Archive for the ‘Transport’ Category

‘Your Next Bus’ on your iPhone

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

‘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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National Express WiFi is satellite based?

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

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 :)

Woodhouse Lane Car Park

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

I don’t know about you but I find the myriad entrances and exists from Woodhouse Lane car park in Leeds city centre totally baffling, especially how they relate to the A58(M) Inner Ring Road.

For example if you drive up Claypit Lane and turn right onto the slip road for the A58(M) you can’t get across to the car park, rather you should have approached from the previous exit on the A58(M), or is it A64(M) at that point? Instead you must drive on past the turn for the Merion Centre car park, turn right, go all the way round the Dry Dock, through various sets of lights and enter via the north entrance.

In an attempt to better understand this most baffling of car parks I’ve put a map together which hopefully will help me plan the right trajectory that will allow access to the car park. The significant oddity that the map does not elucidate is that the exit to the south (city centre) is on level 1, the exit on the north (eventually eastbound) is on level 7 and the exit on the east side (eventually northbound) is on level 12 down a fabulous ‘they wouldn’t build it like that these days’ style ramp. Anyway here’s the first draft of the map.

Woodhouse Lane Car Park

The myriad entry and exit points of Woodhouse Lane Car Park

Update: Since publishing this I’ve noticed there is a further exit on level 8 on the east side of the building that connects with the ramp running down from level 12.