‘Your Next Bus’ is the system used in West Yorkshire (and other regions) to provide live bus timetables. Some time ago I wrote a Dashboard Widget to display live timetables on a OS X Dashboard. I had a request to develop this for the iPhone and so I knocked something together with Dashcode and came up with tyr.org.uk/bus. Browse to in in your iPhone and see it in action, requires Version 2.0 of the OS.

Please feedback with any bug reports or feature requests.

Read on for some of the behind the scenes info.
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I’m writing some training documentation for Veritas Cluster Server (VCS). Reading through my notes I was reminded of the ‘VCS Simulator’. You can import an existing cluster config into the Simulator and use the (Windows) GUI as if it was a live cluster, changing the config, faling things over etc. It’s just the ticket for a training aid, it’s just a shame there isn’t a CLI simulator.

You can download it here (needs a Symantec login) and there’s a Flash video explaining how to import an existing cluster here.

I’ve been wanting to have a play around with both the Solaris Cluster Express work that’s coming out of OpenSolaris and also VirtualBox, a virtualization platform that Sun recently acquired and have moved under their xVM banner. So wanting to kill two birds with one stone I thought I’d try setting up a VirtualBox Solaris Express cluster. Here’s a run through on how to get the same thing going if you’d like to try.

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VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta is out. It’s a free upgrade for all current VMware Fusion users. Notable updates include Multiple Monitor support and Direct-X 9 Shader Model 2.

To give the Shader Model 2 a whirl I fired up Half Life 2. It had refused to run in any previous VMware Fusion release but this time it runs! Ok, it’s runs but it’s nowhere near playable as it’s getting about <5 FPS. However it’s a promising development.

Recently I posted about installing Solaris Express on a Mac Pro. This morning OpenSolaris was released, the first release of what was Project Indiana. Prior to this release the outputs of the various OpenSolaris projects were available within Solaris Express, however now they have their own distribution which has several differences notably the use of a new packaging system called IPS (Image Packaging System).

I will look further into the workings of OpenSolaris in some future posts but for now I thought I’d take a quick look at how the install ran on a bare metal Mac Pro (2006 version).

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I’m on the train! Finally WiFi is free in standard class on the east coast mainline. So that’s at least one thing National Express have done right so far.

I’d always assumed that the train WiFi was supported by a 3G network, or something similar. However my outbound IP address is 217.28.34.132 which a whois indicates belongs to

inetnum: 217.28.32.0 - 217.28.35.15
netname: NSAB-NET
descr: NSAB backbone and address-pools for VPN Services
##########################
In case of improper use, please contact:
<abuse@nsab.se>
##########################


nsab.se redirects to SES SIRIUS AB which is a satellite broadband provider. Well there you go.

Now if only the train was on time…

P.S. Google comes up in Swedish

In the March 8th edition of The Economist this article appeared about Wikipedia. This section piqued my interest

Mr Lih and other inclusionists worry that [the current Wikipedia administration and bureaucracy] deters people from contributing to Wikipedia, and that the welcoming environment of Wikipedia’s early days is giving way to hostility and infighting. There is already some evidence that the growth rate of Wikipedia’s article-base is slowing. Unofficial data from October 2007 suggests that users’ activity on the site is falling, when measured by the number of times an article is edited and the number of edits per month. The official figures have not been gathered and made public for almost a year, perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia’s health.

I thought ‘perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia’s health’ was a possibly a bit strong, especially against the lack of any properly referenced statistics. Whilst the official statistics might not be regularly updated at the moment a full export of the Wikipedia is still available at regular intervals. As such it’s possible, given a bit of work parsing the data, to generate some unofficial statistics. So that’s what I set out to do.

The results are at wikivitals.newswall.org.uk, or read on for more information about how they were created.

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Perhaps not the most successful turn of the holiday

For me one of the most interesting aspects of the modern internet (Web 2.0, if you like) is the high availability and feature depth of APIs that websites make available to enable integration into a variety of systems. These range across the whole spectrum of websites from flickr to BetFair.

One API that has particularly taken my interest of late is the Facebook Developers API, this is the API used to build all Facebook applications. What is particularly interesting, and perhaps surprising, about this API is the amount of personal information that is made available about Facebook users.

In order to increase awareness of the information that Facebook makes available about you and your friends to every applicaiton you install I created a ‘What Applications Know About You’ application. Read on for more details.

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A while ago I showed how I upgraded my Solaris Express system using Live Upgrade. Now it’s time to upgrade again. This time we do it a bit differently as a boot environment for the upgrade is already available. Read on for the full story.

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