http://masalalabs.ca Tue, 25 May 2010 00:53:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en After a month long hiatus, I finally had a chance to get hbus.ca back into a working state. The big difference is that we're now using the official HRM transit data. Lots more remains to be done to make this site competitive for 2010 (most of the recent work has ... http://masalalabs.ca/2010/05/hbus-is-back/ With yesterday's work out of the way, there weren't too many extra steps required before I got a basic version of Transit to Go running for Edmonton. There are definitely bugs and rough edges (the bus names could definitely be better described/formatted, and there's some serious geocoder issues), but I ... http://masalalabs.ca/2010/04/i-can-has-edmonton-transit-iphone-app/ A productive day on the transit development front. Finished up a few big features related to hbus.ca and Transit to Go: Sped up the graph and database generation by an order of magnitude. Not too exciting from a user perspective, but I should now be able to iterate the codebase much ... http://masalalabs.ca/2010/04/oh-the-lines-and-some-help-for-edmonton/ Because I don't have enough spare time projects (this is a joke), I decided to take on the task of adding a must-requested special iPhone/iPod-touch friendly view for the WifiDog authentication server (used by the infamous Île Sans Fil) after being inspired by the WifiDog camp held a few weeks ... http://masalalabs.ca/2010/03/fun-with-wifidog/ Oh glorious day, the Nexus One is now available for purchase in Canada! I've been feeling less and less enthusiastic about the iPhone lately, in particular after the ridiculous lawsuit against HTC. It's no secret that we at Navarra have been doing quite a bit of work on that platform, ... http://masalalabs.ca/2010/03/nexus-one/ First, I'm overdue in announcing Transit to Go a.k.a. "the iPhone transit map that's demonstrably more useful than a paper schedule" a.k.a. "your bus departure in 15 seconds or less, no matter where you are". I wrote up a blog post about it for Mindsea's site, if you're interested in ... http://masalalabs.ca/2010/03/adventures-in-processing-with-prender/ >>> import neocoder >>> g = neocoder.GeoCoder("greater-hrm2.db") >>> g.get_latlng("14 Johnson, North Preston") SQL: select firstHouseNumber, lastHouseNumber, length, coords from road where name like 'Johnson' and firstHouseNumber = '14' and placeName like 'North Preston' limit 1 (44.73895263671875, -63.464725494384766) http://masalalabs.ca/2010/02/its-alive/ Hurrah, 2010 is upon us! One new years resolution I have set for myself is to blog more about what I'm working on. I've learned over the last year that the audience of people who care about your projects in development is vanishingly small. Thus, the need for secrecy in ... http://masalalabs.ca/2010/01/projects-for-2010/ Near a client's office in beautiful old Montreal. Originally uploaded by William Lachance So I haven't been blogging much lately. Story of my life, I'll try to be a bit more active in the new year. I'm now back living in Montréal, which has been great. Very sad to leave Halifax and all ... http://masalalabs.ca/2009/12/changes/ Started to use a new piece of hardware at the Navarra office today, which resulted in the following gem being added to the GNOME notification area. Would anyone care to guess what the following icon is supposed to represent? [caption id="attachment_54" align="alignleft" width="277" caption="Image of crazy status icon in notification area"][/caption] http://masalalabs.ca/2009/08/icon-metaphor-fail/