As I previously posted, I went out and bought a GPS unit last weekend. Since then, I've been working on finding or writing some "dashboard" software to run on my laptop for it, since it's really hard to see the 1½" by 3" screen driving down the road.

I just drew the last straw with Microsoft's oh-so-wonderful development suite. That's right, I am not going to use any "Visual" languages ever again, so long as I live.

But now, I'm kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place. There's no software that'll do what I'm looking for, and the languages I've not sworn off aren't really capable of what I'm wanting to do. I was able to read a small chunk from the COM port, using fopen(), passing the name of my port as the filename to open. The problem I'm having, though, is that I can't really parse the NMEA output in realtime with PHP. It's basically impossible.

I'm getting rather frustrated with this coding crap, and I'm really upset that there's no software existing to do what I'm wanting.