March 10th, 2012 ravi
I’m writing up a more in-depth post about this on my personal blog, but I wanted to give a quick summary of why keys have not been generated and mailed to you.
I run a very, very old version of FreeBSD that is not capable of running a modern compiler. This, in addition to other things, means I’m not capable of compiling the tools that are needed to support the users on my host or this service as a whole.
I currently have a bunch of applications running in memory right now that I cannot start again because I can’t compile a modern version of it.
I’ve overcome the dependencies for this service specifically and with the help of a friend we’ll be scraping through all the key requests and shipping them out to you ASAP.
Posted in Announcement | 1 Comment »
March 10th, 2012 ravi
I wanted to mention that I will be on a SXSW 2012 panel, Sexy Data Solutions for Public Transit Systems, which will be at the AT&T Conference Hotel.
If you’re at SXSW it would be great if you could make it. Hop on the shuttle of take a stroll. The weather should be well cleared up by then!
Posted in Announcement | 2 Comments »
July 19th, 2011 ravi
I haven’t updated the blog in about 6 months mostly because the service is fairly self sufficient. Unfortunately I’m very behind on generating update keys and I know a lot of you have mailed requesting them more than once. I haven’t forgotten about the requests so much as I got in the weeds with respect to free time.
I’ll try my best to get these kicked out soon so more can help make the service better.
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January 29th, 2011 ravi
John Murphy (@murphstahoe) asked for some stats of this service. I’ve been meaning to write something that sifts through the data and I figured others may be interested.
I would have dropped this behind the new WordPress <more> tag, but this theme doesn’t support it. Oh well.
Check out the compiled data.
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September 1st, 2010 ravi
Community! Lindsay Schauer of Twitter write a great blog post about this service for the new Twitter Tales site.
Also as a followup to an editorial update Mark Otto succinctly rephrased my response with “We don’t follow you for personal opinions; we follow you as a community wanting to know how we’re getting to/from work each day.” Well said, Mark!
The service is also approaching the 3 year anniversary and there are 4,490 @caltrain follows, 465 @bikecar, and 534 email keys have bee issued. Quite an accomplishment, I think, for a small grassroots project.
Thank you to everyone who has continued to help make this a valuable service to the community.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
May 11th, 2010 ravi
The new year brought with it a new job, new apartment, and new car. As a result of the former 2 I was completely in the weeds with any projects like this service. Thankfully it runs on its own however being in the weeds meant nearly 100 key requests sat unanswered. Part of the problem was how I input the data to the DB. It was anything but graceful.
A friend of mine has been coaching me to learn Ruby for some very specific reasons (so please don’t tell me I should learn some other language). I took the opportunity to write a script that will speed up the data entry and parsing. After actually successfully doing that I was able to plow through the pending requests.
The new car means I haven’t been taking Caltrain for the last several months. This is in part because I’m no longer within a reasonable biking distance to 4th/King and I would have to either bike from Mountain View or take VTA to my new office. I have a rule that excluding walking I will not take more than 3 modes of transportation to work. That said I need to really need to figure out timing to drive to Millbrae (with or without my bike) and take Caltrain to Mountain View where I either bike or take VTA. but of course Caltrain has been about as reliable as MUNI so I’ve scrapped the whole idea of taking Caltrain all together for the time being. I’d really like to use it again as I’d be gaining at least 1h30m of work time.
Anyhow things are back on track and its a good thing too because Twitter is discontinuing support for basic authentication. That means unless I get moving it will outright break. I better get cracking!
Thanks again to everyone who continues to make the service the success that it is.
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March 2nd, 2010 ravi
It is March already and I am 2 months behind in generating update keys for people. I am very sorry for not getting to it, but I started a new job in early January which has been consuming 97.45% of my time and then in February I thought it would be a great idea to move. Now that I’ve moved in I will spend a little time going through all the emails and generating those keys.
Thank you for your patients.
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December 8th, 2009 ravi
…public transit providers in the U.S. had a similar campaign.
Also I know I’be been slacking off quite a bit with issuing new post keys and I am sorry. I have no excuse other than being very lazy. Perhaps I will do them tomorrow.
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October 22nd, 2009 ravi
Jennifer Van Grove wrote a piece about BART partnering up with a location-based social network site Foursquare. One person tweeted that Caltrain should also embrace the service and a few more shared the feeling. I can’t help but to wonder how this partnership will help Caltrain or Caltrain riders any more than the BART partnership does. Am I missing a bigger picture here? Can someone clue me in, please?
Posted in Commentary | 1 Comment »
September 24th, 2009 ravi
I think I summed up things in my previous post. Unfortunately I was ignored and while I would love to see how the dust settles I fear taking inaction would irreversibly hurt the service and the work I have invested into making it as good as it has become.
Spock said it best with, “[...] the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
That being said I am now doing pre-processing of all updates globally. This will actually only impact a very small subset of the user base (<1%) so many of you won’t even notice. This will be a temporary solution until I can add in a bunch of other features people have been requesting.
Posted in Announcement, Commentary | 2 Comments »