I’ve been told…

I’ve been told that while Karen’s been away, my blog has been boring. Ah well, what do you expect? It’s been busy with Karen not being around. She’s due to come back in 3 weeks or so, which I’m looking forward to. I kinda wish she was back here now – but that’s just because I have a touch of the flu at the moment and I’m feeling a bit whiney.

What have I been doing? Well, lets see… fiddling with programming on the iPhone. That’s been fun – although with the NDA in place over the development kit, it means you all haven’t been treated to me revelations and accomplishments there. I have two applications pretty advanced, although neither are complete. One is for calculating the tip at a restaurant (which I need, badly) and the other takes advantage of the iPhone’s location awareness and some local web services provided by Wash U/ Seattle Transit to report when the next buses are coming to your stop. (another application that I wish I had).

Somewhat ironically, I saw last week in Craigslist a job listing for Metro that was looking for a middleware software engineer to help provide the “next available” reporting at bus locations around the city and other “consumer reporting” systems. Sounds nice – I’d sort of hoped that Seattle would build something like that for ages, but so far it hasn’t. I’ll be happy if they just provide the raw data effectively at this point – I’ve got my application coming along nicely for the rest.

Along similiar lines, I recently became aware of a neat web application (Mashup) that Adam Parast has done: http://students.washington.edu/adambp/index.html. It’s a map of all the Seattle bus stops with a link to the tracker information to look up the coming arrivals. The lookup component is the same service that I’m using in my application. Pretty cool, huh?