November 21st, 2008 ravi
Some of you may have noticed some tweets were eaten up by the /dev/null monster. Earlier in the week Twitter was having DB maintenance and today I manged to DOS myself with a daemon to monitor for portscans. I’m not certain what exactly happened other than new connections were dropped.
In related news I am upgrading my server and have been slowly configuring things to use FreeBSD’s jails. I’m not a sysadmin (anymore) by trade so I’m having to learn how this works. Quite frankly its quite cool, but it requires thinking differently about where I run certain services. Bottom line is I hope that when I finally do swing over the IPs from the current to new server that services just work. I’m doing my best to run everything in parallel and testing as best I can, but I’m sure I’ll f something up. That said please bear with me if you notice things not quite how they should be.
Posted in Announcement | 1 Comment »
October 30th, 2008 ravi
Caltrain wins.
KCRA reported at 5:59PDT a incident with a truck and 12m later the @caltrain feed warmed up to a steady stream of updates about track status, train routing, and departures. While at first I regretted enabling SMS updates for @caltrain because of it waking me up early and keeping me up, I was able to make alternative plans and ended up carpooling with a friend.
I thought it was amusing to read on a list I am on at 7:52PDT
At 4th/King and there are a hundred or so people waiting for multiple
trains. No info on what’s up.
Only to be followed up 8 minutes later with
The CalTrain Twitter feed says there’s a train v. truck in San Mateo,
initially at 9th, finally stopped at 5th. http://twitter.com/caltrain
I don’t know about you but does anyone else think it is strange that at a Caltrain terminal this person didn’t know what was going on? It would be one thing if it were a unstaffed station, but it is unfortunate it was not clear to what was going on at 4th/King.
I would like to thank everyone again who updaes to make the feed useful to many.
Posted in @caltrain, Commentary, Fail | No Comments »
October 3rd, 2008 ravi
I wanted to note how neat it was to see what looked like 8 cyclists waiting at the second car location at Palo Alto this evening after I updated with the status from Mountain View. Even when I don’t bring my bike on bord I will update whenever possible, and it was great to see the results right away.
Posted in @bikecar, Commentary | No Comments »
September 8th, 2008 ravi
So one benefit to saving all of your Tweets is generating statistics for trains and their configurations over time. This data may be useful, for example, for demonstrating to Caltrain that they are not consistently sending high capacity trains during peak times.
While there were only a few tweets that were unrecognizable by my parser everyone should take a look at the Updating Guide for formatting suggestions. I’m currently matching on /(1|one)|(2|two)/i and /(old|gallery)|(new|bombardier)/i so as long as you have that in there we should be good.
One problem I ran into is graphing the data in a meaningful way. I looked at gnuplot, but damn if I could figure it out. Granted I spent 5 minutes looking at it, but if I couldn’t get it to work in that time I didn’t want to waste any more on it since I wasn’t sure if anyone would even get value from it. I took a look at Excel and it kinda did what I wanted, but I use Excel about once a year and I just create trivial sheets.
So here is what I am hoping someone can help me with — graphing this damn data. Right now I have a list in the following format, but I can save it in pretty much any way.
{DATE} {TRAIN} {NUMBER OF SLOTS}
The X axis would be DATE, Y would be NUMBER OF SLOTS, and each TRAIN would be a separate series.
Any help?
Posted in @bikecar | 6 Comments »
August 20th, 2008 ravi
A lot of chatter on Caltrain today starting with a inquiry of a fatality at San Bruno. While it was not a fatality it did cause delays on the system which was communicated with diligence and discretion. Many thanks to everyone who provided a steady stream of updates which almost certainly help us plan our commute home.
I think I will file this under WIN for the service.
Posted in Misc | No Comments »
August 13th, 2008 ravi
I am now tacking the received time by my server to the update sent to Twitter so people can have a frame of reference of when the update was actually made. This will help account for any network (net or mobile) delays and for the iPhone which does not let you get a time stamp for each SMS, but only what it considers a conversation. It will look like (emphasis added):
Caltrain 365 very slow/10 min late before milbrae T17:05
In other news it looks like I may be able to easly configure things so that you can send a direct message to either of the Twitter accounts and have them be used as the update. This means you will be able to SMS ‘d account update‘ to the Twitter SMS short code 40404. This ability is currently being used by a small group of people to help me iron out any bugs.
I’ll update as things roll out.
Posted in Misc | 1 Comment »
August 11th, 2008 ravi
I was contacted by Tamara Barak Aparton of The San Francisco Examiner yesterday afternoon about a piece she was writing about BART and Twitter. She came across the Caltrain feeds I setup and wanted to know more. Sadly I wasn’t able to get back to her before her deadline although there is mention in the article and URLs are provided.
Check out the article.
Posted in Misc | 2 Comments »
August 8th, 2008 ravi
Fritz over at Cycleicious wrote a blog post listing the steps to get setup with Twitter and using this service. Inspired by this I adapted his guide and created one here.
It can be found at http://cow.org/c/getting-started (or http://cow.org/r/?3ce5 if the url must be short).
Posted in Announcement, Tutorial | 1 Comment »
August 5th, 2008 ravi
I brought my bicycle on the train today because the valet at Warm Planet Bikes was overfilled to where bicycles were in the storeroom floor. I was going in late enough that I knew I wouldn’t be bumped going to work, but the commute home I was worried about since there is no patten for train configuration. I made it on the 6:46 out of MV and was reminded how frustrating it is to rack up quickly when there is a large queue waiting to get in.
This process reminded me of the daily commute before the valet and I had always thought while a FIFO queue was the more fair there would be some benefit if people were to board in a FILO. If we were to know how many slots were available (conductors helped out by doing more than telling us to hurry up) bicyclists could quickly board accordingly. Maybe this just adds more work and confusion, but in my perfect world it wouldnt. Then again in my perfect world there would be enough room for all bicycles all the time.
Posted in Commentary | No Comments »
August 5th, 2008 ravi
The SFBC Bulletin had the following which you wil find important if you take your bicycle on Caltrain:
Don’t let Caltrain’s Bike Master Plan leave you behind — speak up now! This week Caltrain staff will be updating its board of directors on their Draft Bicycle Master Plan, which looks at beefing up bike parking at 10 of its most-popular stations, but doesn’t do anything to add (or even maintain) bike space on trains, now or in the future.
If you care about “bikes on board”, please attend the Caltrain Joint Powers Board meeting this Thursday (8/7/08, 10:00 am, 1250 San Carlos Ave., San Carlos, a four-minute walk from the train station). We need a strong show of support to get bikes on board included in the Bike Master Plan, and we need to make sure the Caltrain board (the folks who make the big decisions) really understands this service and hears from the people who use it. We have a group of speakers lined up to make public comment, and we need you in the audience with your bicycle helmet in hand. Can’t make the meeting? Write to your mayor about this important transit service. For more information, and to download a template and mayors’ addresses, see our Bikes ONBoard page.
What is particularly interesting is the plan release has been pushed BACK to AFTER the meeting. It is unclear if the board meeting will also be pushed back, but I have not seen anything yet to indicate as such. I’ve emailed the SFBC about this as well in hopes they can get to the bottom of things.
Posted in Commentary | No Comments »