Bugging

So, have you noticed the new design? I was pretty busy last couple of days creating a new design for the website. Finally, it is up and running. Excited to hear your feedback good or bad...

Also, fixed a pretty major bug with TO Mapster skipping the closest start station. This bug took me 2 days to fix. 1 day for each bug... That's because there were 2 bugs!

One of them was a poor assumption on my part. In my desire not to discriminate against different modes of transport, I took a speed of 15km/h as an average speed something in the middle of a car and a pedestrian - bicycle , I suppose. All of a sudden, TO Mapster started favoring extra long walks :) I changed the speed to a more reliable 5 km/h to shift a balance of power to people who enjoy walking less than I do.

...still didn't work. I ate some candy, had some tea, and started slowly going through code... Couple hours later, I find a real hideous beast in the depths of Mapster. Whenever a route is calculated, I add departure and end nodes to the graph and edges to connect those nodes to the surrounding stations. This design gives me the best pair of start and end stations for free with Dijkstra's algorithm. So, when I create an edge, I calculate its weight by formula ( time_till_depature - walking_time) which takes us back in the future! I, of course, meant to calculate the weight of the edge using max( time_till_departure, walking_time )

Well that's my story for today... One less thing to worry about!

TO Mapster redesign

I am reporting that the reply from Metrolinx was that they are in the very early stages of planning. I think it is favorable. 

In connection with this, I finally decided to invest some money into the website redesign. I have received many complaints before saying that Mapster just doesn't look that pretty... I am thinking of paying a professional Graphics Designer to create a logo and a layout for TO Mapster. Also, thinking of rebranding as a GTA Mapster. I will speak to a friend who has a consulting company to see if he can help me out.

I think the response from potential customers will be much better if UI looks better ( see Joel's post about this )

GTTA / Metrolinx

I have learned recently that GTTA now Metrolinx has plans to build their own transit trip planner. That's a great idea and it is amazing to see that finally it is budgeted for. I am writing an email to the CEO telling him how great TO Mapster is:)

In terms of potential benefit, this is email is much more important than spending my time finishing geocoding the remaining TTC stations. I think I need to partner with a marketing guy since my heart longs for a technical problem when this is indeed a business problem.

GeoCoding TTC stations

Mapster is back alive and kicking!
The current item on my agenda is adding TTC Buses which involves a lot of changes to Mapster internals. Also, adding the TTC Buses requires me to parse all the data from the ttc website.
This is by far the worst data I have seen or imagined. I have a strong suspicion that all the data was entered by a blind person in 1965.

I ll write later on the assumptions that allowed me to parse the schedules more or less accurately. But in this post, I ll talk about geocoding stations. The geocoder remained unchanged ever since Ivan worked on it more than 8 months ago. It works like a champ for stations that are within reasonable bounds of human understanding. However, 10% of all the stations seems to defy gravity and have no relation to earth's surface!

Here are my numbers:
Geocoded successfully: 1790 stations
Failed to geocode: 164 stations

Those 164 stations include amazing jewels pointing to a complete lack of standards.
My personal favourites:

NO FRILLS
LAWSON at OVERPASS ( I will be an old man when a geocoder can figure this out)
COMMON AREA ( apparently implies York university and has 7 different ways to spell it)

I've manually geocoded around 100 stations this Saturday and have around 60 left:)
This is a good progress since after I geocode all of them, it will remove the last obstacle for the testing of the faster trip planner:)

TTC Overlay for TO Mapster

We loved Ian Stevens overlay of the TTC Map on top of Google Maps. We loved it so much, we decided to make one for www.tomapster.com. Ariel is currently working on it:)

TO Mapster invites comments

TO Mapster is in its alpha stage, and we invite your feedback about how we can improve to be more useful to Torontonians, Mississaugians, Bramptonians, Richmond Hillians and so on:)

Welcome

This blog is about new things that are going on with TO Mapster.
We are actively working on it in between managing school and other unrelated and useless stuff.
Our next major milestone is getting TTC Buses to work. We will keep you posted.