Here’s a little hack I thought I’d share. There are maybe other ways to do this, but this way took all of two minutes, which suits me. My daily routine has me taking a train along the Inner West Line (here in Sydney), and I wanted to know in advance if there was any issues with the line. 131500 provides weekely emails about upcoming trackwork, and there’s an RSS feed of delays; this is what you’d see in many of the Sydney transport-related apps. Another information source is through Twitter. For all of these sources I only really care about the one line I take every day - the quickest answer would seem to be if I could only get updates on Twitter for my line

I don’t know how many times I’ve lost tiny parts and had to spend time trying to find them. I realized after removing the back of my monitor that I’m starting to learn from those mistakes; instead of just sticking the screws in a box with other screws, and then having to dig them out, I taped them to the back of the monitor.

A short while ago I wrote about visualizing transport by using 131500’s TDX data, converted to GTFS, and served by GeoServer. Because I’ve started playing around with Google’s Fusion table, I thought it would be interesting to see what all the transit stops in Sydney look like in FT. So, voila!

I’ve had several conversations with neighbors and co-workers about the “lack” of forward thinking, or at least the lack of forward action. Of course, I keep in the back of my mind that we aren’t “experts”, and the more I learn about transport the more I learn how complex it is. Dr. Sussman’s CLIOS process (Complex, Large- Scale, Integrated, Open Systems) appears more and more true the longer I work in and study transport. There is a plethora of excuses that can be made, but the general conclusion was that the earlier we prepare the better. I can remember working near Zhongshan 7-8 years ago and driving around on huge roads in the middle of empty fields. There …

I was having some issues with my personal mail server (Postfix) and my phone (Android). The logs depicted the below issue: Jan 9 09:19:53 ip-11-222-23-223 postfix/smtpd[12345]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from 12-13-14-15.abc.com.au[12.13.14.15]: 504 5.5.2 <localhost>: Helo command rejected: need fully-qualified hostname; from=<emailaddr kelvinism.com="kelvinism.com"> to=<emailaddr gmail.com="gmail.com"> proto=ESMTP helo=<localhost> </localhost></emailaddr></emailaddr></localhost> We can see here that the stock Android email client is doing a ‘helo localhost’. One part of my main.cf file specifies this:

A few weeks ago I saw an opening to give a 5-10 minute lightening talk at SyPy (Sydney Python), and with two nights to prepare, decided it would be interesting to explore Splunk’s usage of Python. You can see the presentation video

After much consideration, I’ve decided to retire yet another website: Colddirt. This site was created as an example of how to use the different parts of Django, mostly in just one afternoon. I’ve decided it is time to just take a few screenshots and retire the site - the domain is expiring, and honestly, I don’t want to spend $10 to renew the domain. So, here are the screenshots.

Over the years I’ve created several websites, some with the hope of becoming big and popular. Naturally, I’m still waiting to create a site that becomes big and popular. In the meantime, it seems appropriate to retire some of the older sites and ideas. The truth is, I’m moving all my little sites from MySQL on a mediocre VPS to Postgresql on EC2. Because I put some sweat and blood into these sites, I thought it would be only appropriate to record how the sites looked for future sentimental value. I downloaded a small plug-in for Firefox to take full-length pictures, and I thus post them here.

I have to admit, to me, editing OpenStreetMap is actually a little therapeutic. Sort of like gardening. My first major contribution was when I brought my little QStarz GPS unit across Indonesia, by train, sitting against the window. The most recent contribution was our trip to Dubbo, where I helped fill in a few missing roads, and added an initial outlay of Dubbo Zoo.

For the last year YS and I have been studying French once a week (4.5hr on Saturday!) A few months ago I wrote some Python code to read the RSS feeds of the most popular French newspaper site, and then kept track of the count of each word. I repeated this every week for a few months. In the end I had a database of the top ~3000 words used on the site. Today I decided I wanted to play with Processing, so created this little word collage. It is 1680x1050, my monitor’s resolution. Two thumbs up for Processing!