Tweet and share your location

Last week I had put up MyBooth, where you could go to for figuring out your polling booth. Essentially this is a service built on top of Twitter messages. You send out a tweet with the GPS co-ordinates and tags for that location to @tweetaloc, in the following format

@tweetaloc <message> (:<location tag>:)* L:<lat>,<lon>:

The lat, long is reverse geo-coded from geonames.org to figure out the country code, state code and nearest place name, all of these and the tags that you provided are tagged on the location and available for search on MyBooth. Currently the interface does not allow you to search in a country other than India, will fix that up shortly.

Behind the scenes is some old fashioned perl and php and Amazon SimpleDB for data storage. Uses Net::Twitter and Geo::GeoNames to poll twitter for messages and lookup geonames for the location data. A simple php page pulls the data out and feeds to Google Maps API as a geo-rss feed. Thats it nothing much there.

The itch behind this was the inability to find some place which gave out the exact location of where I could go and cast my vote. Addresses in India are ad-hoc and locating a place with just the address in hand is not easy. Online map services do not figure out the address for this reason and the only thing that can work here is crowd sourcing, like what wikimapia.org allows people to do. But then on the road putting things into wikimapia , so thats where this thing fits in, use any twitter client from your GPS enabled device and send a tweet out and this takes care of the rest.

Couple of things that I might add in to this

• search by twitter-id and tags, so you can search for @jebui’s office
• search for tags around a given location, for things like polling booths within 5kms of my current loc
• query via twitter

Annual Day @ Magic Puddles

Annual Day @ Magic Puddles, originally uploaded by Jebu I.

Aemy’s first annual day was today (23rd Feb). Dressed in traditional half saree and singing a Kannada song she was representing the Kannadigas. She is standing in the group in the middle leftmost dressed in green and red.
It was an enjoyable event.

BTRAC – Bangalore traffic follow up

This Ad appeared in most of the papers today. Interesting point 2 talks about using cellphone signals to monitor traffic.

Bangalore Traffic .. some help from technology

Bangalore traffic is a mess, its a well debated topic and I don’t want to offer any suggestion on how to improve it, my take on it is that the people have to be disciplined if there is to be some order in this chaos. While this requires everyone to make an effort i think this technology will provide some solace. With cellphones being present in almost every conceivable vehicle in Bangalore, this project being currently available in the US provided by IntelliOne would go a long way in giving some help to this mess.

Traditional traffic mapping solutions require deployment of sensors which are costly and some place like Bangalore where there is a junction almost every kilometer deploying and maintaining a dedicated sensor network would be a nightmare. The beauty of this piece of technology lies in using the cell phone positioning data that a normal cellphone that you and me carry. With data flowing in from the cell phone providers, anonymized of course, and mapping the rate of movement this provides a traffic movement data which is upto the minute, reliable and always on. Combine that with delivery of this information via applications on the mobile itself on an app like Google Maps for Mobile and you have a killer in the making.

Also blogged here…. and it seems this has been alive in Europe for some time from Logic CMG

Geomagnetic Reversal

Did you know that the earth’s magnetic fields reverses once in a while? ie; the magnetic north and south changes position once in a while. That was some bit of information to me, came upon this at wikipedia. Here is a link to the section which talks about geomagnetic reversal. It seems it occurs 1-5 times every million years and the last one occured 780,000 years ago.

OLPC, Quota system and the HRD ministry

Well the HRD ministry rubbishes the OLPC program (One Laptop Per Child) excellent, way to go, but please explain to me why are they so bent upon implementing the quota system in higher education?