Blog posts

When I blogged last month about abstracting mapping with YM4R I commented: What I’ve not yet discovered (and may not be implemented) is a way to automatically center and zoom a map. It would be very nice to be able to add a batch of points to a map and have the plugin automatically work out their mid-point. Maybe I need to work on that a little… What I was missing was the center_zoom_on_bounds_init method. There are various ways to interact with it, but I’ve chosen: ...

Last time we saw Wilco play—two years ago on the A Ghost Is Born tour—it wasn’t until the third encore that they seemed ready to relax. Having performed a remarkable, polished set and two exceedingly strong follow ups, they were called out by the fans one last time and loosened up for a rendition of The Late Greats. Friday night’s set in Lansing was an altogether different affair. This time around it seemed that the band had hit the road not to showcase a new album but to have some fun. Their entrance and the first two songs was almost jaunty, and they played around with some arrangements including a guitar solo early on that could have become painfully self-indulgent in the hands of a lesser player than Nels Cline. Jeff Tweedy was unusually quiet on stage, a fact that he acknowledged during one of his rare comments, but he assured us that he was having a great time. ...

The New York Times today ran a piece talking about organizations and businesses developing strong local neighbourhoods and green buildings. Their lead profile is of Guy Bazzani, President of Bazzani Associates. Working with The Image Shoppe I’ve worked on Bazzani Associates’ website over the past eighteen months. We’re currently testing a few new features showcasing the company’s work in the local community, and it’s a shame they weren’t ready to launch before the article went to press. But Bazzani Associates are doing good work, and it’s good to see them getting deserved attention. ...

The news of the potential closure of my old department has led me to wondering what the future is for a subject like physics, which in turn had me thinking about its past. While many have been worrying lately about declining interest in a number of ‘core’ academic subjects, such as physics, it is easy to forget that the subject only came into existence as a distinct discipline within the past two centuries. Many of the great heroes of physics–people like Kepler, Galileo, and Newton–would never have considered themselves physicists, probably leaning toward the term ’natural philosophers.’ Maxwell’s contributions to the discipline were immense, but he’s also notable for being one of the earlier practitioners to go by the name ‘physicist’. ...

I received an email over the weekend from the President of Reading University Students’ Union informing me that the Department of Physics (in which I studied) is being prepared for closure. Yesterday, the BBC picked up the story. Enrollment in physics courses across the UK has been going down for years, and the fact that the department only attracted thirty-five students is a striking low. It’s not a surprise that the University’s Senior Management Board is considering drastic measures. But this is also the fourth department to be scheduled for closure in as many years. While I was working in the Student Union we were fighting the closure of the Music department, and since then they’ve closed Sociology and Mechanical Engineering. ...

In the comments on my entry a couple of months ago about tourb.us, Carl writes: If you like tourb, you will love BeeThere.net. BeeThere has been live since October 2005, has the features you request here, and is clearly the site that tourb is trying to imitate. I would love to hear what you think! Naturally, I can’t be sure exactly what inspired tourb.us but looking at BeeThere I don’t feel like Carl’s claims are fair, and having spent some time exploring his site I really don’t think it does provide the features I was requesting. ...

Personal Kyoto (via O’Reilly Radar) is a great idea. The site allows residents of New York to register their electricity accounts, and see the change in usage that’s required for them to do their part to meet the targets set in the Kyoto Protocol. While the protocol itself does not go nearly far enough to have a serious impact on climate change, it is good to see so many communities and individuals in the US reacting to the government’s failure to act by taking the initiative. Tools that help people see the impact they are having, coupled with ideas of how to improve that, are vital. ...

Being the concerned citizens that we are, we’ve been trying to work out how much of our travelling next summer can be completed by public transport. Good sources of train information are hard to come by, so I was very pleased to discover Seat 61, an impressive resource with details of train and ship travel for more than eighty countries. Well worth a look if you’re trying to plan some travel without the carbon cost of airfare. ...

In the process of building my bus route app, I realised that half the data for bus stops is missing. While the site’s developers have done a good job of providing clear data on half the stops, if you want to see stops going in the other direction, you have to use a drop-down box that triggers an AJAX request and repopulates the table. A little digging shows that the call is to: ...

Following on from my previous entry about scraping bus route data from The Rapid’s website, and to begin to demonstrate the possibilities it opens up, I’ve set up a simple web service to provide route and stop data. It’s based on the new REST style from Edge Rails, and routes are scoped by city to allow for future expansion. To get data on Route 1, GET: http://projects.jystewart.net/buses/cities/1/routes/1 To get a list of the stops within 1.5 miles of a given longitude and latitude, GET: ...