Thanks again,

-r

I apologize if this jammed up aynone.

I’m fired.

NB227 and NB230 delayed. NB STOPPED: 233@Lawrence-255 near Bayshore- 231@SM - 135@SJD

No NB trains operating at this time. SB134, 332 and 230 op as locals & reduced speeds.

VTA is accepting all Caltrain fare media on their El Camino Real bus routes.

SamTrans will accept all Caltrain fare media on all buses for the remainder of the service day

As a gesture of apology, all rides on Caltrain will be free until 1:30 a.m., Dec. 5.

Moving forward authoritative or official tweets of this nature will be prefixed with O: to indicate this.  The Thanksgiving break got in the way of rolling this out earlier.

In other news another contributor noted the train numbers encode the type and direction of service.  1xx is for local, 2xx for limited, and 3xx is for baby bullet.  Even routes are for southbound and odd are for northbound trains.  I will update the Guide to reflect this and and will be removing and NB and/or SB labels from updates to reduce tweet sizes.

Also a few notes and reminders about the service to remember:  First, the @caltrain and @bikecar accounts are not monitored so to speak.  I currently do not review any @replies so don’t be offended for the lack of interactivity if you ask questions or try to send updates via this method and are ignored.  Second, the service is not operated by any transit authority and the majority of the updates are provided by commuters.  And finally, I have been keeping hands off approach with the updates and only have had to guide a few contributors so far.  I suspect many of the followers have enabled SMS updates (I have) so please consider the newsworthiness of your update.    With that in mind please try to omit editorializing or including irrelevant content.

And finally I strolled to 4th and King this morning gambling that service would have been restored after the signal system failure.  I ended up being interviewed by KTVU since I was just working on a bench while I waited for the next MUNI to stop by to take me home.  They actually put my ugly mug on the 5 o’clock news and used my sound bite as the lead to the story.  I plugged this service off camera too.

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.

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.

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?

I think I will file this under WIN for the service.

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.

Check out the article.