Fritz over at Cycleicious wrote a blog post listing the steps to get setup with Twitter and using this service. Inspired by this I adapted his guide and created one here.
It can be found at http://cow.org/c/getting-started (or http://cow.org/r/?3ce5 if the url must be short).
I brought my bicycle on the train today because the valet at Warm Planet Bikes was overfilled to where bicycles were in the storeroom floor. I was going in late enough that I knew I wouldn’t be bumped going to work, but the commute home I was worried about since there is no patten for train configuration. I made it on the 6:46 out of MV and was reminded how frustrating it is to rack up quickly when there is a large queue waiting to get in.
This process reminded me of the daily commute before the valet and I had always thought while a FIFO queue was the more fair there would be some benefit if people were to board in a FILO. If we were to know how many slots were available (conductors helped out by doing more than telling us to hurry up) bicyclists could quickly board accordingly. Maybe this just adds more work and confusion, but in my perfect world it wouldnt. Then again in my perfect world there would be enough room for all bicycles all the time.
The SFBC Bulletin had the following which you wil find important if you take your bicycle on Caltrain:
Don’t let Caltrain’s Bike Master Plan leave you behind — speak up now! This week Caltrain staff will be updating its board of directors on their Draft Bicycle Master Plan, which looks at beefing up bike parking at 10 of its most-popular stations, but doesn’t do anything to add (or even maintain) bike space on trains, now or in the future.
If you care about “bikes on board”, please attend the Caltrain Joint Powers Board meeting this Thursday (8/7/08, 10:00 am, 1250 San Carlos Ave., San Carlos, a four-minute walk from the train station). We need a strong show of support to get bikes on board included in the Bike Master Plan, and we need to make sure the Caltrain board (the folks who make the big decisions) really understands this service and hears from the people who use it. We have a group of speakers lined up to make public comment, and we need you in the audience with your bicycle helmet in hand. Can’t make the meeting? Write to your mayor about this important transit service. For more information, and to download a template and mayors’ addresses, see our Bikes ONBoard page.
What is particularly interesting is the plan release has been pushed BACK to AFTER the meeting. It is unclear if the board meeting will also be pushed back, but I have not seen anything yet to indicate as such. I’ve emailed the SFBC about this as well in hopes they can get to the bottom of things.
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?
…people will hear.
So /var on my server filled up because like a idiot I forgot to stop logging mail.debug. 1.6G later /var fills up and then MySQL throws a tantrum. I stop the daemon, remove the debug log, and try to start things up again, but for some reason soft updates are not updating the partition. Also one of the tables of a DB (which I thankfully had a backup of) disappeared. I wanted to fsck /var but it wasn’t having any part of it. Somehow along the line my /var/mail partition flipped out and went into read-only mode.
I managed to get the partitions running, but I didn’t notice that Dovecot and Postfix lost their connections to MySQL so all my mail was being rejected for about 2 hours. Thankfully in that time there were no Caltrain Tweets that were sent over. I had envisioned there being a flood of them around 8pm yesterday when I finally got things back up and running.
I decided it would also be a good time to upgrade to FreeBSD 6.3-STABLE while things were hosed so that is a bonus.
And in unrelated news I sent an email to my company’s commuter list advertising this service. It has the potential for there to be a lot of new updaters which I’m not quite certain I’m ready for. Not so much of not bieng able to handle the load as being able to manually process key requests. I have a user portal in the works, and the Twitter direct messaging feature is in Beta (read 1 other person becides me is using it) and actually works. I just need to get the motivation to compelte things.
With the increase of followers brings more updates with inconsistent content. To help guide the community I whipped up a guide of what I envisioned the content would be.
Check the guide out.
Like I said I don’t want to cramp anyone’s style, but I think it would be nice if the alerts could contain the same baseline of information and occur only when they need to.
The 295bus Blog brings up a interesting point about the verbosity of tweets to the Caltrain Twitter account. Noting that a particular train arrived at the terminus 5 minutes behind schedule is not particularly helpful to anyone. The key to success of the service is for each update to be newsworthy which means enough information in a timely manor. Don’t get me wrong — I’m thrilled at the level of support from the community, but I also don’t want to frustrate people who follow the accounts with excessive tweets.
This service has really taken off since the fatality on Friday May 6th and with this morning’s rumored fire on a train outside Mountain View. With all the new traffic has brought to light some deficiencies with my service let alone any issues Twitter may be having. Because of this I decided to create this dumb blog to better communicate updates. This is in addition to the mailing list that already exists.
Because of the service issues with Twitter I’ve had to actually code in some robustness to my API calls. At the moment I don’t attempt a resend on error (by design), but with the frequency of delays and the number of followers I’ve reconsidered. I have also successfully implemented a method that will redirect Twitter direct messages. This means you will be able to send a direct message via SMS to Twitter and have that be the update. The only hangup is I will need to build an actual user portal on my site to sufficiently link your Twitter account with your email key. Not being a web designer at all (not even a little bit) I’ve been putting this off. Everyone hope for a slow work week for me and I’ll get something done.
Last I am now filtering updates that match (^\w\w:) to weed out people who reply-to all after a few of those were sent out this morning.
Also I wanted to thank everyone for contributing and hopefully this has alleviated some frustration Caltrain commuters have.
Edit: Of course I had to publish the URL for the blog as http://cow.org/c/blog/ BEFORE I looked into this WordPress thing. It seems it has its own ‘About’ page which seemed to be a suitable replacement for the old index page. That said the blog replaced it and is now at http://cow.org/c/ but I put a Apache RedirectPermanent option so all is good.