3.14.1 fixes for 2010-12-22 changes

[Steve8x8]

Happy New Year to everyone!

As you may have noticed, gc.com made some major changes to their
search pages only a few days before Christmas.
- Distances/directions to caches are represented by images - there's
no clear text anymore.
- The same holds for difficulty and terrain rating, and the cache
size.
- Trackables are represented in a different way.
It took a while to get GeoToad's basic functionality back - distances
still don't work though until someone comes up with a clever idea.
Until 3.14.2 is released, you can get a working GeoToad from SVN trunk
(revision 799 or later); in the Download area, there's also a .deb
package (for Debian and Ubuntu) that contains the latest fixes.
Please test, and make GeoToad ready for the next release!

Cheers,
S.

[Steve8x8]

Although GeoToad 3.14.1, by another set of changes to the
geocaching.com website, had been obsoleted a while ago, we noticed
ever-increasing download counts.

Unfortunately, it took some more time to get a stable new release out
of the door, but finally here it is: 3.14.3.
There are 4 files right now:
- a Windows executable (zip packed)
- a MacOS executable (dmg)
- a Debian/Ubuntu package (deb)
- a source archive (tar.gz)

We've seen a bunch of incompatibilities between Ruby versions 1.8 and
1.9, and hopefully have caught and fixed the majority of them.

GroundSpeak, some weeks ago, has announced to work on constantly
improving their website, therefore we may expect some more surprises.
There are a few things which do *no longer work* as before, which may
affect you:
- Filtering of search results for difficulty, terrain, or container
size:
Since these 3 values are encoded into an image now, and the encoding
key changes at least once per day, pre-filtering based on them is no
longer possible.
This will result in a larger number of individual cache descriptions
to be downloaded - only they now contain parsable information that can
be used for filtering.
- Distance and direction:
Distance and direction, from your center of search to the cache, are
also encoded into an image.
This encoding is not well understood yet; at least, it apparently
does not change (frequently).
Perhaps, in the near future, we will see not only ">E" but finer-
grained degrees?

Of course, there are also good things:
- Some more output formats
* gpx-gsak and gpx-wpts, to feed caches and additional waypoints
separately into GSAK
* gclist and gcvisits, to built geocache_visits.txt files for Garmin
devices.
- Several small fixes and adjustments
- It works!


We're working on a couple of other issues which might be nice-to-have:
- "Young" caches (and approaching events) to be refreshed more
frequently - so one cat get hold of latest changes to cache
descriptions and early finders' logs.
- An option to "freeze" the set of cache descriptions on disk - to
keep results consistent if you need more than one output format (e.g.
GSAK users), and to make regression tests easier.
- More levels of debugging verbosity.


If you happen to run into problems - please check the following page
first:
http://code.google.com/p/geotoad/source/list
- if the latest revision isn't 826 anymore, your problem may have been
addressed yet!

You can always get a GeoToad version that is closer to working, from
SVN trunk (see "Checkout").

Please see the "ReportingBugs" wiki page before, ummm, reporting bugs.


Thanks for your attention, patience, and contributions!

S.