I broke the service last night while adding the improvements for official update prefixing. It was a case of not declaring the variable that contains the update in the right place when I moved everything around. I suppose I could fix this from happening in the future by just not using strict! Heh.
I apologize if this jammed up aynone.
I’m fired.
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.
The last 4 commuting periods where Caltrain has had significant delays I either was carpooling with a co-worker or working from home. Today is no exception — I have a cold or something. Never the less everyone who has been participating in the updating has been doing a fantastic job and today was no exception. I woke up to see 12 new SMS on my phone all telling a part of a sad Caltrain story.
For those of you playing at home (or on the train as it were) it appears there was a broken rail near Morgan Hill and SB #324 had engine trouble and had to be combined with SB #230.
Twitter was overloaded this morning and three tweets were lost to a 500 read timeout. They were (GMT -5):
Fri Jun 27 11:39:02 2008:24834: Tweet: ‘230 old 1car: 332 new 1 car’
Fri Jun 27 11:52:06 2008:25590: Tweet: ‘NB329 5min late at Millbrae’
Fri Jun 27 11:56:18 2008:25865: Tweet: ‘SB230 old style 1 car; room after 22nd’
I am still on the fence on how to handle failed updates. I suppose I could retry 3 times or so, but anything more may run the risk of having the tweet become unnewsworthy. Any thoughts?