BadHill

Migration!

2005-08-14T00:06:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

I'm moving my nonpersonal blog posts from livejournal to here.

Ogle Earth Blogged BadHill

2005-08-13T09:32:00.000-07:00

Ogle Earth posted a writeup of BadHill, featuring a particularly boring, rambling, and badly composed snippet of an email I send to the them. Lesson: send only snappy, proofread emails to blog authors.

del.icio.us linkbacks of BadHill.org, post blogging

2005-08-04T18:53:00.000-07:00

del.icio.us linkbacks of BadHill.org, with user titles and descriptions. wheeeeeeeeeeeee

Blogged by Seattle Metroblog

2005-08-03T23:19:00.000-07:00

BadHill has been blog'd by Seattle Metroblog. Spiffy.

"Even if you're into accumulating vertical in your commute, you can use the site to see just how high you're climbing on a day-to-day basis.

Don't you just love it when the internet is awesome like this?"

Update: Could someone check badhill from a non-mac and tell me if it's hosed? It seems hosed. Damn thing holds up for a month and the second it gets blogged comes crashing down.

Metaupdate: It's fine: it was this antiquated version of Safari not parsing the XML return code. If it doesn't code your address, that's not my fault: it's geocoder.us's.

GIS Meeting

2005-07-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

Chris S. and I had a meeting last night with two transportation planning consultants who are interested in the work "we" are doing. ("we" because Chris singlehandedly did all of the famous stuff and I'm mostly just coattailing at this point). We talked for a long time, and they eventually gave us a bunch of data and a free server, and one of them seemed interested in recruiting me into transportation consulting, which is basically all I've ever wanted to do. I'd jump on it, but I'm not certain that I'd want to abandon the security of a nine-to-five job while I still have so much debt. Chris, by contrast, is pretty fantastically hire-able, but he's working at Amazon likely making more money than God, so he's out of the rat race for now.

There is an interesting catch-22 in making GIS-enabled internet application with municipal data: Anyone who can actually finish a cool GIS project is totally hot and can scoop up huge amounts of government GIS project money. By taking government GIS project money, however, you doom your project to bureaucracy and sloth, and will no longer actually be capable of doing cool things. It's like when MGM bought out Buster Keaton because he was a ninja, which effectively extinguished his ninjahood.

MSN Virtual Earth

2005-07-24T01:36:00.000-07:00

MSN released their google maps clone, MSN Virtual Earth. I like it, but not because it's good. It's approximately exactly what Google maps would be if they siphoned a large portion of their coding budget into PR and marketing. It is useful, in that it will keep the people at google off a high horse and in the code mines keeping their product top notch.

Update: Okay fine. It appears the MSN satellite images have a higher resolution than the leading brand.

BusMonster

2005-07-19T21:42:00.000-07:00

Today I met with Chris Smoak of busmonster.com. We're going to work together on a soon-to-be-widely-adopted bus/bicycle/walking/ferry/donkeycart trip planner.

*flex*

2005-07-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

You can now select your origin and destination using the map (as opposed to an address). Click "Start at Map Center" or "End at At Map Center" to specify the endpoints of your trip.

Disconnected Subgraphs

2005-07-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

An Interesting Math Problem
I'm worried about routefinds between disconnected subgraphs of the roadgraph (from the mainland to an island, for example). Currently the system will search the entire connected roadgraph (sucking up a great deal of processor time) and then crash in some unelegant way. Ideally, however, I can use some sort of tight algorithm for checking the connectness of point A to point B. Anybody have any leads on published algorithms to that end? There's a wiki workpage here:

Wiki: Disconnected Subgraph Problem

Other dispaches:

(a) www.badhill.org works. It is merely a redirect at this point, because I don't have the gumption to ask the university DNS servers to accept a ".org" name entry.

(b) posted badhill to the microsoft bicycle commuting listserv, which has resulted in a steady stream of routefinds queries. The routserver is still up and performing well, but damn does that make me nervous. It's out in the wild.

(c) My oral surgeon checked me out today and concluded that I'm doing fine. So I went to TJs and got some granola.

Updating Software

2005-07-14T16:50:00.000-07:00

Update: It's back up now. Always use nohup for your servers, kids.

New at BadHill

Fixed some address-matching bugs
Elevation data for all of seattle/road data for all of king county loaded up
Works in IE now
Directions presented in table format
Cool new logo
Click on the "action" line item (L, R, Depart) and the map will zoom&center on the relevant intersection

Coming soon: www.badhill.org

If y'all could give it a tad bit of testing that'd be great. Also: it's okay to tell your friends, but try to avoid publicizing it anywhere where it might pick up real press or blog coverage.

Final BadHill Logo

2005-07-14T10:54:00.000-07:00

I made use of the Underwood typewriter today.

How's that:

(You can click through it to see a impractically high-resolution version.)

As opposed to this:

More on BadHill Logos

2005-07-13T23:10:00.000-07:00

How's this?

BadHill Logos

2005-07-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

I'm kicking around a few ideas for header logos on the BadHill site

The second one is awesome, but the image quality is a little weak. Perhapse I could re-work the pennyfarthing image? I think it's pretty cool.

Note - the first image started it's life here.

Elevation Data Loaded

2005-07-12T23:31:00.000-07:00

Elevation data for all of Seattle has been loaded, in addition to the rest of king county without elevation data.

I just ran a route from my house in the U-district to North Bend, in the mountains. The geocode took fifteen seconds and the routefind took six seconds.

Feelin' pretty good about it.

Badhill down?

2005-07-12T10:19:00.000-07:00

I got the impression that the system was massively busted from y'all's bug reports, and sure enough the thing is totally screwed when viewed in Safari from Cait's laptop. I rushed to the office to get to work patching it up, only to find the thing humming smoothly when viewed from firefox.

Also note: Doesn't work in IE either.

In summery: thing only works in firefox, and also, developing webapps is hard.

Introducing BadHill

2005-07-11T23:57:00.000-07:00

Here it is: A "mapquest"-style address-to-address routefinder specifically for bicycles. The routefinder accounts for hills, avoids freeways, and gives total elevation gain as part of the text directions.

Please: Test it out, and forgive me errors it makes.
Please don't blog this or otherwise publicize the routefinder app, yet. The time will come, but for before I further stabilize and test the system.