acts_as_informative

My thoughts on our upcoming election…

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:08:10 -0600

My thoughts on our upcoming election…

Rdio Player

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:56:00 -0700

I really love Rdio. And, after a recently upgrade to a fantastic new 11” MacBook Air I am using it more than ever. I find their Adobe Air desktop app next to useless so I immediately used Fluid to create a Site Specific Browser (SSB) for my music. This worked nicely except, with both options so far, I really missed being able to use my Media Keys to control my music.

So, I thought, I can solve this problem…

Rdio has a couple of ideas on their site on how to work around this issue but they all rely on AppleScript, Third Party Hotkey Apps and swap around what application you have in focus which just seems messy to me.

I decided that it would be easy enough to put together a quick OS X App that would wrap the Rdio site and then listening for the media keys trigger JavaScript events into its webview to control the tunes. After about two hours of hacking Rdio Player is born.

It is a very simple SSB that just wraps the Rdio site and allows you to once again control your music with those handy Media Keys.

You can download it here: http://xib.ca/lf37

If you are so inclined you can check out the src here: http://xib.ca/QyQU

Hopefully you enjoy this little tidbit as much as I do. :D

Note:

Due to a bug introduced this past fall pressing the play button on your keyboard will open iTunes if it isn’t already running and once it is open the Media Keys can cause a bit of excitement. I am planning on implementing a more proper / integrated fix but until then this handy little tool that temporarily fix this problem.

Update:

Rdio Player now supports Growl notifications for track changes.

TXT.2.ETS

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:17:00 -0700

TXT.2.ETS is a hacker project that @joeljackson and I (@seanhealy) put together after being inspired by the open data event in Edmonton this last weekend.

Basically if you text us a bus stop number we will send back the next few buses that will arrive and when.

We are still doing some testing on it so please forgive any bugs that may come up. Also, while we sort out a solution to getting a Canadian txt number if you are on Rogers of Fido they will charge you 25¢ to send a txt to our current number which is in the US. (If things go as they should we should have the Canadian number figured out in a couple days. Thanks @camlinke!)

TXT.2.ETS’s Number: (858) 779-4952

Example:

Sent to (858) 779-4952:
    2872

Response:
    Trips from stop 2875 (109 Street & 82 Avenue):
    
    9: 07:11 PM
    9: 07:26 PM
    9: 07:41 PM
    9: 07:56 PM
    9: 08:11 PM
    9: 08:26 PM

Found a bug or have feedback?

Send us a text starting with the word bug or the word feedback and we will get you input.

Example:

Sent to (858) 779-4952:
    feedback You guys rock!

Response:
    Your feedback has been logged. Thank you for your thoughts.

Twitter

As a bonus we also did a twitter interface. If you send a tweet to @etsinfo with a stop number it will @reply you back with the bus times.

Oh, and unless you want to be spammed with everyone’s requests it is probably best not to follow @etsinfo. ;)

Example:

Sent
    @etsInfo 2872

Response:
    Trips from stop 2875 (109 Street & 82 Avenue):
    
    9: 07:11 PM
    9: 07:26 PM
    9: 07:41 PM
    9: 07:56 PM

API!

While getting all the Google Transit info playing nice wasn’t any sort of epic accomplishment it did take a bit of time. So, we thought we’d save anyone else who may want to do a similar project a bit of time by exposing our data to whomever wants it.

For now we only have a simple lookup that lets you find a stop and returns some info about it including the next few buses that will show up.

If you have any other data that you think would be nice to have exposed let us know and we will do our best to add it.

It is available at: http://etstext.blackskycorp.com/stop/<stop_id>.<format>

Where <format> is either: html, txt, xml or json and <stop_id> is an ETS stop number.

