London Tube

So last night my flat mate and myselfwere chatting about how it would be nice to see a real rendering of the london underground system.

So I went and started collecting data. I'm currently using ord-survey co-ords to plot the points and have the data in a processing-friendly format.

Now I'm looking for other uses and ways to visualize the data. Some suggestions so far today;

• Add height above sea-level and make it a contour map focussed on the tube stations
• Add the ability to provide your post code and plot it onto the map dynamically to see where the physically closest stations to you are.
• Use it to prove to tourists that it is quicker to walk from Leicester Square to Covent Garden rather than change tubes
• Add pub locations to enable easy tube-crawling session planning and management

If anyone has any other suggestions for visualisation or anything else to do with this then get in touch. (just decode the really strong algorithm used for my e-mail address above...)

CORBA/Perl

So I finally got off my arse and started on this. I've got a Parse::RecDescent parser up and running on 90% of the IDL grammar at the moment. The other 10% I currently don't care about and will add later.

My main task now is to generate a nice syntax tree representation that can be used to generate all of the types of output needed like stubs, skels, helper classes etc.

After that I'll start on the ORB proper and then the POA classes. I really hope I have enough time to get this going within the year end.

Work

Latest hack at work is an object-query language. You provide constraints in terms of objects and their members and you get a list of object references back.

It's quite simple but I find it very cool. I might try to generalise this and go and make that Perl Object Persistence framework I keep on musing about. Nearly got there once upon a long time ago but kind of got stuck on how to query the damn thing. Here is my answer...