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World's Longest Road Trips (with Google Maps)

A thought occurred to me: is it possible to plot the Road to Mandalay with Google Maps? The answer is, currently, no. Google Maps doesn't seem to have road network data for Myanmar, or indeed China, Russia or Central America. But, you can get directions for some surprisingly long road trips. The constraints I've used are that these must be driving routes between cities.

As a comparison for the UK, Lands End to John O' Groats is 850 mi (1,350km) - 14 hours 55 mins

North America

  • Fairbanks, Alaska to Miami, Florida
  • 4,800 miles (7,700km) 3 days, 18 hours
  • New York to San Francisco
  • 2,900 miles (4,700km) 1 day, 22 hours
  • St John's Newfoundland to Tijuana, Mexico
  • 4,200 miles (6,900 km) 3 days

South America:

  • Rio Gallegos, Argentina to Boa Vista, Brazil
  • 4,200 miles 5,100 miles (8,300 km) – 4 days 8 hours
  • Punta Arenas, Chile to Tumbras, Peru
  • 5,150 miles (8,200 km) - 4 days 7 hours

Europe and Asia:

  • Lisbon, Portugal to Chittagong, Bangladesh
  • (via Zagreb to avoid the Brindisi crossing) 
  • 8,000 miles (13,000 km) 7 days
  • Oslo, Norway to Goa, India 
  • 6,500 miles (10,500km) 5 days 20 hours
Africa:
  • Cape Town, South Africa to Tangiers, Morroco
  • 9,000 miles (14,500km) 8 days 17 hours
Australasia:
  • Sydney to Perth
  • 2,500 miles (4000 km) 1 day 23 hours
  • Auckland to Invercargill
  • 1,000 miles (1600 km) 1 day 1 hour
And here's the map:
View World's Longest Road Trips in a larger map

Google Public DNS

Submitted by JMB on Tue 22/Jun/2010

At some point in the last year or so, Internet Service Providers appear to have made a collective decision to brand that crap out of everything they do. In particular, when typing in a domain name most ISPs have an “advanced network error” tool that redirects duff queries to a search interface.

Using Virgin Media as an example, let’s say you wanted to go to http://www.google.com , but inadvertently mistyped the domain as http://www.google.comR

Virgin will provide the following result:

  

Now when you’re getting started on the Internet, this sort of thing might be quite handy. But it can be a bit of pain as well. Virgin are one of the better operators - they provide an easy “opt-out from advanced network error” process; other ISPs may not be so accommodating.

Google offer a  rather nice (free) service that gets rid of the whole issue, namely their Public DNS service:

Google Public DNS is a free, global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider.

To try it out:

  • Configure your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers or
  • Read our configuration instructions.
If you decide to try Google Public DNS, your client programs will perform all DNS lookups using Google Public DNS.

Google claim that this service reduces DNS latency, and it certainly seems a bit faster. Even if it’s only faster for the ten percent of the Internet running on Google’s cloud (blogger, feedburner, youtube, gmail, voice, etc.), that’s still pretty good.

More interestingly, switching away from your ISP DNS servers may also give you a bit of protection from government snooping, for which the UK government tops the charts. On the other hand, it gives even more data to Google.

But if you’re looking for a supply chain for 36 barrels of gunpowder (at four firkins to the barrel, that’s about 15 tonnes TNT equivalent), then it’s something to think about.

The Google Internet Authority ?!

Submitted by JMB on Sat 19/Jun/2010

Short Version: Google seem to be preparing to start up their own SSL Certificate Authority.

I've been using msmtp as an SMTP client on Win32 boxes to hand-off to Gmail for a while with no problems. However, doing a fresh setup on a new machine, I received the following error message when printing server information:

>msmtp -S

msmtp: TLS certificate verification failed: the certificate hasn't got a known issuer

If one interrogates smtp.gmail.com, it seems that Google are no longer using Thawte as their certificate provider; the new certificate issuer is the “Google Internet Authority”.

