From various backups and by re-doing a chunk of work I’ve managed to get bustrackr.co.uk doing something useful again. It even does sensible things like caching now!

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My Virtual Machine got hosed. Excitingly I wasn’t doing any regular backups so I’ve had to revert to a backup I had from my last-but-one hosting account. Which seems to be from June last year :/ I’m devising some cunning way of pulling all my lost blog posts out of the Google Reader cache. Normal service will be resumed at some point soon.

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A while back Lothian Buses fitted some fancy GPS tracking to all of their fleet enabling real-time tracking. Then LCD screens appeared at (selected) bus stops giving you a list of incoming buses and their ETA. All very clever. Then, at last they launched a web site which gave access to the same data: mybustracker.co.uk.

I think that making the website resemble the signs from the street is a poor design choice. Why not work with the medium you are presenting information over (the web) rather than trying to make it resemble something else? They constrain information into a tiny space, put it in a stupid font, make the background looks like all lcd-y, use excessive popups and it takes forever just to get to the basic information.

In shock news, this isn’t just a whiny post with no actual action. I present the beginnings of a “Bus Tracker API”. Think of it as a “cleaning” of the data for a fresh beginning. If we can get clean data out of the system then we can build a clean interface on top of it. My API is REST-ful and inspired by the flickr API. I have one method so far “bustracker.departures.getNext” which takes one parameter: the bus stop code. It shows you all of the incoming departures for a given bus stop. Here it is working for the stop nearest my flat. Feel free to change to bus stop code to another one by digging around the Bus Tracker website. I’ll hopefully have some other, more useful methods done soon and maybe some nifty google maps visuals…

Update: Source code now browsable at: http://trac.ollyjackson.com/bustracker/browser/trunk

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Penguin are releasing a new Bond novel entitled “Devil May Care“. Guess who’s writing it? Yes, Sebastian Faulks. It’s released next week and it could be awesome.

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I’m loving these Vintage Motoring Maps being posted to flickr by John Hicks.

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I can’t believe this hasn’t been more widely promoted but the Ordnance Survey is finally opening up it’s data for use on the internets. Their new Open Space project allows a Google Maps style interface to their (usually tightly restricted) mapping data. I do like the design of the OS maps, a nice alternative to Google. I’ve knocked up a quick demo centered on Edinburgh.

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The new Bond covers from Penguin are gorgeous:

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Animoto generates “shorts” compiled from your photos and set to music. They render lots of fancy effects, using your photos, apparently in time to the music. Pretty neat!

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