Pie Palace

New OC Transpo Website: It looks like OC Transpo is rolling out a new website on November 12. You can get a sneak preview at www.octranspo1.com. The content is pretty much the same, but it’s all web 2.0-y. They seem to have replaced the clunky old travel planner with an all-in-one thing. (1)

Ouch. Data entry errors hurt: US courts have a spread sheet that they use to ensure that sentencing is fair. The prosecutors fill in a few fields and the spread sheet spits out a suggested sentence. But apparently there are data entry errors in about 10% of cases – simple stuff, like addition errors, or filling in the wrong field. The defense lawyers didn’t catch the mistakes, which resulted in variances of up to months in the final sentence. Oops. (0)

There's money in them thar bytes: Gawp has impressed on me the value ofcuration – that’s the process of normalizing and verifying data so that it can be used elsewhere. Clean, useful data is clearly awesome, but I didn’t realize it would be possible to build a business on it. AggData apparently has. They scrape publicly available data, normalize it and make it available for a small fee. I’m amazed that they can employ five people with a business model based on pure curation. Good for them! Further proof, if any was needed, that we live in the future. (Via Weather Sealed) (0)

1044: For those of you who enjoy your sweets to be both inexpensive and ethical: the Metro Central Y sells excellent Cocoa Camino hot chocolate for a measly $7, including tax. That’s 20% cheaper than Bridgehead! NOM NOM NOM NOM! (2)

Fund this project: I’ve always liked the idea of open source bounties. I want open source coders to be able to make money on what they do, so I like the idea of users banding together to pay for a feature. The only drawback is that I’ve never actually seen a bounty collected. As an experiment, I’ve picked a worthy project, and I’ll be matching donations to it that (a) link back to this post, and (b) total no more than €60, (c) comment here. So hit Cofundos and take my money! (Yes, I’m avoiding typing. But this is a minipost, so it doesn’t count.) UPDATE: I’d like to make clear that I’m only offering €60 in total, and that’s matching on any single donation made after the original date of this post (April 14, 9:00am-ish, EST). I also added (c) above, so that I don’t have to check the cofundos site. (0)