the response. Now that we are tracking our beta units, we start to add in features we have on OSX3, like pausing the reporting of positions while the unit is in the station or on-scene.

Once OSX4 is released, we plan to add functionality to enable a department to share their asset locations with other departments. Cooperation like this enhances the situational awareness of all units responding to an incident.

The current OSX3’s functionality is named “Asset Tracker.” We’re not sure if OSX4 will need a separate product name for asset tracking. It will just be part of the core OnScene Xplorer 4.0.

What’s in a Name? Code Signing Certs

Iron

Our development of OnScene Xplorer 4.0 is going very well. So it is time to get a code signing cert (certificate) so users would not have to deal with that annoying popup in Windows asking if you trust to run the app.

Getting a cert is pretty straight forward: fill out a form, pay some money, provide some documentation to prove you are who you say you are, and they give you the cert. Simple, right?

We provided some docs from the Commonwealth of PA which shows our name and address. For the record, our registered name is “Iron Compass Map Company.” The cert authorities also want some additional documentation, for example, a utility bill. So we provided them with a bill from our internet service provider. The reply? We’re sorry, but this doesn’t have the full company name. You see, our ISP seems to only have 18 characters in the billing name, so our bill has “IRON COMPASS MAP C.”

We sent them a vehicle registration from the state, which has our full name, but that didn’t count. OK, so legal documents or records from our state government do not count. I guess they don’t trust the government. Then we got another reply:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for writing us.   Could you please confirm us shall we use the company name as ironcompass.com which is listing in zoominfo.com or do you wish to have Iron Compass Map Company.

Awaiting for your response !!

The lesson? Besides their English being a little suspect, they trust ZoomInfo.com more than the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

OK, so we start looking at the bills from our vendors and guess what? All of our vendors either use some variation of our name (Iron Compass Map Co., Iron Compass Map, etc), or they use our mailing PO Box. Oh yes, cert company needs to have the registered address on the bill. The PO Box doesn’t count. Yes, as you would assume, we have our mail send to our PO Box. See, that is why we have a PO Box. Crazy, right? So, they wait.

Please provide us the comcast bill document document with the full company name Iron Compass Map Company, so that we will proceed further 

Wait a minute! We have a virtual phone system that bills annually…maybe they have our full name. Hey, they do. But it has our PO Box and not the registered address. But, in the last few emails, it seems like they are looking at the name separate from the address. Perhaps that will do? OK, Log in…bill history (Feb 2019), print, and email..

I think we have worn them down because they accepted the name with the PO Box address and are moving to the final item. Just thinking, if we were a fake company, wouldn’t we just fake some utility bills too? Only a legitimate company would do this whole back and forth to get a cert. Right?

After all this back and forth, they only need to verify our phone number by giving us a call and provide a code, which we then type into a web form.

Voila! Congratulation IRON COMPASS MAP C…… Iron Compass Map Co…..Iron Compass Map Company, you now have a code signing certificate. Yay!

You’ve seen it: The Hamburger!

Iron

We came across this interesting article about the origins of the “hamburger menu” icon. Since our new OnScene Xplorer 4.0 mapping and pre-incident planning software will have a hamburger icon, we thought you’d like to know where it came from.

Of course the whole time we were reading this we thought of Wimpy from Popeye: “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

Read:

An oral history of the hamburger icon (from the people who were there)

OSX 4.0, Under Construction

Iron

When you are building anything new, the product can look a little messy while you’re in the middle of the construction zone. Think about when a new home being built. Some people go into the construction site and it’s just chaos. But, other people can go into the home under construction and visualize what it will look like when it is finished. They can “see” the cherry cabinets in the kitchen with the granite counter tops. They can “see” the family room with the built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace….while none of it has been built.

Software development is really no different. There is the vision for the app before work beings. The app has to be designed how people work, not the easiest route to getting it done. It need to be simple to use while making difficult tasks easy. And much like a home, some of the “simpler” elements are much harder than you think to build, while some of the fancy items may actually be easy to include. But the real fun is having the vision and then seeing it through to completion, and then having the customers’ “see”the beauty of the product.

So how does the construction start for OnScene Xplorer 4.0? The design for the all new OSX 4.0 started with the release of the first version of On-Scene Xplorer 1.0 back in 2004. Yup, On-Scene Xplorer just had it’s 15th anniversary on April 14th. Of course things were different back then, but we have learned a lot over the years and the new version of OnScene Xplorer 4.0 will be the fruit of the knowledge gained.

Although a lot of the design of the new app is under the hood, much like an HVAC system of a new home, at some point you want to see the architectural drawings. Same for 4.0. We started with paper and pen and a bunch of sketches. Here is a snippet of the main interface:

OnScene Xplorer 4.0 User Interface on paper

With a road map in place for the under the hood stuff and a layout for the user interface, the software developers are now at work. The back-end work often is filled with trial and error as new methods to handle data and moving data around are investigated, worked with, refined, and implemented. Just like how HVAC techs fully appreciate a new system in a home under construction much more then the home buyer, it’s like that for software. Developers can look at code and make comments like, “it’s very elegant in its implementation.” For the rest of us? We want to see the granite counters.

