On the road to Mandalay

Computer Life column for October 10, 1998
by
Richard Gordon

Last Saturday, I had a busdriver's nightmare of a day.
One of my bands played at the Delaware Friends of Folk Fall Fling in Hartly; the fiddle player from a former band was getting married in Devon, PA; and I made intermediate stops in Landenberg, PA, and Malvern, PA, to take on and discharge passengers.
One friend has purchased fancy software and hardware for his laptop that lets him plot his route as he's driving it. Two other friends swear by one of the commercial street atlases on CD. But I decided to see how close some of the free Web services would come to plotting my journey.
None of the free services was perfect; in fact, only Mapquest (www.mapquest.com) came up with some of the routes I actually drove. And, all the services were plastered with disclaimers about the accuracy of their directions.
Not even Mapquest could find the exact address I needed in Hartly. In fact, it ended up putting me in a loop just trying to find the town. It would ask me for an address. I'd supply one. Then it would advise me that it couldn't find that address, so just supply a town name. Then it would ask me for an address again.
Mapquest did better on the legs from Malvern to Devon and Devon to Wilmington. The directions were very close to what my friends gave me. And Mapquest's directions for the trip from Landenberg to Malvern were exactly what locals on either end recommended.
Vicinity.com's MapBlast (www.mapblast.com) had some cool features. For example, it was easy to zoom in closer and closer on a map to find things. However, they routed me from Hartly to Landenberg via the toll booths at the Maryland border.
DeLorme's CyberRouter (route.delorme.com) did a nice job of getting me from city to city; however, it didn't do door-to-door directions.
The server for Microsoft's map service (www.expediamaps.com) was too busy to be very helpful. At one point, I found myself downloading information at the rate of 2 bytes per second. When available, its strength was also city to city.
Zip2 (www.zip2.com) had the maddening "feature" of referring to nearly every road by its name, not by its route number. For example, twisting and turning in semi-rural Pennsylvania, Routes 896, 841, and 1 are all clearly marked--but the street names of the same roads are hard to see.
You can go directly to the U.S. Census Bureau's map server (tiger.census.gov) and zoom in on different locations to plot your own route. Because I knew where I was going in Hartly, I could find the exact location--but not the road name. But over a modem, this method saves no time over looking at a paper map.
Switchboard's Maps On Us (www.mapsonus.com) had the coolest user interface of any of the services I tried. It let me register a home address, confirm it on a map, build a route with intermediate stops, then plot my whole trip at once. It even had an option in which it would show me a map of every turn I'd take. However, some of their routing in suburban PA and rural DE was a little, well, unusual.
So, if you are looking for the best free directions to a specific location, the winner is....
Swallow your pride and ask someone who lives there.

Tip of the week

Trust no one.
If someone--even your mom--gives you a disk with information on it, check it for viruses before you use it.
If someone sends you an executable program (e.g., a ".exe" file), a Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Lotus AmiPro document as an e-mail attachment, check it for viruses before you open it.
Don't worry about pictures of your nieces and nephews: most data files (including ".jpg", ".gif", ".bmp", and ".jpeg" files) cannot carry a virus. In fact, Word, Excel, and AmiPro documents are the only types of data files that can be affected by "Macro Viruses."
Don't have anti-virus software? Get it before it's too late. Dr. Solomon's, F-Prot, McAfee, and Norton/Symantec are among the more effective packages.
Visit the University of Delaware's virus resource Web area at www.udel.edu/topics/virus.

Computer Life Index

Richard Gordon helps support faculty, staff and student computing at the University of Delaware. E-mail questions, comments or suggestions to richard@inet.net, or write him at The News Journal, Box 15505, Wilmington, DE 19850. Although each note cannot be answered individually, reader comments and questions will often be incorporated in future columns.