A carnival of technology

You may be familiar with the Google maps overlay that David Cantrell created a while back using the MARTA rail lines. Since David doesn’t live in Georgia anymore, I took over the role of MARTA fanatic and copied his data for my own purposes. The only improvements I’ve made so far are using the different types of circle-P icons for the different varieties of parking at the stations, adding icons for the park and ride lots and adding a handful of points of interest for CCT. I also bent the track lines a little for a few sections north of Lindbergh, but I stopped that while I come to terms with the fact that the line data files are going to be really freaking huge. I also switched the data files to XML, since I hear that makes everything more fun.

Of perhaps more interest than the map itself, though, are a couple little tools I made to simplify data input. The first is a tool for finding points. Anywhere you click on the map will add a marker, and clicking on the marker will give you the coordinates. The second is a tool for making lines. Every point you click will be added to a GPolyline object, and the coordinates will be displayed in the textbox at the bottom of the page. Comes with an undo button, because I have poor mouse control. I’ve found these two pages to be quite useful, so I thought that I would share.

You may notice some new links along the side of the page, the galleries. I found a nanoblogger gallery plugin, so I took another step towards moving the entire site into the blog. Coincidentally, I also stumbled across the first few photos I took with my camera that I thought I had lost, my favorites being the Port City Java set and the pictures of the Jesus Van I saw in Cullman. I modified the plugin to create the subdirectories and individual pages for images, so maybe at some point I’ll try to clean up the changes I made and give them back to the author to see what he thinks. I’ll keep the old photos browser the way it is for a while, mainly because I’m too lazy to do anything about it yet, but eventually it will point to the new galleries.

I guess the next blog thing I should do is fix the broke-ass comments system. That sounds harder, so that’s still at the bottom of the to-do list.

Since I haven’t posted anything of substance in the past week or so, here’s a quick summary of what’s been going on.

• I fell off my bike. I took a turn too fast and got in a fight with the
  ground. I went to the emergency room since I couldn’t move my right arm
  very well, but my shoulder wasn’t broken. I got a tetanus shot and some
  pills (which I think were just Aleve) out of it, though, so I won’t regret
  the visit until I get the bill. I’ll probably have a red spot on my elbow
  for a few years where I slid across the pavement.
• I bought a new bicycle helmet, replacing that one that looks like half
  of a giant ping-pong ball. I got a blue one. My big fat head is apparently
  at the upper limits of “large.”
• Sandy Springs apparently has concerts at the historic site on the first
  Sunday of the month, and I attended one played by
  Keltic Kudzu. The pipes were
  neat, but I think I would have liked the rest of the show better if it had
  happened in a bar.
• Speaking of bars, I’ll have to remember to bring my own open container
  violations if I go to another of those concerts. It seemed to be a pretty
  popular thing to do.
• This week was really freaking hot.

I think that’s about it.

I found a bug in svnacl caused by some weird behavior in svn. It turns out that if if you modify the properies on a subdirectoy and merge it in from a branch, the action for the subdirectory will be “replace” even if its parent directory had an action of “add.” I think that’s kind of unintuitive, so the new version treats these directories (and possibly files, I guess) as adds both for the sake of making my property comparisons work and for the access check.

My MARTA riding has been going pretty well. I’ve given up altogether on driving, instead riding the two or three miles from my apartment to Medical Center. People have been surprisingly unjerkwadish on Glenridge, and I was even able to give someone directions to St. Joseph’s hospital today while stopped at a light, giving me a warm fuzzy feeling between gasps for air. Not having a car on the other end of the train has meant two rides in the rain, though, and I think I’ve already destroyed my brake pads trying not to careen into fifteen directions of traffic while riding downhill on a wet Roswell Road. I figure the bike is about due for its break-in service, so maybe they can replace them if needed and hopefully not make fun of me.

Riding the train has been a fun way to relax for a few minutes away from the hassle of traffic, and I’ve been noticing a few interesting things. For example, there’s apparently a Lexus advertisement in the tunnel between Dunwoody and Sandy Springs done as a sort of 50mph flip book. I wonder how much they paid to have that installed, and I wonder if Lexus is targeting the right audience with people riding public transportation. On one train ride I also happened to notice a rail map leftover from 1993 similar to that one at Peachtree Center station. Besides showing Sandy Springs and North Springs as under construction, as well as still calling the Western terminus “Hightower” and having Omni as part of the overnamed station to the west of Five Points, it showed provisional lines for some of their lofty ideas, such as the Northwest line, the Hapeville line and the line towards Emory whose name I forget. It also had a busway going south from Candler Park, which I found interesting in light of the newer East Corridor bus rapid transit idea. I really don’t understand the east corridor motivation besides being able to extend beyond Indian Creek without having to build new rail lines. Regardless, it’d be nice if they built more rail lines.

Another thing I’ve been noticing about MARTA lately is the voice that announces the next station. Among the various automated voices around Atlanta, such as the sorely missed robot people-mover voice (stop do not enter) and the welcome to the baggage terminal guy, MARTA lady definitely sounds the hottest. I wonder who she is. She’s probably about 60, though, so I don’t spend too much time fantasizing about a MARTA supermodel, hidden away in catacombs of the city, recording what’s near Lenox. I did, however, note today that she pronounced “GRTA.” GRTA is a money-pit started by Roy Barnes that, I think fairly recently, began running busses from the ass end of nowhere into the city. I usually make it rhyme with MARTA when I’m making fun of it (most of the time) and grr-tuh when I’m not. Apparently it’s actually pronounced something like gr?ta.