Scripting News

Measuring the worth of a blogger

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:57:19 GMT

It occurred to me that one way to measure the worth of a blogger is how much intelligence do they add or subtract to or from the universe.

Sometimes it seems some bloggers just subtract, that when they post, others must negate the damage they do. One of their blog posts is an environmental disaster, like an oil spill or a nuclear accident.

Of course our presence in the vastness of the universe is infinitesmal, both in time and space, so either way it doesn't make much of a difference. But it's something to consider at the end of a year. How much value did you add to the intellect of the universe in the last 12 months -- and here's best wishes to doing even better next year.

Web 2.0 gas prices, revisited

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:30:35 GMT

On June 29, I took a picture of the prices at a local gas station, thinking they were worth documenting for two reasons:

1. The prices were so shockingly high.

2. I thought they'd continue to go up.

In a blog post, I compared them to prices recorded by Google Maps street view of the same station.

Yesterday, returning from a lunch in Sausalito, I stopped at the same intersection and took another picture. Instead of going up dramatically, the price of gas had gone down, dramatically.

Just goes to show, try to predict the future, the future fcuks with you.

Update: One of the cool things about the rise in gas prices earlier this year is that it got a bunch of people to buy these small cars that you see all over Europe. Not just in Berkeley, I saw a bunch of them in NY too. Maybe we should make a deal with Ford and GM and the American people, we'll swap one for one, an old gas guzzling SUV for a modern new high-tech Smart. Could be one of the public works projects of the new New Deal.

CTO of the Year

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 19:36:41 GMT

Tis the season for X Of The Year awards.

Time has Person Of The Year, I have Blogger Of The Year, and InformationWeek has CTO Of The Year, who they just announced is Werner Vogels of Amazon. I heartily endorse this choice.

Vogels has led us into the age of cloud computing, a buzzword for sure, but also a kind of software development that holds great promise. For me, it's the next step on a path that began with CompuServe in 1980, when I begged them to let me run software on their server, so I could do great things with their CB Radio environment. Of course they wouldn't. Now, Amazon not only lets me run software in their cloud, but the environment I run it is exactly the same environment that runs on my 7-inch netbook computer. That makes my inner software architect very very happy. You just need to write the app for one platform and voila, it's available at 40,000 feet on a jet flying at 600MPH from NY to SF, and who-knows-where (geographically) in Amazon's cloud. I actually logged onto my server from the jet using Remote Desktop Connection. I knew it would work, but I just had to try it to say I'd done it. It did work.

Now Werner had the vision to do all this, and more -- and to somehow get the huge organization that Amazon is to ship it with the vision intact. That's what CTOs do, their work is more prosaic than ideological, although ideology is important. The main thing the CTO does is get the organization to do important things. I don't know how he does it, it's a skill I don't have, but I'm in awe of it.

There's another thing to commend Vogels, he reads this blog. No joke, to me that's important, because we have a basis for communication. We've only met once, but he was instantly familiar because of the email exchanges we've had.

Now from time to time I shoot an idea over his way, something I'd like to see Amazon do in their cloud, and he never says one way or the other if they're going to do it, but sometimes the ideas do come out. Whether I was an impetus or not doesn't matter -- I'm happy when I get what I wanted.

A few months ago I suggested they implement the back-end of a Twitter-like service as part of the Amazon cloud. This was back when Twitter was having huge trouble keeping the service up. Now they're not having that problem, Twitter is much more reliable, but I think it's still a good idea, and I wonder if we even need Amazon to do it. It might be possible to build what I want using the services they already provide.

Let's give it a go. Viewed from the cloud perspective, my Twitter stream, the one I read, is a sequence of 140-character bits of text with several attributes. Easy to represent in SimpleDB or S3. Then the question is who has the right to insert something into that sequence? The answer is the people I follow. So there must be a way to represent that, again SimpleDB would have no trouble doing that. That list is publicly readable but only I can write to it. Now that's something I have to look into. Does SimpleDB offer permissions like that? I know S3 does. So maybe my follow list should just be stored in S3. It's very much like an RSS subscription list, and we have many years of experience working with those and a fairly consistently implemented standard. Obviously there's a user interface to Twitter, many of them, but that's not something I would ever expect Amazon to do, that's the province of the developers.

This is just an exercise. Not sure if it goes anywhere, but it may be something to get a conversation started.

I've also suggested to Evan at Laconi.ca that he offer an AMI on Amazon for an instant microblogging server.

