This week I was meant to make improvements to the android app since I got far enough with compressing data last week. That’s not how it went.
My laptop is really struggling to run the heavy tools you need for android development and I had a much more powerful machine from my old project just lying around unused at home. At the same time I got back a really old MacBook that someone had borrowed. So I thought, I’ll set up the Intel NUC as my primary development machine and the mac for iOS development. I spent a huge amount of time working on that and fiddling with my existing code so it would work with the new installations. But I’m done now and have a lot more processing power at my disposal. By the way, burglars, don’t get any ideas; it’s all safely Kensington’ed to a big radiator next to my desk.
Drunk on all this new processing power I’ve switched from my “dumb” text editor to android studio for android development and pycharm for python. That has taken, and will continue to take, some adjustment. But I needed to do some nontrivial debugging and I felt I needed some more powerful tools, which is an option now.
I did also have time to make progress on the android code, it can now read the compressed scheduling data but I didn’t get to the part where it display it. What I did try was to display bus stop locations on google maps because I wanted to have a sense of how the data is supposed to look so that, when I display it in the android app, I can tell if it looks right. It turns out that’s super easy: it’s like five clicks and then boom, there’s all the data nicely shown on a map. So now I know that some of my test data is from Mexico City.
This week I’ll keep working on the android code. I might take a detour around OpenStreetMaps too. The data I have covers all of Denmark which is what I want, but it would be nice if I could extract smaller parts – like, say, just Aarhus. To be able to do that I need to know what exactly Aarhus is, like, what is the exact region that makes up Aarhus. OpenStreetMaps is a huge database that contains, among much much other interesting information, that kind of information: exactly which geographic region is considered to be Aarhus (
as well as any other city). So I’ll probably spend some time extracting the data I need from there.