Archive for the ‘Ruby’ Category

FlightCaster Flight Delay Prediction

Monday, November 9th, 2009

A bit ago I was cruising the Hacker News site and there was a posting about one of the YCombinator alumni companies called FlightCaster. The company and the technology behind it really sparked my interest so I decided to read more. FlightCaster is a company which tries to predict in advance flight delays that may occur on a given flight. By giving you advanced warning of an impending delay, you can reschedule your flight before the masses crowd the counter when the airline officially announces the delay. They do this by scanning the available FAA data, weather reports, and using statistical analysis. The technology they use to accomplish this (Clojure and Ruby on Rails) and their approach is extremely interesting.

You can read 2 great articles about the company and their technology here:

Clojure and Rails – the Secret Sauce Behind FlightCaster

Building FlightCaster’s Frontends for the Web and Smartphones

Their application is available as an iPhone or Blackberry app. Since I was to be traveling to Denver shortly after originally reading about this company, I decided to make my first app purchase for the iPhone (9 months of iPhone ownership and I still had only used free apps) for a whopping $4.99 (the price is now down to $1.99).

The app itself was simple and visually very appealing. As I went to enter my flights, I discovered that you can’t enter your flights until around 24 hours prior to takeoff. This is probably a limitation on the airline data available to FlightCaster so this was not much of a bother. On my flights out to Denver the weather was great and there was no prediction of delay. Sure enough none of my flight had issues.

Unfortunately on the way back home the application wasn’t able to find either of my 2 flights. They were small regional flights, but it was still a bit disappointing to not be able to use the app on the trip back home. That aside, I would still recommend this app to any traveler.

I’m definitely not a road-warrior so this was the only time so far I have tried out the application. Since my flights had no problems I can’t really say whether the app works as they say, but given the comments and reviews it sounds like it does (it did predict my experience on the way out correctly). If you travel much you really should check out this app. Especially with the lower $1.99 price, this should be a no-brainer for frequent travelers. And if you are a technology person, you should really read about how the company approaches and solves the problems of predicting the unpredictable. It is very interesting stuff.

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Posted in Ruby, Technology | No Comments »

Unofficial Ron Paul RSS Feed

Monday, April 30th, 2007

So in the same way as my previous two unofficial RSS feeds, I have created a new one. This one takes the writings of House Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) from his House.gov website and puts them together into an RSS feed (since that is really the only way I consume the news these days aside from Reddit.com).

The feed is available here:
http://www.theportermethod.com/ronpaul/index.rss

For those of you that have not heard of Ron Paul, he is a Republican member of the House of Representatives representing Texas that is running for President in 2008. Though he is running for the Republican party nomination he doesn’t really fit the Republican party of today. He tends to be more of a Libertarian in his views or possibly a Thomas Jefferson style Democrat from the days of old. I recommend you check out what he has to say. His message fits with what most of my friends and I think is important for our country going forward. Check out his Wikipedia page for some more information.

If I had to sum up his platform, I would say Common Sense, Personal Freedom and Responsibility, Limited Government, Fiscal Restraint, and State’s Rights. He always looks to the Constitution for guidance in his voting and is not afraid of standing up for his beliefs. And get this, he actually reads the full text of all of the bills he votes on (related see the Read The Bills Act). Contrast this with the majority of Congressman that have no idea what is contained in the bills they vote on (the Patriot Act comes to mind, also the Campaign Finance Reform bill that the Congress voted on and then had to bring in special trainers to teach them how to follow it).

Also, this is one candidate I actually contributed money to (first and probably only time ever) since he really needs help getting his message out. You can help out too by donating here or buying some swag from his cafepress store. He may not win the nomination (probably won’t due to lack of funds), but if he can just get his message out on a national level I think it will get people thinking about what is important long term in this country.

Also, if you want to check out the Ruby script I am using to put this feed together, you can download it here: ronpaulfeed.rb

As with the other feeds, if anyone associated with Ron Paul’s organization would like me to send this feed to them nightly for their use just let me know.

Posted in Politics, Privacy, Ruby, Technology | No Comments »

Unofficial Clark Howard Show RSS Feed

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

Another of my favorite radio shows is the Clark Howard Show out of WSB in Atlanta, GA. Clark Howard provides daily consumer advice about a range of topics mostly dealing with personal finance. His motto is “To Help You Save More, Spend Less, And Avoid Getting Ripped Off”. Now that is a show I can get behind.

Clark posts a daily recap on his site with the high points of some of the topics covered and also some of the helpful websites mentioned. I love reading the recaps, but these days if it doesn’t come through an RSS feed. I do not read it. Thus I have hacked together a Ruby script to create such a feed. The feed is located here:

http://www.theportermethod.com/clarkhoward/index.rss

If you would like to check out the Ruby script itself, it is located here: clarkhowardfeed.rb

If anyone that works with Clark Howard is interested in hosting this feed themselves, I would be more than happy to FTP it to the official Clark Howard site nightly when it is generated. Would save me bandwidth and hopefully enlighten more people to the wonders of RSS.

Don and Mike Show RSS Feed Update: I have fixed the Don and Mike Show RSS Feed, so it should function again. The only change is that due to the new site using the Wimpy audio player to host the MP3’s of the audio recaps, the feed no longer contains these recaps. This is because the audio files no longer follow a standard naming convention based on the date. Now they include the date and arbitrary text describing the content. Unfortunately all of this information is locked up inside the Wimply Flash Player on the site, so I cannot scrape it to include it. If this changes in the future I will let you know.

Posted in Radio, Ruby, Technology | 1 Comment »

Unofficial Don and Mike Show RSS Feed

Saturday, February 18th, 2006

I have written a script to generate an RSS feed of the Daily Recaps and Audio Recaps for the Don and Mike Radio Show. The feed can be found here:

http://www.theportermethod.com/donandmike/index.rss

I have been toying with the idea of creating an unofficial feed for some time. I started out planning to create a script in PHP and did some experimenting with the libraries required to do screen scraping in PHP. That fell by the wayside and this weekend after a conversation with some friends I decided to go a different route. Enter the language Ruby. You have probably heard about Ruby these days from the excitement surrounding the web framework Ruby On Rails. My site is hosted by TextDrive which provides full support for Ruby (and Rails also) so this was a viable option. And this script provided a great opportunity for me to dive into the language.

After a little perusing of some tutorials and docs and a bit of hacking, I produced a working script that generates an RSS feed for the great Don and Mike Show. Since this could preclude you from visiting their site directly, I have added links at the bottom of each entry in the feed for their streaming Internet feed, a link to download their podcasts from iTunes, a link to shop for swag from their store, and of course a link to Hank’s Look-around Cafe (also known as O’Meara’s).

The Ruby script I wrote that generates the rss file is available here: donandmikefeed.rb

It is my first Ruby script and could no doubt be dramatically improved (and will be as a get the hang of some of the fancy dynamic features in the Ruby language) so be gentle with your evaluations. Feel free to comment here or mail me with any feedback.

Also, anyone associated with the show that would like access to this script or file, just let me know. I would be glad to have it FTP’d nightly to your server so it could be hosted as the official feed (and save me some bandwidth potentially).

Posted in Radio, Ruby, Technology | 2 Comments »