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.
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?