But I guess my point, at the end of this rambler, is congrats and thanks to Werner and his team at Amazon for pushing the market in this direction. They're doing good work.

Blogger of the Year 2008

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 03:47:24 GMT

Last year, after giving it much thought, I decided to give out an award that I called, unoriginally, Blogger of the Year. I felt entitled to do so because I am a blogger, like millions of other people.

Why should I, of all the people who blog, give an award once a year to someone who, imho, exemplifies what's great about blogging? Because I can. And of course so can you. That's the point of blogging. Nothing makes my blog better than any else's. It's what I put here, my ideas, my beliefs, my desires, my foibles and foils -- oh never mind. The point is you can give out an award too.

But this is my Blogger of the Year award.

I'm not ready to announce who it is this year, but I've more or less made my decision. I called last year's BOTY to see if she approved my choice, and she did. Not that that's a requirement, it isn't, but I would have been surprised if she had disagreed. And while both people exemplify what makes blogging tick, what makes it worthwhile, the people couldn't be more different.

Last year's BOTY is a woman, this year's is a man.

Last year's BOTY is a tiny little person who eats vegan and spreads the joy of body acceptance. This year's BOTY is not small, and eats greasy food (as do I) and smokes!

Last year's BOTY is cute, this year's BOTY well, I don't think anyone thinks he's cute, except perhaps his wife, and even there I wonder.

Last year's BOTY often goes naked in public as a form of social, artistic and political expression. As far as I know this year's BOTY is always fully clothed in public.

Both people rub others the wrong way, get people to say "Who does he or she think he or she is?" I have a funny feeling all BOTYs will have this property.

Another thing both BOTYs have in common is they were both at BloggerCon I. Haha. Now there's a good clue.

I don't know when I'm going to announce the choice, but I love a good tease, so you gotta figure I'm going to stretch this one out, play it for all its worth. Sorry!!

"curly"

Where are snowcams?

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:00:00 GMT

They're calling it #snowmageddon on Twitter.

And on Flickr too.

I know it's snowing a lot back east cause it's raining a lot here on the California coast. And now it's raining some more. More rain here, more snow there. Pretty simple.

I just posted a twit saying "People in the eastern U.S.-- more snow headed your way. Hugs, California"

We're all in it together. Just some of us are more in it than the rest.

I miss the snow, so here's what I want to do.

Where are snowcams? I want webcams in American and Canadian cities that show the snow? I'd like to accumulate a list here.

Here's a cam on West Dayton St in Madison. It's a live feed. You can see the snow blowing and cars going down the street. Wish there were audio too. The Comp Sci building is on West Dayton if I remember correctly. This building is quite close.

Funny how Madison looks the same 30 years later.

Here are some other Madison-area webcams.

Post a comment if you know of one!

Goodbye to an icon

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:30:21 GMT

Doc Searls writes that Out Of Town News on Harvard Sq in Cambridge is going out of business on January 1.

There are efforts to revive it as a print-on-demand business, but come on, that's not going to work.

I think at some point you have to take a picture, have a ceremony, put up a plaque and let it go.

When I was a student in New Orleans in the 70s, I used to take the streetcar down to the Quarter every Tuesday to get the Sunday NY Times and sit by the river if the weather was good and catch up on the news from the world outside the bayou.

I imagine that's the function this news stand used to play for students in Cambridge of the same period. The stuff of stories, but it clearly not part of anyone's future.

Is a netbook a cheap laptop?

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:16:27 GMT

Two people I respect enormously, John Gruber and Michael Gartenberg, both joined in the discussion of what netbooks are with the same theory.

"What is the difference between a 'netbook' and a 'really cheap laptop that runs something other than Vista?' -- asks Gruber.

On Twitter, Gartenberg asks the question, and answers it. "Are netbooks a new category of device or just small, cheap laptops? I think the latter."

Not so fast!!

First, I agree that a netbook is a cheap laptop, although of course I'd prefer "inexpensive," but let's not quibble. It's that, and it's a new market category. As usual I have a story to go with my opinion.

Back in 2004 I was living in Seattle and one day I was hanging out at Microsoft, and Jeff Sandquist showed me a computer that changed my life, a small netbook-size Sony Vaio. It was an instantly charming computer, it spoke to me -- it said, no it screamed -- YOU WANT ME. It was like meeting the most beautiful woman in the world, an experience I have had, btw. When that happens the only thing the alpha male psyche knows to do is GO GET IT.

