Posts Tagged ‘travel’

I’m in Brazil

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Christ the Redeemer Hello, Rio de Janeiro.

I’m here for a conference but had a bit of time this weekend to explore before it starts.

It’s not enough time to properly learn about the city, but I’m having a fantastic time and thought I’d share a few random disconnected thoughts.

Weather. I should get the cliched observation out of the way first. It’s hot and sunny. Really sunny. I’m regularly covering myself in SPF50 and still ending up more than a little pink. Perhaps I’m just not used to this “being outside” thing.

It’s hilly. Actually, they’re called hills, but that doesn’t do it justice. The bus heading up to Corcovado went up one bit that was so steep I was convinced it would roll back down.

The hills
Wherever you go, the hills are part of the landscape

Rio isn’t a place for people who don’t like heights. Even ignoring people offering me helicopter rides or friends suggesting hang gliding, the big tourist attraction is getting a cable car to the top of Sugar Loaf mountain. The views are apparently amazing, but I thought it looked far too scary and gave it a miss.

Views from Corcovado hill
The view from Corcovado Hill

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Bye-bye to ‘UK Traffic Checker’

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Until this month, I had an Android app which displayed road traffic problems on a given route.

It was a fairly simple app, but kinda useful and managed to find 33,000 or so users.

But it’s stopped working. It was using a bunch of travel news feeds from BBC Backstage.

Those feeds now all return:

BBC Travel Feeds

…we will be discontinuing access to all traffic and travel feeds released via the backstage.bbc.co.uk project, this will include both tpegML and RSS formats…

In the short-term, I can’t find a straightforward replacement (a free and open source of feeds for local traffic and travel news) and so I’ve unpublished the app from Android Market. Sorry.

(I have tinkered with writing my own feeds from NTCC data, which is something I’ve played with before. This is technically do-able – I’ve already written a basic PoC to demonstrate, but there are issues – such as I’d need to pay for the hosting of it, and the data only covers motorways and trunk routes unlike what the BBC had. So not sure whether this is a realistic option.)

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