In article ,
HotShot wrote:
Actually, pretty well the whole state is covered for scanner feeds.
check out http://www.mattlogic.com/

It all comes back to me now. I tried

http://www.mattlogic.com/

and remembered that I had found that site some time last Spring, but
unfortunately, the problems of incompatible technology hit big time.

This isn't a personal gripe, but here is what can happen:

I have two browsers that work in text mode in UNIX. There is
one called lynx which is kind of the gold standard for text browsers.
It does just about everything well except javascript which it doesn't
do at all. The other browser is confusingly called "links" which
sounds the same, but obviously is different. The links browser does
do javascript but doesn't seem to be as good at taking a page apart
which is sometimes necessary to make things fit when they don't
normally want to.:-)

The links browser, while having some javascript capabilities,
misses the mark many times on problem sites so it only sometimes makes
a real difference. If I use links to go to mattlogic.com, the browser
sees the first page and kind of goes in to a coma in which all you can
do is shut it down.

If I use lynx, I get a message that says,


FRAME: Header
FRAME: LeftMenu
FRAME: Center

Viewing this page requires a browser capable of displaying frames.

Actually, you can look at frames just fine and select any
links you want on some sites, including this one.
FRAME: LeftMenu is what you want to see the resource selections.

It opens nicely up as follows:


Home
online scanners
chp cad Forums fire weather local weather CA Webcams

California Online Scanning
fcc frequency lookup feed status page Guestbook Get Firefox!

So, I selected online scanners and then Bay Area scanners and read:

BAY AREA ONLINE SCANNERS

SCANNER 1 SFFD & SFPD
SCANNER 2 CDF (Bay Area) & CDF (Sierra's & Northern Ca)
SCANNER 3 Bay Area & Central Valley FD's on VHF 1 & 2
SCANNER 4 CHP
SCANNER 6 Sacramento Trs, ALCO TRS & Livermore TRS

Of these, I selected

SCANNER 1 SFFD & SFPD

That's when things went South. The next page showed what appear to be
trunk IDs


[EMBED]

This is a Uniden 780 Trunking Scanner that I have In the computer Loft
of my home. I live in Livermore CA in Eastern Alameda County.

Right Speaker

Left Speaker


14800 SFFD-A1
14832 SFFD-A2
14864 SFFD-A3
14896 SFFD-A4

and so on. There were no discernible links below this list.

I even dumped the source, not to be evil, but sometimes, one
can build an absolute link (one that actually works) from javascript's
cute way of making relative links which breaks lynx. I didn't find
anything so I don't know how the audio stream gets going.

This is by no means a unique problem to this site. The web
publishing software these days is very proprietary and one has to
really work to make it behave in a generic manner.

Anyway, that's what happened when I tried this site. One
never knows what will happen exactly on any given site because some
sites have plenty of graphics and javascript but are still accessible
because the underlying navigation doesn't require a mouse or doesn't
do whizzbang stuff to assemble the audio feed. You just have to try
it and see.

My thanks to those who set up sites like this since it takes a
lot of work and resources to provide this service. My real
frustration is with Microsoft and other corporate types who dream up
some of this technology with no interest or desire to try to make it
work for all. That leaves the web designers having to do lots of
extra work which is unfair to them, so nobody should take these
observations as a flame or put-down. It is simply a description of
what happened.
--

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Information Technology Division Network Operations Group