OnScene Xplorer 4.0 is still early in development, but progress is being made. Here are a couple of screen shots of the “home” being built. Of course, there is more to come…

Plans for the new OnScene Xplorer 4.0 using fluent design
Address searching is getting an overhaul in OnScene Xplorer 4.0; many changes will be made and feedback from users gotten before it’s finalized.

Oh, and you may have noticed something above that changed when OnScene Xplorer 3.0 was released in 2011, it’s the “-“. Yes, it was a subtle change in the name of the product from “On-Scene Xplorer” to “OnScene Xplorer.” Our baby is growing up.

Round Earth, Flat Map

Iron

Map projections; it’s always a fun topic…if you are a map geek like us. When you make a map, you have to project from a round earth to a flat piece of paper or a screen. Projections are mathematical formulas to take lat/long values and project into a new coordinate system, like feet or meters. I know this stuff is a real yarner. But from our side of the app, it’s a big deal.

When we first developed OnScene Xplorer we used a “localized” projection. The “State Plane” projection was used and localized for each area. There is a “Pennsylvania North State Plane”, and a “Pennsylvania South State Plane” and so on. When we wanted to create a new data set, for example in Camden County, NJ, we had to process the data for the New Jersey flavor of State Plane. As you can imagine, as we brought on more customers, this became a big task and it became difficult to manage the base county datasets in Esri Shapefile format.

When we designed OnScene Xplorer 3.0 we decided to store all of the mapping data in once seamless dataset in a very robust database engine. So we have to move everything to a single map projection before loading into the database. We choose the “World Mercator” projection as it would suite well for any location we mapped. We re-projected and uploaded the mapping data into our master database. From that point forward we could have many people editing our one master database at the same time. No tripping over each other!

But as fate would have it, the web mapping industry gravitated over time to a new map projection created by Google Maps. The “Web Mercator Auxiliary Sphere” is now accepted as the standard. So if any app wants to take advantage of services, like satellite imagery, to include in their app, it’s best to use the “Web Mercator” projection.

For OnScene Xplorer 4.0 we will be using the “Web Mercator” projection. So do we have to re-project our master database? Nah, the tools we use to deliver data to OSX 4.0 will re-project the data on-the-fly. Therefore, with an available internet connection, users will be able to view satellite imagery or other web available layers without the performance penalty of re-projecting the data on the users’ devices.

Isn’t technology great? When we first built OSX, most of today’s tech was just a vision. We live in great times, well at least for map geeks like us.

Click here to learn more about map projections

Major Goal is to keep data local

Iron

The design goals for OnScene Xplorer 4.0 remain largely the same as the first version: easy to use emergency responder software with all data local on the device to ensure availability.

Since we released OSX 1 in spring of 2003, one of our goals was to have the data local on the device that responders are using. Back then, mobile computers either didn’t have an internet connection, or the connection really didn’t support mapping. OSX used Esri’s Shapefiles for the mapping data and Microsoft Access to store tabular data like preplans.

The downside of OSX 1x and 2x data storage was that updates had to be snail mailed to users on CD-ROMs. Then the users had to often copy the update to a USB drive to move to the computer to apply the update.

When we release OSX 3.x in the fall of 2011, the entire software was essentially new. We left behind the Shapefiles and moved all the mapping and tabular data into Microsoft SQL Server’s Express edition. This gave us some horsepower to play with. And, we had engineered a system that allowed us to make updates to the underlying mapping data and push only those changes to our users. Therefore, if a new development was built, we could add it to our master database and post a small update file to our server. The users never had to do anything to get the update. OSX would check for updates, download the updates and apply it locally on the users’ computers.

We also did this with the OSX software too. When a user exits OSX, it checks the “mother ship” and if there is a software update, it downloads it and installs the update. Finally we didn’t have to mail CD-ROMs with updates for mapping data or software to users.

OSX 4.0 will follow a similar model, but with some significant improvements. Since internet bandwidth can accommodate much larger files, we can package all of the base mapping data into a map package with a vector tile cache. This will make the map display very fast and responsive. The packages are relatively small and will be downloaded as one complete file. As we update the base maps at Iron Compass, we’ll make another package and OSX will download it automatically.

Another big change will be the move to SQLite as the local storage database for preplans, map markers, hydrants, documents, and other user data. There are some very cool tools that will allow SQLite to sync between computers in a department. This will come built-in to OSX 4.0, something we know our users will like.

Lastly, we want to enable our users to “share” their local data, like hydrants, with neighboring users. This features, when ready, allows a department to focus on it’s first due while getting the latest updates from mutual aid departments nearby,

Planning for OSX 4.0

Iron

The planning for OnScene Xplorer 4.0 has already begun. Actually, it has been on our minds for some time. We have learned a lot since releasing OnScene Xplorer 3.0 back in 2011. And a lot has changed in the world of technology too. Customers now have a range of devices to choose from like Android tablets, iPads, and Windows 10 laptops and tablets.

The component technologies that software companies use to develop apps has changed a lot too. It is much “easier” today to build apps that sync data and can be deployed onto different devices.

We actually chuckle to ourselves a little over today’s “fluent design” for apps, and realize the OSX released in 2003 looks very much like “fluent design”

We plan to post our progress here as OSX 4.0 design evolves and development progresses.