See-Why

BusTime Firefox Extension Progress

Christine — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 06:55:31 +0000

I’ve been wanting to make myself a Firefox extension that would display the next bus times at my home bus stop since forever. I don’t know how many times when I’m about to go out, but forget to check the buses until the last minute and then finding out that the bus just left. If only the bus schedule was in the status bar for me to see as I web surf!

I live in Metro Vancouver, and the local bus operator, Translink maintains a pretty good online system of bus times. Whether or not the bus drivers follow the schedule is another story, but lately it has been ok. I do remember times when buses were 30+ minutes late D:

Today I finally made some effort towards actually building the extension, and I actually made progress!

It makes use of Translink’s own NextBus feature, looks up a bus route at a particular stop and shows it in the Firefox status bar. Now I just need to add user preferences to set the refresh interval, and the GUI to input the bus stop and bus route numbers. And test it of course.

The most useful article I used so far was one from the Mozilla Development Center: Creating a Dynamic Status Bar Extension. It does something really similar, loading stocks quotes from yahoo stocks. It teaches how to use the XMLHttpRequest object to get data from an URL. However ir doesn’t tell you that you need to wait for the page to load though, and that caused me many hours of confusion *laugh* You need to wait for the XMLHttpRequest object’s readyState to change to 4 (completed), which I now know thanks to this ajax tutorial. So yes, if you want to make a similar extension that’s all you need. And if you live in Metro Vancouver, I might put my extension up for download when I’m done…

Oh, and this is pretty obvious but I’m not affiliated with Translink in anyway. And now the stop# shown above is not my home stop, and that is not the bus I take.

Scientific Journals

Christine — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:39:04 +0000

We’re doing a research project right now in the wonderful world of CPSC430, and I came upon an article about Nature Publishing Group giving the University of California a 400% increase. While we are not reading from Nature in CPSC430, I have used it extensively for biology courses, and other scientific journals probably run under the same model. Researchers at universities submit their papers to the journals, and other researchers then peer-review the papers all for free. The paper then turns around and sells these researcher’s own work right back at them at astronomical prices! I’m not even going to analyze this using ethical theories, it is just too ridiculousness. Obviously it’s only the publisher getting anything out of this system. It’s time for a more web 2.0 approach to scientific publishing, reviewers can leave comments right on the paper then. I remember my co-op supervisor talking about something like this before too. I’m surprised that universities don’t already run their own databases like that for their own faculty’s work. I guess when papers are submitted to journals, the authors lose copyright so they can’t post it elsewhere? :/ I’m not sure, but if it is that is also the lamest thing ever.

Sweat Shop Poem

Christine — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 19:07:19 +0000

So in the last post in my class journal here, I talked about Mouse Manufacturing. It reminds me of a poem by Canadian poet Rita Wong, here’s an excerpt:

nothing comes between me &
the labour of the garment workers
their fifty cents a day sweat
hugs me tight every morning

my auntie’s fingers nimble
with the demands of piecework
how she churns dozens of jeans by dim lamplight
one more casualty for casual wear

The rest is posted on her website (It’s near the bottom of the page, called “denim blues”. To change the situation for computer mice:

nothing comes between me &
the labour of the factory workers
their fifty cents a day sweat
under my hand everyday
as I point and click

ok so I’m not a poet.