I went home and ordered one the same day, and when it arrived my then-favorite laptop became a desktop and the Vaio went everywhere with me.

Then one day in 2006, the Vaio broke. I tried to get it fixed, but it wasn't possible. And search as hard as I could, I couldn't find a replacement. It seems Sony had decided that this model Vaio had been a failure and apparently stopped making it. I literally couldn't find something in that size, a sub-12-inch laptop. They didn't make them, at any price.

Until one day I saw a comment on FriendFeed about the Asus Eee PC 901 and what a lovely thing it was. As with the Vaio I bought one on impulse, and it was everything I hoped it would be. They had picked up the baton from Sony.

The point to both John and Michael is that until the netbooks came along this was an empty category. That they are cheap is a great bonus, but I would have bought one at two or three times the price. The small footprint laptop has always been a market imho, and it hasn't been served fully until the netbooks came along.

Update #1: Apparently they do still sell the Vaio I liked so much. But the price is $3199.99. That's almost ten times the price of a decent netbook!

Update #2: This picture illustrates the difference between a laptop and netbook computer. Which would you throw in a knapsack?

What is a netbook?

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:46:41 GMT

In October, I wrote a piece that explained why I like netbooks. It listed a set of criteria that says if something is a netbook or not. Yes, it's my opinion. But someone has to start this conversation. There have been some ridiculous ideas of what netbooks are and aren't. According to Steve Jobs, an iPhone is netbook. Heh. He's making a joke. It's funny. I have an iPhone and I like it -- but I have a netbook too.

Anyway, without further ado, here's my list of what makes a netbook a netbook.

1. Small size.

2. Low price.

3. Battery life of 4+ hours. Battery can be replaced by user.

4. Atom processor.

5. Rugged.

6. Built-in wifi, 3 USB ports, SD card reader. Ethernet, SVGA, webcam, audio in and out.

7. Runs any software I want (no platform vendor to decide what's appropriate).

8. Competition (users have choice and can switch vendors at any time).

9. Windows XP.

All these things are important. I think we could make room for a Macintosh netbook, but it's tough because one of the things that's super important is that we're not locked into a vendor. I could replace my netbook with an MSI or Acer, even though I've bought two Eee PCs. Apple could make their operating system run on the hardware these other guys make, so they could ship a netbook that meets these criteria. But we're all pretty sure, if they deign to make a netbook, that it won't offer users this choice. We'll have to wait to see how it feels, but I'm not sure if I'd switch to an Apple netbook, even though I use a Macintosh desktop and use Mac Minis as my entertainment center system (I have three of them). I've been able to integrate XP computers into this network without too much difficulty. (Which surprised me, when I switched to Macs in 2005, I thought I'd never use Windows again.)

Another concern came up in a recent thread on FriendFeed with Kevin Tofel of GigaOm, who is one of my closest netbook buddies. We share information and pretty much share a philosophy of netbooks. He says there's still a cloud over XP, that Microsoft says they're going to withdraw it at some point. They keep saying that. To which I said, Geez Louise guys, come on -- you have a winner. Microsoft has to be the most out to lunch technology company out there. By now you'd think they'd realize that the market doesn't want a new operating system, that XP is just fine, thank you. But they have their own reasons, like the auto makers, to do what they do. Or the journalists. The last people they'd let drive the market are the users, right? Microsoft is basically a full employment charity for operating system programmers. They should let all those programmers go, and hire some new ones from the user community, fix bugs and give the users what they want. Of if they insist, keep them employed, but please let us continue to use XP. It's not a half-bad operating system and its cheap and runs on cheap hardware. We like it!

Microsoft's attitude about XP reminds me of the National Lampoon issue where they had a picture of a cute dog with a gun pointed to his head. The headline said: If you don't buy this magazine we'll kill this dog. (Ouch.)

Update #1: Don MacArthur says the purpose of Vista is DRM. That's why Microsoft wants to kill XP. And maybe that's why we like netbooks -- you can watch a movie or listen to a podcast without hassles.

Update #2: Other features you should expect to find on your netbook: a webcam, audio in and out. AM Pressman says some netbooks only have two USB ports. That's debatable. It's amazing how quickly the market has rejected products without all the features of the others. Two USB ports are the minimum you can get by with. Three really is pretty important, beyond "nice to have." I added the webcam and audio features to the list, above.