Example:

http://etstext.blackskycorp.com/stop/2875.json   #=>

    {
       "stop_id":"2875,
       "stop_name":"109 Street & 82 Avenue",
       "stop_lat":53.5189,
       "stop_lon":-113.512,
       "trips_departing":[
          {
             "bus":"9",
             "time":"05:28:00"
          },
          {
             "bus":"9",
             "time":"05:43:00"
          },
          {
             "bus":"9",
             "time":"05:58:00"
          },
          {
             "bus":"9",
             "time":"06:13:00"
          },
          {
             "bus":"9",
             "time":"06:28:00"
          },
          {
             "bus":"17",
             "time":"06:37:00"
          }
       ]
    }

Future

We don’t have a timeline for any of these at the moment. If you have a snazzy idea we would love to hear it too!

Routing:

We think it would be cool if you could send us you current location and then where you want to go and we could give you a suggested transit route on how to get there.

Better Estimation:

We have an interesting particle filter idea that we want to try so we could use the data we get from people’s requests to better predict bus times. We haven’t started hardly anything on this part yet as it would be a bigger job and would depend on the amount of usage we get but who knows, better bus estimation would be pretty fantastic. :)

Atlanta has chrome fire hydrants…

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:20:00 -0700

Atlanta has chrome fire hydrants…

Some of the Most Fantastical Things from my trip to the CDC

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:43:02 -0700

Meeting a lot of amazing people with great ideas. (Stoked)
Getting a great reaction from Surveyor. YAY!
Seeing the CDC’s Emergency Response Centre
A 40” touch screen with scrubbable pseudo-live satellite imagery from Haiti
Seeing the [outside of the] building with the level 4 labs
The Minneapolis Airport is intense and the Atlanta one is HUGE.

It’s the Miniature version of the CDC Campus that they keep at the CDC.

Eight Uses for Teleportation

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:59:00 -0700

Getting around
Fetching Things
Fetching things from locked underground vaults
Visiting Mars
Escaping awkward or boring situations
Never have to go to the washroom again
Snow Removal
Making loud thunder noises as the air rushes into fill the space of what you just teleported

"All I ask is one thing, particularly of young people that watch. Please do not be cynical. I hate..."

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:37:00 -0700

“All I ask is one thing, particularly of young people that watch. Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. It’s my least favorite quality. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and are kind, amazing things will happen.”

- Conan O’Brien

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty..."

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:04:00 -0700

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

- Benjamin Franklin

Anoying Disqus Lines

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:27:00 -0700

In the process of setting up my tumblr here I signed up for disqus.com to provide comments. Everything was going fine but then there were these really anoying borders between the profile and the comment box and at the bottom.

For some reason I REALLY wanted to get rid of these. After doing some digging I found they are actually a 50% transparent png background image which makes sense as this widget could be embedded almost anywhere.

After adding the following to my tumblr ‘Advanced’ ‘Custom CSS’ I have accomplished my goal.

#dsq-content div.dsq-options,
#dsq-content #dsq-new-post div.dsq-request-user-info,
#dsq-content #dsq-authenticate .dsq-login-buttons {
	background-image: none;
	margin: 0px;
	padding-bottom: 10px;
}

Great Victory?

P.S.

In the process of writing this post I had need to include code using the trusty <pre> tag. My theme restyled <pre> with a variable spaced font which just doesn’t make sense. I fixed it like:

#container pre {
	width: 484px;
	
	margin: 0px 0px 14px -10px;
	padding: 10px;
	
	font-family: "Courier New", Courier, Monaco, monospace;
	
	border: solid 8px #E1E1DA;
	background-color: #EFEFEF;
}

This includes some theme info I added specifically for my theme but, if your theme did something similar and this is a problem you have, this should get started.

Look! It's a blog…

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:00:00 -0700

My main inspiration in starting a blog is two fold. First, I feel my ability to write has severely diminished recently as I have not had to do it for some time now. Secondly, I have a dream of one day sharing solutions to problems I have while working and this seems like a decent mechanism for doing so.

Here goes nothing. :)

This is me at my friends’ wedding carrying a boat. Why?...

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:02:00 -0700

This is me at my friends’ wedding carrying a boat. Why? Because, the photographer told us to. Some people have though is a picture of a cow walking; this is not true.

Also, this is here as I thought it was how to upload a profile picture on tumblr which it wasn’t but oh well…