Pie Palace

The VrtuCar reservation page sort of sucks. It works, but it’s ugly:

It’s also hard to use, as it:

• mixes available cars with unavailable cars,
  
• gives tables varying widths,
  
• places the reservation buttons inconsistently.

My greasmonkey script makes the site look a little better:

If you’d like to improve the look of your VrtuCar reservation page, grab the script from the GitHub repo.

Blogawa.ca now has three new contributors: our geeky pals at Zone 12, the highly fashionable Dare to Unravel, and the contentariffic Hello Ottawa. ((blogawa++)++)++

For some of us, making it big is getting cross posted to the Make blog. By that measure, the folks on Ottawa’s Zone 12 Project blog have made it with Nigel Vezeau’s fantastic child-size recumbent trike. (And yes, I’ve asked them if they’d be willing to have Z12 added to Blogawa)

Boo! After hours of hard work, I managed to get an AWN helper (nerdspeak for “a thing that shows stuff on my computer’s status bar”) for Workrave included in the official distribution (nerdspeak for “now everyone can use it”). I pinged OMG Ubuntu to say “hey! you like docks, and I wrote this thing! you should mention it,” and they did. They just left my name off the attribution. All that hard work and no cred to go along with it.

ScraperWiki just got a little more awesome. Dave0 put together a scraper that crawls the City of Ottawa website and makes the development applications machine readable.

A couple of years back I floated the idea of portable website scrapers that would be able to programmatically pull information off of websites regardless of language and platform. The folks at ScraperWiki have gone so far as to actually do it. Their version scrapes publicly available information (meaning that my use case of scraping my bank statements is out of scope) and stores the result in a publicly accessible manner. Props!

I accidentally let my New Scientist subscription lapse. They helpfully spammed saying that they’re having a subscription sale until October 10. The price for a year’s subscription? $75. Last time I checked it was over $300. I guess they’re feeling by the intertubes.

It’s too bad that our new Governor General’s coat of arms features an apparently meaningless string of binary. Considering that every other device in coat of arms has some degree of symbolism, I’m surprised none of the folks at the Canadian Heraldic Authority bothered to find something nifty to encode in there.

In entirely unrelated news, Bobby Scrawls, Assistant to the Deputy Herald Chancellor of the Canadian Heraldic Authority, recently got his first tattoo! He wanted to get “out of the box” of his day job, so he got some really awesome Chinese Japanese Korean Asian characters inked on his back. Because of his incredible artistic ability, he got “Writes like a ninja” tattooed over his spine:

Of course, opinions on the meaning of those characters differ.

(Images from Hanzi Smatter used without permission, see Mental Floss for more tattoo fun)

The Web 2.0 dream is to be able to give something away while still making a living on it. That may work for Cory Doctorow, but for most of us, it’s untenable. The only mechanism I’ve seen for paying open source peeps for consumer-grade projects is donations. Paypal and Amazon both provide an ability to donate to a project, as does Pledgie, but I haven’t seen anything that makes donating easy.

Then I found Flattr. It allows donors to give micropayment-style donations to anyone with a web page (and a Flattr account). It makes life easier for donors because they choose how much they will give a month, and that amount is divided amongst their donees.

It isn’t perfect. The Flattr community is pretty sparse, and there’s no way to set a recurring Flattr, but they’re 90% of the way there. It’d be great if Canonical, vim, Parcellite, Google Chrome, kdenlive, and Guake accepted Flattrs.

If you’re looking for an invitation, hit me up with the contact form and I’ll hook you up.

(h/t Raphaël Hertzog)

I knew that OC Transpo had been making their route/schedule information available to Google Maps for a while, but I wasn’t aware that the information was publicly available. Even better: the spec is available too! (via DataOtt.org)