July 8th, 2009 ravi
The last month has been a punch to the face for me work wise and I’ve fallen behind in generating keys for people and for that I am sorry. I hope to get some things off my plate and spend some time doing so on my commute this week so be patient.
I had a few small outages with my server in the past few months. Some were self inflicted and others are still unknown. It was because of this that I realized I need to establish a backup system that will process email updates if the primary goes down. I’m not really sure how to do this per se other than some Postfix and MySQL magic. I have the infrastructure just not the time.
Edit: And no sooner did I post did was there another fatality.
Posted in @caltrain, Fail | 2 Comments »
June 18th, 2009 ravi
What a morning, huh? It is fortunate there was no loss of life this morning but it seemed to impact service just as bad if not more so. I found it amusing that a day after I was talking to a friend about the service there was an incident where so many of the pros and cons were highlighted. That said here are a few tips, reminders, and requests which will hopefully help to continue to make this service useful.
1) Check @caltrain before you send your tweet.
Don’t get me wrong here — everyone who is contributing rocks and I’ve been spared a long and painful commute many times because of everyone who gets up hours before me, but checking recent tweets will reduce duplicate messages.
2) Take note of the received time stamp
The addition of the time stamp [HH:MM] is automatically appended to all received updates and will help to put the tweet in context. This was particularly handy this morning where there was as much as a hour delay from when the update was sent to Twitter and when the SMS was received
3) Gift horse getting what he paid for… or cliché du jour
I wanted to defend the tweets from the transit authority this morning. I think it is absolutely fabulous that there are such updates and use them to supplement the more to the minute, live feed from passengers on the train. I won’t pretend to know the chain of command that is involved with getting the official tweets sent, but I suspect these are average delays at a particular moment in time. As a rider one should factor the time when the update is sent with other surrounding updates.
4) Just the facts, ma’am
Please refrain from editorial tweets and stay on topic. In case you forgot have a look at the updating guide.
Posted in @caltrain, Commentary | 5 Comments »
May 13th, 2009 ravi
Twitter changed the functionality of @-replys somewhat which allows for group like feature. Reading the description it is not immediately obvious if this will be helpful in any way to improve the service.
I’m on a working vacation right now in Boston and NYC so won’t have much time to dig into this until I return on Tuesday.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
May 5th, 2009 ravi
It is unfortunate to learn about two suicides in as many days (and the first of the year) and it is unfortunateit is this news that brings me to posting at all. @caltrain certainly helped me out on my morning commute today as I suspect it had for others. I had intended an early train but adjusted my schedule after getting the first tweet. This gave me plenty of time to get to 4th and King and get an update of delays. I was able to get a delicious latte from The Creamery and Lactaid from Walgreens to allow for a pleasant gastro experience.
It was nice to also see actual official tweets by a Bay Area transit representative. Official tweets from such entities are prefixed with O: to designate so. I also want to remind everyone of the updating guide and to try to check recent tweet history to prevent too many redundant tweets. Also consider the newsworthiness of the tweet. I don’t censor, edit, or otherwise prohibit content but I want to remind everyone of the 1,200 followers many may be getting SMS updates for each tweet.
In other news I had a phone interview with Sebastian Kunz of Talk 910KNEW / green960 KKGN a few weeks ago to talk about @caltrain and @bikecar. I’m not certain if it made it to air as I was back in Cleveland for several days, but the potential exposure and awareness was cool.
Finally I wanted everyone to know that it is just me running this service so if replies to email for update keys or otherwise take a little while it is either because I am stuck with my real job or out of town. Sometimes I do miss email all together so if its been a long time in getting a reply send a reminder.
Thank you to everyone who has been helping make this as useful as I had imagined it could be.
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
March 5th, 2009 ravi
Bicycle riders should be happy to learn that Caltrain has published the 36 scheduled trains that will be equipped with 2 bike cars for a total capacity of 64 bicycles. “These trains are operated with the stainless steel, fluted-side gallery cars, and the bike cars are the northernmost car and the fourth car from the north.”
I suspect the utility of my service will decline with this new data, however I believe it will still be useful when the trains are configured differently.
Posted in @bikecar, Announcement | 8 Comments »
January 12th, 2009 ravi
A rider used @caltrain this evening to send a SOS for a left bag and sure enough someone came through. How cool is that? Certainly a lot better than my failed attempt to recover my keys.
Posted in @caltrain, Misc | 2 Comments »
December 22nd, 2008 ravi
I wanted to apologize to a few dozen of you who emailed in for update keys weeks ago. It wasn’t until today that I have had some time to go through the Caltrain mbox and reply to everyone. I also wanted to thank everyone who has been participating in the Caltrian and Bikecar updates. I started the service a little over a year ago after a particularly bad period of delays. It has now gained the support of at least 750 Caltrain riders and 130 who have asked for update keys to help make the service actually useful. I have even gained the attention of the media with the San Mateo Daily Journal being the latest to mention it.
Thanks again,
-r
Posted in Commentary | 1 Comment »
December 5th, 2008 ravi
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.
Posted in Fail | 3 Comments »
December 5th, 2008 ravi
A representative from one of the Bay Area transit providers has been providing updates to the service for some time now. You may have noticed them as the ones full of information such as
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.
Posted in @caltrain, Announcement | 1 Comment »
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 | 2 Comments »