Update #3: People immediately say that I should broaden the definition or narrow it to include or exclude their idea of a netbook. That's not what I'm trying to do, though. There really is a specific product the market is settling on, and it's happening quickly. Partially due to constraints Microsoft is putting on XP licensees; and partially because there are applications that require certain configurations. I'm not trying to influence anyone, I don't have that power and don't seek it. I'm doing something pretty much like reporting -- this is what I see. You may see soemthing else, or may have a different purpose, and you can (of course) to write your own piece explaining netbooks.

Embargoes are stupid and unbloglike

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:49:36 GMT

See this FriendFeed post.

http://bit.ly/BrEAf

Thanks!

My great uncle's letters

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:55:13 GMT

German author Arno Schmidt was my great-uncle on my mother's side, my maternal grandmother's younger brother. I never met him, but when he died in 1979, my mother ended up with a collection of his writing. We want to donate these writings to a library for long-term preservation. We're going to do this slowly and carefully, because we want to do right by an ancestor, but also to learn as much as possible about the process to apply to preserving digital archives. I'll write more about the book collection later.

I also have a taped interview with Lucy Schmidt Kiesler, my grandmother, done by a Schmidt biographer, which I'm going to digitize and then release as an MP3 podcast. It'll be the first time I've heard my grandmother's voice since she died in 1977.

Today I want to see if it's possible to do some detective work to find some of my great uncle's letters to my grandmother, his sister -- from his home in Germany to her home in Rockaway.

Here's what I know. According to my mother, in 1977, a doctoral student from the University of Texas, Kenneth Wayne Egan, visited and with permission, studied the letters, which had been left to my mother by her mother, my grandmother, Arno Schmidt's sister. Apparently Mr. Egan took the letters, according to my mother, without permission. One thing's certain -- we don't at this time have the letters.

I have a letter from Dr. H-B.Moeller, Assoc Prof in the Department of Germanic Languages, thanking my mother for her help and hoping that she would extend her welcome, if needed again, in the future. My mother says she attempted to contact Dr. Moeller to inquire about the letters, but he didn't respond.

I scanned the letter and uploaded it to Flickr. Click on the thumbnail below to see the full image.

We did some searching and found Egan's doctoral dissertation mentioned in the bibliography of an analysis of Schmidt's Zettle's Traum. It's possible the originals are in a library at the University of Texas. If so, they should be returned to my mother so we can include them with the collection of our books in our donation. I'm not saying that Egan, or Moeller or the University of Texas did anything wrong, memories can fade over 30-plus years. But we believe the letters belong with the rest of Schmidt's writings, as a collection. In any case, it would be helpful to know where they are.

Update: Jeff Beckham sent a link to Dr. Moeller's page on the University of Texas website. I sent him an email asking for his help in locating the letters.

The lame duck ducks, redux

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:49:33 GMT

Yesterday I posted a video of US President George Bush having a pair of shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist while yelling insults at him. Bush did what you'd hope he'd do, he ducked -- then came back up unbelievably with a half-grin on his face, just before ducking again as the guy threw his other shoe.

I also posted a number of questions on Twitter that I should have posted here, which would have made more clear my concern.

1. Will Secret Service make reporters remove shoes?

2. Bush is POTUS. Such disrespect of US is bad

3. Will they throw shoes at Obama? Will we think that's funny?

4. What if it escalates? Where is the line where it stops being entertainment?

Now Twitter is the opposite of verbose. In a blog post I can fully explain, which I will now do...

First and foremost until January 20, Bush is more than Bush, he is the President of the United States. When you throw shoes at this guy, until then, you're also throwing them at the office, and at the country. If you're an American and your pride in your country isn't offended by this, then well, you're different than me. I think Bush is the worst President we've ever had. But until he's out of office, he is our President. I hope we make it to January 20 without paying more dearly for our terrible choice.

Second, I found, from watching the video, over and over, that while I saw the humor in it, and I laughed out loud, that I can't help sympathizing with the guy who's being attacked. I admire his spirit. He didn't get angry, he sort of acted like a goalie, and fielded the shots. But as funny as it is, it is sad for us.

The day-after reaction in the Arab world confirms this. They can get away with throwing shoes at the President. What's next? Shit? What if one of those shoes had injured the man? Do we want discourse to go this way? And then what if someone throws shoes at Obama. Can you imagine there wouldn't be a response from the US? There better be or else the next symbol to go could be something bigger -- but wait a minute -- there is no symbol bigger than our President.

