Archive for June, 2008
post a commentIt has been almost a month since Ria and I were in Paris and I’m only just blogging about it. My excuse? I’ve been busy!
We flew out from Edinburgh on a Wednesday and stayed all the way through until Sunday. Not too short, but also not too long. We stayed in an Apart-Hotel, basically a hotel room with an attached wee kitchen. It was a pretty good size and superbly located just off the Rue de Rivoli, about 2 minutes walk from the Louvre.
We managed to cram in a lot of sights: Musée d’Orsay, Eiffel Tower, Palais Royale, Rodin Museum, Musée des Arts et Métiers (science & technology), The Louvre, Cathédrale Notre Dame, cruise on the Seine, Musée Carnavalet, Sacre Coeur, Pompidou Centre, the cafe from Amelie, Montmartre, crazy bookshops and of course, lots of sitting drinking coffee and watching the world go by.
Being a geek, I took along my Bluetooth GPS receiver and had it logging when I remembered to turn it on. You can see an amalgamation of our wandering on Google Maps here. The crazy straight lines are when we descending into the Metro and then popped up somewhere else.
I have rather a lot of photos on Flickr, so here are some of my favourites:
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