That’s not as ridiculous as it sounds on its face. This station doesn’t exist:
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There’s an area in Baltimore County known as Texas, and Google Maps claims that you can get off the light rail there, at “Texas Crossing” station. For the record, you can’t: there’s nothing in the MTA literature that indicates a station there, and I rode the line past there today. The driver wasn’t about to stop.
Apparently, the MTA has considered adding a station there before. There’s a platform for light rail drivers to disembark from. The situation reminds me of how the new Intercounty Connector highway was open for a while on Google, a year before will be completed.
Problem reported to Google; blogging this so that other people can find information if they search like I did.
With all the noise surrounding Ubuntu’s new (and evidently very crashy) “Unity” UI, I was concerned that I might get trapped in an upgrade, my beloved no-frills Metacity-based desktop taken away from me. I removed Compiz quite some time ago, as I haven’t felt a need for any of the typical 3D-desktop frills (not to mention instability and bizarre bugs, like the IBM implementation of Java Swing being incompatible with Compiz).
Luckily, this has been a pretty smooth upgrade. In fact, the only thing that seems to have been intrusively installed is something called “Gwibber,” which evidently has a purpose to fit its name — integrate social networking into the desktop. Easy enough to remove through Synaptic. It looks like an ad for cloud service Ubuntu One was installed as well. I can’t blame them for trying. Purged.
My Gnome Do preferences were nuked, which seems to be a regular occurrence for that application. Other than that, Gnome seems to have picked up right where it left off; applets like Glipper are the same as ever. Incidentally, everyone should try Gnome Do. It’s great.
I am, of course, curious to see where these new UIs like Unity end up going, but there’s no clear benefit to battling its problems for me right now.
Also, the Ubuntu upgrade process still suffers from a huge problem, namely, that it’s not fully automated. I assume that the server upgrade process is better. But I had to keep one eye on my laptop during the entire multiple-hour install process to hit “Accept” about five or six times. And all of the questions asked would be baffling to normal users — configuring the MIME type database? Or they didn’t have a clear reason for existence, like asking for approval before restarting services, or asking for permission to upgrade glibc. These are things that are done automatically all the time with apt-get. Expecting ordinary users to go through that is too much.
This is my first experience with Firefox 4, and it seems like the developers are trying as hard as they can to distract the user. First, there’s the jumpy status bar that only shows up when you hover over a link: my eye keeps getting drawn to the bottom; a small cognitive drain. The Status-4-Evar extension brings back a reasonable facsimile of the old status bar.
Second, someone must have been bored and decided that slowing down the opening of new tabs by animating the process was a good idea. This is easy to change through about:config. The variable is browser.tabs.animate.
On Saturday, I experienced a kinetic sculpture race for the first time. The weather was perfect, and it was tremendously fun to cycle with so many other people. Though the crowds made it more difficult to get too many clear shots, there’s some more 3D pictures up over in the gallery.
It’s National Bike Month, Amazon just launched a bike commuter store, and so I thought it would be a good time to talk about how I get around town.
I own a Strida 5 SX folding bicycle. Some people tell me that it looks goofy.
But I think that it’s pretty comfortable, and agree with designer Mark Sanders, who says that upright bicycles are the right design for most cyclists.
More importantly, the Strida is basically maintenance-free: there’s no chain, only a Kevlar belt, so there’s no grease. There’s only one gear — but on any terrain that isn’t perfectly flat, I have no trouble keeping up. It’s designed to be as lightweight as possible, yet it’s unlike all the cheap bikes I’ve owned in that it never feels like it’s going to fall apart. I’m not the only one: there’s an active global discussion forum for Strida fans.
While it’s one of the fastest-folding bikes on the market, the Strida doesn’t pack down into a very compact package. It’s roughly as tall and as wide as a large golf bag, and, consequently, there’s a good chance that airlines will try to charge you overage fees if you try to check it (like I did — ended up costing me $200). Still, it’s fine to take on board the local light rail and subway trains; it takes up considerably less space than a stroller, for instance.
Still, the size has had me thinking about alternatives. I really like having a greaseless drive, with no chain to break or get me dirty. Dynamic Bicycles seems to be the leader in shaft drives; they make a pretty normal-looking folder. So do Kinn-Ovations and abio.
It’s hard to go back to a standard design now, though, having used an upright bike for the better part of a year. I can’t help but think that the ultimate ride would be a Strida with two gears (like the SD and MAS editions) and the ability to fold into a more compact package. Maybe for the Strida 6, I hope?
I’ve mentioned a “Big Project” several times over the past few months, and here it is, in its first public form. It’s obviously a work in progress, but it was time to put something out there and start tracking interest. And it’s been a great, humbling experience putting together every element of this product, from the data model (Postgresql), to the application code (web.py), and the interface design (such as it is).
Without any further ado, here’s TrackMyTV. The idea is to help people find where they can watch TV shows online, whether for free, like on Hulu, with a subscription, like on Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu Plus, or on a pay-per-view model, like with Amazon Instant or iTunes.
Obviously, I have a lot more data to import — right now, I’m only tracking some NBC comedies and Doctor Who. And there’s user interface improvements to be made. I have back-end automation work to do. But it’s a start. I hope you find it interesting.
