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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
A lot of chatter on Caltrain today starting with a inquiry of a fatality at San Bruno. While it was not a fatality it did cause delays on the system which was communicated with diligence and discretion. Many thanks to everyone who provided a steady stream of updates which almost certainly help us plan our commute home.
I think I will file this under WIN for the service.
I am now tacking the received time by my server to the update sent to Twitter so people can have a frame of reference of when the update was actually made. This will help account for any network (net or mobile) delays and for the iPhone which does not let you get a time stamp for each SMS, but only what it considers a conversation. It will look like (emphasis added):
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.
I was contacted by Tamara Barak Aparton of The San Francisco Examiner yesterday afternoon about a piece she was writing about BART and Twitter. She came across the Caltrain feeds I setup and wanted to know more. Sadly I wasn’t able to get back to her before her deadline although there is mention in the article and URLs are provided.
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).