This customer owns a small twelve vehicle ambulance service in a rural town here in Arizona. He has purchased GPS-enabled cell phones for each of the units (1 - iPhone on AT&T, 1 - Google G1 plus a few Blackberries on T-Mobile and the remaining are Blackberries still on Sprint). The idea is, when an emergency call comes in he would like to display a Google map to the dispatcher showing the location of the emergency and all of the in-service, non-dispatched ambulances so it will be easy for her to see where each unit is and to be able to dispatch the closest one. Currently she has to make a radio call and have each unit respond with their location and then in her head figure out which one to dispatch. The owner and I are both aware of the commercial products that do exactly this but the cost of getting one of these is prohibitive. The thought was if there was some way to have the cell phones in the units respond to us when we needed the units location we could use them plus Google maps to get the functionality he needs without a significant starting cost. I know this is possible as there are services available to keep track of where your kids are based on their cell phone GPS. I'm doing this project pro-bono as a service to this community as they have been hit hard by the down turn in the economy. If anyone knows how we might be able to get the phones to report back their location when we "ping" or somehow let them know we need the unit's location, or can point us to information how we can do this, we would really appreciate the help. Thanks, Gregg

I have a customer who has a fleet of service vehicles that he sometimes need to know the location of. While there are a number of products that will allow him to do this it price is so hight that he can not afford any of them. He has provided each service person with a GPS enabled Blackberry cell phone and we would like to use the cells phones to provide the locations of the service trucks. Does anyone know how get a cell phone to report its position by activating the GPS from a remote application? Thanks for any ideas, Gregg

The two other things I would add to the code, code, code... 1) take classes from the smartest people you can find and 2) the look at and analyze every piece of code you can get you hands on until you understand what it is doing, why it does it this way and if there was a better way to have done it based on the training and analysis you've been doing or is this the best, simplest and cleanest way of doing what the code is intended to do? I've found over the 30 or so years I've been programming that there is always someone else smarter that I am that if I'm really as smart as I think I am, that I do everything I can to learn from both their successes and failures.