If you're not an American, imagine your leader visiting our country and being physically attacked this way by an American. Yes I fully understand that the Iraqis have legitimate issues with America and with Bush, but a visiting leader of a foreign country is entitled to some respect and protection. Otherwise how can we have relations? It's the same principle that provides immunity for diplomats.

This is no good. Sorry if you don't understand, when people say the shoes were being thrown at the man and not the office and not the country, I can't agree. Until the 20th of January, there's no difference between the three.

Twitter federates with Google?

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:38:24 GMT

Not sure what to make of the announcement that Twitter is becoming part of Google's federation. That could be the wrong way to describe it. Here's what I do know. You'll be able to use your Twitter ID to sign on to any site that supports Google's API and the relationships between you and your followers and the people you follow will somehow be reflected in the Google "social graph." It'll be interesting to see how this works because "follow" isn't mutual, if I follow you it doesn't mean that you follow me, where friendship in social networks is two-way.

Also unsure of how safe this is for Twitter. Once they've let Google have a shot at their users this way, how far a reach is it for Google to provide a Twitter-like service to all of Twitter's users and all of their users? Maybe this isn't interesting for some reason?

Update #1: Twitter is also connecting with Facebook.

Update #2: And leaves MySpace wondering WTF.

Netflix is dix

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:07:39 GMT

My credit card account got hacked, leaving me in a sticky wicket when I got to NY. I was able to convince the credit card company to let me check in, just, and then when I got to the room they cancelled the card. As a result various services will try to bill that card and will fail (I've been through this before). Most of them come at the end of the month, but Netflix tried to bill the account the day after it was cancelled, and I was still in NY and hadn't received the new card yet. But they put my "account on hold" anyway -- which means if I thought of a movie to add to my queue in the meantime, tough noogies, no payee no queuee. No grace period, even though I've been a subscriber in good standing since 2001 or so. Assholes.

The stupid thing about it is I'm on the verge of shutting down Netflix anyway. I've exhausted my imagination of old movies to have them send me. I usually don't even watch the ones I order, I just send them right back, and it makes me feel guilty that I'm contributing to global warming. But Markman just posted a long list of great 1930s films, and I wanted to check them out in Netflix, but nooooooooo... I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

I've always said Netflix should be about the intersection between movies and the Internet, and they should own that space, and never under any circumstances close the site to an avid film user, esp one who has been paying $20 per month steadily year after year. What a bunch of losers!!

Singin in the Rain, day 2

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:30:42 GMT

I didn't know so many 20s and 30s film enthusiasts were tuned in to Scripting News. I am one myself, the 30s were probably the biggest growth decade for film, at the dawn of the decade sound was just coming out (I was wrong yesterday, The Jazz Singer was of course the first picture with sound, 1927).

A commenter posted a pointer to a Chris Pirillo piece that explains in great detail how to download an MP4 of a YouTube video. The Cliff Notes version: Right-click on this link, choose Bookmark This Link. Then when you're on a YouTube page whose video you want, just choose the Bookmark menu item, and save it to your local hard drive.

I tried it with Singin in the Rain, and it worked, and now I have a copy in my archive on Amazon S3, so it's less likely to disappear in the future.

Re yesterday's piece, I'm still wanting to create a list of all the people in the song, in order. I only know who a few of them are.

Singin in the Rain

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:04:57 GMT

I've been looking for this song, in video, for years -- and today I found it on YouTube, while flying from NY to SF on American Airlines flight 15.

It was the closing song of the Hollywood Revue of 1929, the first talking picture, which is actually in the public domain. I'd like to download an archive of this video in case it disappears from YouTube (one that was there about a week ago did disappear, for no good reason, since it is public domain).

I know who a few of the actors are, but I'd like to know the names of all of them.

A young Joan Crawford is the second in the review.

Two later is Buster Keaton, the only one who isn't singing.

I'm sure Jack Benny is in there somewhere, as is Conrad Nagel.

Marie Dressler is the old woman, third from last.

Who is this guy? He looks like he could be a friend of mine (of course no matter, all these people are long-dead).

The 1930s was a golden age of movies. So much great stuff, culminating in one of the best years -- 1939.

First post from 38K feet

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:38:03 GMT

I'm on an American Airlines flight from New York to San Francisco. It has wifi from Gogo Inflight.

Aside from immediately posting a note on Twitter, I checked to see if it had enough bandwidth to access my Slingbox, and it does. I'm listening to the roundtable on This Week while I write this.