It all seems legit, and the underlying issuer is Equifax/Geotrust. So pick up the new certificate from your cache, or download it here:

Equifax Secure Certificate Authority (this root is included in all browser's root store)

msmtp users - amend the tls_trust_file directive in msmtprc.txt and way you go!

msmtp --serverinfo --host=smtp.gmail.com --tls=on --port= 587 --tls-certcheck=off

SMTP server at smtp.gmail.com (fk-in-f109.1e100.net [209.85.129.109]), port 587: mx.google.com ESMTP h2sm4781504fkh.55

TLS certificate information:

    Owner:

        Common Name: smtp.gmail.com

        Organization: Google Inc

        Locality: Mountain View

        State or Province: California

        Country: US

    Issuer:

        Common Name: Google Internet Authority

        Organization: Google Inc

        Country: US

    Validity:

        Activation time: Thu Apr 22 21:02:45 2010

        Expiration time: Fri Apr 22 21:12:45 2011

    Fingerprints:

        SHA1: 1A:6F:48:8F:BE:5B:FD:92:D8:12:30:F9:22:CE:84:49:B3:43:BD:2C

        MD5:  60:39:DE:FB:0A:D9:9E:43:26:E7:75:AC:60:48:A1:B0

Capabilities:

    SIZE 35651584:

        Maximum message size is 35651584 bytes = 34.00 MiB

    STARTTLS:

        Support for TLS encryption via the STARTTLS command

    AUTH:

        Supported authentication methods:

        PLAIN LOGIN

 

UPDATE - Some additional details from a correspondent, Ramon Leonardi:

(In particular, this solves the problem of Zend Community server using msmtp, by explicitly stating the msmtp configuration file in php.ini) 

I had a few problems though, even after using your msmtprc.txt sample file. I don’t know if that is a Windows 7 problem only, but msmtp wasn’t working properly.  It took me days to realize the problem was a missing log file. Apparently, msmtp updates – but can’t create – a log file on its own: so I hand created an empty txt file, and renamed it to msmtp.log, and then create a reference to it on my msmtprc.txt file. Before that, every time a tried to send an e-mail, that generated an error on msmtp and stopped the program.

A good way one can test if msmtp is working fine is by sending an echo mail form command prompt:

>echo “this is a test” | msmtp example@test.com -t

The code above works for me without a –from parameter because I’ve set a “from directive” on my msmtprc.txt file. Without that, one should use the complete command:

>echo “this is a test” | msmtp --from=myemail@test.com example@test.com -t

If every this is configured right, msmtp sends the e-mail, returns no message, and updates the log file.

After that I bumped into some integration glitch between msmtp and php. But that was much easier to solve. I have no idea why, but when called by php,msmtp wasn’t loading  msmtprc.txt properly. So, after reading Uniserver’s wiki on msmtp I tried fixing php.ini with the following code:

sendmail_path = "C:/example/msmtp/msmtp.exe --file=C:/Users/example/AppData/Roaming/msmtprc.txt -t"

Reference: http://wiki.uniformserver.com/index.php/5.3-Nano:_msmtp#Gmail

________

My config files

#php.ini – mail section#

[mail function]

; For Win32 only.

;SMTP = localhost

;smtp_port = 25

 

; For Win32 only.

;sendmail_from =

 

; For Unix only.  You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").

;sendmail_path =

 

sendmail_path = "C:/pathtomsmtp/msmtp/msmtp.exe --file=C:/Users/MyUserName/AppData/Roaming/msmtprc.txt -t"

 

; Force the addition of the specified parameters to be passed as extra parameters

; to the sendmail binary. These parameters will always replace the value of

; the 5th parameter to mail(), even in safe mode.

;mail.force_extra_parameters =

 

#msmtp.txt#

 

account server

maildomain gmail.com

logfile C:\pathToWhereIcreatedIt\msmtp.log

host smtp.gmail.com

port 587

auth on

password ****

user example@gmail.com

auto_from off

from example @gmail.com

tls on

tls_trust_file "C:\pathToMsmtp\msmtp\Equifax_Secure_Certificate_Authority.cer"

tls_starttls on

account default: server

 

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