Wow man, that's great news. I'll give the modified HJ a try tomorrow.

As usual, I've got something I was wondering about: My GPS receiver (a simple GPS mouse) stopped working a few days ago (I've already gotten a replacement). It was permanently connected to the empeg's serial port. So maybe it quit working because the empeg was sending some 'weird' data to the GPS-Receiver (at least from the point of view of the receiver ;-). Is it a problem that the receiver always sends data simultaneously while the empeg sends data? Or could it be that the output from the player re-programmed the GPS-receiver's bios (or whatever)? Should I only connect the GPS-receiver if I have gpsapp running?

The kernel does send out some messages during bootup, if you don't have car_serial_rate and notify, the player shouldn't be sending anything. However I don't think either of these would 'reprogram' a receiver.
The used protocols typically use non-ascii characters and checksums to avoid such things from happening. How is that receiver powered? I might be a power spike, 12V in a car isn't really regulated, so it can be anywhere between 9 and 16, (or even worse? maybe I should add a diode to protect my gps from negative voltages).

The receiver runs at 5 Volts. I'm using a simple fixed voltage regulator. It's buffered with a high capacity cap and sufficiently cooled. I don't think that's the problem, do you?

Incidentally, the python script gets really pissy if your web browser plays with the web page at all when writing it out. Both saving page as .txt and .html in Mozilla write out something useless; When I use wget, it's fine.

I use mozilla myself and use 'save link target as html'. But yeah, the python parser isn't that pretty and easily gives up when the input doesn't really match the couple of routes I tried. There are 2 html options, for one of them mozilla also grabs the images and rewrites the html output, my guess is that the rewrite breaks the parsing.
In a way the mapsonus routes should be a temporary solution as I want to get on-line routing in gpsapp at some point.
btw. fixed the Trimble TSIP protocol, turned out to be that the ARM uses a slightly different layout for double precision floating point numbers. v0.8 has just that one little change.

With a regulator in between, receiver damage due to power spikes is unlikely. I do find it hard to believe that ascii text written to the serial port could cause permanent damage to your receiver. Perhaps the company provides a flash upgrade or windows drivers so that if something like this happens again you can simply reflash it.

In a way the mapsonus routes should be a temporary solution as I want to get on-line routing in gpsapp at some point.

Agree. I contemplated writing it in perl for about 30 seconds, then figured there were more permanent improvements that could be done (not that any of them are now done.)

What about empeg's serial port? Maybe there are power spikes or even negative voltages at the moment I power on the empeg?

The serial port is supposed to use -12v and 12v signal levels and the inputs typically have pretty high impedance, I don't think you can kill a serial input line, except when you go crazy with the voltages (25V and over..) Haven't looked it up or anything, I guess a max233 datasheet could give a 'reasonable ballpark figure'.