Before we left I took a picture of the plane and uploaded it. Maybe later I'll take some morepics .

I got a special offer of 25 percent off the $12.95 price.

All the more reason for American Airlines to have clip art for blog posts now that we're going to be blogging from the air.

According to Speakeasy, I'm getting 1201 kbps up and 269 down.

New York update

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:10:17 GMT

Cold and rainy and wintry here.

Been riding the subways, meeting with friends, walking a lot, bundled up and finding lots of free unsecured wireless all over the city, unlike the Bay Area where everything's locked up.

Another secret of NY, if you need a warm dry place to hang out for an hour or more with no one hassling you to buy stuff, try the lobby of a big hotel. There are lots of them, and they're public places, and often have free coffee. Someday they'll close these places or figure out how to charge for them, but for now they're noisy amenities that are open all the time. Across from me in the New York Sheraton lobby there's a mother and daughter playing cards, people reaidng newspapers, business people talking deals, and no one seems to be in any kind of a rush. I have my Asus 1000H with 5 hours of battery life and nothing to do for 45 minutes. I bought a Starbuck's at the bar, over-priced for sure, so I hope they're getting a fair deal from me. Christmas music playing (I could live without but) -- it seems fitting.

Yesterday I had dinner with my book agent Steve Hanselman at the Capital Grille under a huge portrait of JP Morgan. I promised a portrait of Morgan on Scripting.

This morning I had breakfast with Anil Dash of SixApart, and got his pic with David Jacobs, also of SixApart. This is an alternate universe, one of my best friends is named David Jacobs. No relation. The one here is a Mets fan and the one in SF is a Cubs fan. They both feel like brothers, for different reasons.

JP Morgan

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:26:51 GMT

Greetings from Dallas airport

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:55:24 GMT

Changing planes here for NY/JFK.

Going to take the AirTrain into NY, this time I'm going to get on the LIRR in Jamaica and ride it into Penn Station.

I hear from people who are regular JFKers that this is much better than taking the A train fom Howard Beach, which is how I got there last time.

The guy behind me on the plane is talking on the phone, being very stern, and talking about screening a movie in DC for "Barak." He is wearing two hats. And being pretty rude to everyone around. Thankfully they don't allow people to use their phones when we're in the air.

I'm doing crosswords and watching an American Experience episode on the Crash of 1929. Remarkable how many parallels there are to 2008. Basically we unwound a lot of the regulations that were put in place after the crash, so we got another one.

People are telling the guy behind me that they "Love your work." Wonder who he is. Didn't get a good look. He's black and wearing two hats, and is kind of short but he doesn't look like Spike Lee. I'm so clueless. You can quote me.

I don't want to be rude and turn around and stare.

Last time I sat near someone famous on an airplane it was Suze Orman.

Is your subway system a platform?

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:54:32 GMT

Does it have an API?

Funny thought perhaps, or maybe only in the Bay Area -- but our subway system -- BART, has an API. And it's kind of fun. I spent a couple of hours today hacking together an application, it's not all that useful, but one of these days something else will get an API that plugs in nicely and something interesting will happen.

Here are the docs for the BART API.

And the docs for the real-time ETA feed.

And the ETA feed itself.

Clearly it's a straight dump of the database of the BART trains that are running right now, and the time of their expected arrival at the various stations on the network.

I wrote an app that loads the XML into a database on my server once a minute, it's quite quick -- and then it looks for trains that are arriving right now, and sends a tweet saying something like: "The train to Richmond is arriving at the Downtown Berkeley BART station."

This would generate far too many tweets to be humane, no one in their right mind would want to follow a user that was announcing the arrivals of every train in every station on the BART network, which isn't even that big a network. You can imagine what a PITA that app would be for a subway system like NY or London. Not cool.

So instead I had it only report on trains arriving from any direction at the three Berkeley BART stations, Ashby, Downtown and North Berkeley. That's a manageable number of tweets. And that suggested a name for the feed: BerkeleyBart. Which sounds like something from a cowboy cartoon or a Henry Fonda western starring Jimmy Stewart and Raquel Welch with Buddy Hackett as the kooky sidekick. Okay enough of that.

It's a cute little thing, nothing earth-shaking, but I wonder if it's correct. Next time I'm at a Berkeley BART station I'll check it out and see if it correctly calls the arrivals of trains.

Also it seems like just the thing Scoble will like. He's into trains and Twitter and really strange things. I've also set it up so it works with FriendFeed.