Brian Toth dot com

I thoroughly enjoyed tonight’s episode of SciFi’s new show “Eureka“. It’s funny, has all kinds of crazy scientists, a bunch of neat gadgets, etc. Definitely Tivo worthy.

The downside? After it ends, wrestling comes on! Why, why, why is there wrestling on the SciFi channel? I especially can’t stand all the yelling when wrestling shows come on, it’s very disturbing when you’re not expecting it. Much like those ultra-annoying car dealership commercials on the radio, right after you just listened to an enjoyable song. (I haven’t actually listened to FM radio for a few years now and I don’t miss it.) I couldn’t reach the remote fast enough.

Perhaps I should write to SciFi and remind them they’re a science fiction channel and that, while wrestling may consist of a bunch of bad acting (like most of the movies on the SciFi channel), it has no place in their lineup. Before you know it, there’ll be wrestling on HGTV.

Version 2.5.2 of the Google Maps (and Earth) plugins include the changes I wrote about last time and a couple semi-related issues as well. This is probably worth checking out if you’ve had issues with accented characters or were looking for better support for Google Earth and Japanese addresses.

Something I plan to take a closer look at are addresses with ranges of numbers in them, such as “200-300 Some Street”, etc. Google doesn’t handle these ranges but works fine if you remove one of them.

Right now, however, it’s time for Stargate. You can download the update here.

One silly little change to the URLs passed to Google has solved my previous character encoding dilemma. Thanks to those that sent me the tip of passing “&ie=utf8″ along with the URLs. I had noticed this before, as well as the variables that tell Google which localization to use, but never gave it much thought. =) (Google Maps generates these variables when you click on “Link to this page” for a particular map.)

I had always encoded my URLs as UTF-8 up until version 2.5 of the plugins. When I added support for Google Earth, I was running into issues with accented and Japanese characters not being parsed properly when telling Google Maps to output a Google Earth KML file. After experimenting, I found that ISO Latin 1 worked for all the European addresses but, of course, not the Japanese characters. So I had to implement some special handling for troublesome addresses. Turns out that, even though I’m not having any issues, some users are experiencing problems with certain characters, especially umlauts, which is probably a result of the change in character encodings.

After adding the UTF-8 variable to the URL, I’ve found my previous Google Earth work-arounds are no longer necessary. Japanese addresses are now found correctly and Google Earth does it’s little “fly-to” animation. And I can go back to using UTF-8 for all URLs.

Hopefully in the next day or two I’ll get an update together. I’m going to go through some more testing and look back through some old emails that mentioned issues with the previous version, to see if anything has been resolved with these changes.