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Saturday, July 31, 2010

No car equals using LTC Web watch

My car had to be at the mechanic for a couple of days which meant I had to take the bus to work.
It had been a while since I took the London Transit;however I got the opportunity to use the LTC Web watch monitor which provides real time location of the LTC buses. I must say I found the Web watch monitor very useful and very accurate.

Another result of not having my car was that I was able to catch up on my reading. In the spirit of London's City Council passing the Open data initiative I had the opportunity to read the following interesting articles:

Real Web 2.0: Linking Open Data
Linked Data
How to publish linked data on the web

Friday, July 23, 2010

Open data comes to town (London,Ontario)

On July 21st 2010 The London Board of Control voted in favor of opening parks and recreation data. This is seen as the first step in the support of an open data initiative in London. What this means is that machine readable data will be made available to be used for web and mobile applications.

I imagine getting an e-mail alert a day before my garbage pickup. Many mornings I have got up to see the back of the garbage truck to realize that I did not put out my garbage. The potential for applications are huge. With data also comes the use of predictive analysis for you data mining geeks. Other Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver have embraced open data.

One current example of open data application is the website eatsure.ca website which displays health unit restaurant inspection information onto a clickable map. I look forward to more applications in the future.

For more information on open data you can check out this wikipedia's entry . Also, check out Tim Berners-Lee's TED conference on examples of using open data.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

List of open source packages

I came across this list of free and open source software packages from wikipedia. It is quite a comprehensive list that has categories such as Science, Theology,Networking and Games.
Before purchasing a software I will definitely take a look at this list. Two software I currently use from this list are RSS Bandit and KeePass.
RSS Bandit I tried it after my previous RSS reader crashed too many times. RSS bandit is written in .NET and it syncs my Google Reader Account
KeePass I find useful to store and encrypt my passwords. You have the option to install on your PC or have it on a flash drive.

Due to the economic climate of 2008, some companies started to look to open source in a effort to reduce IT cost. Why not you ?