Tom Morris

It's not often that the Pope says something that's sensible - like that Islam is a violent religion. Okay, it doesn't go far enough to talk about how all religions - including the Pope's own religion, Christianity - have violent elements. But it's one of the few times that the Pope has actually been right about something.

And so everyone's gone completely bonkers of course.

Why aren't there people objecting to the completely ludicrous things he believes? I mean, this man actually believes that a virgin gave birth, that he is in contact with the Almighty God and is his representative on Earth - that his organisation is the only body that knows the truth about humanity's existence and purpose. All without much evidence.

Brice Hoult over in the Samizdata comments seems to have it about right:

"You're an ape-faced turd!"
"Hey! I resemble that! I demand an apology!"
"I'm sorry you're an ape-faced turd"
Seems to me that's about how it is.

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Dave has just pointed to Citizendium, a Wikipedia fork.

Their homepage has 5,504 words on it, and it's a real fiddle actually working out what it's purpose is. Most of it is trivia. So I present you with the diffs between Wikiepedia and Citizendium.

Citizendium is WIkipedia with "expert involvement, the requirement of logging in and real names, and more" (which, in 5,000 words isn't quite explained).

A question, though: "Will project management always going to be this forthright in their answers?"

I bloody well hope not. I haven't got time to read 5,000 words explaining how you want a non-anonymous Wikipedia with added experts. (Of course, the wiki functionality would be extremely useful as I could fix the error in tense).

That said, it's a project well-suited to the academic - it spends 5,000 words to explain what could be explained in about 50.

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Another one of my rapidly developed mashups - it's an OPML interface for Yahoo! Traffic. Yahoo provides a really decent REST API to their US traffic data.

It takes a handful of options - the first is "map", which embeds a small Yahoo map in to the outline. This has the advantage of looking pretty, but the disadvantage of reducing the number of results in certain areas (I was testing with towns in MA) if the map isn't available.

The other option it takes is "zip", which allows you to enter a ZIP code instead of the usual state, city and street mixture.

If you choose not to enter a ZIP, you should enter at least a state and city or town.

Certain places are not supported. You shouldn't have any trouble with the big cities - I've tested numerous Californian cities as well as NY, Boston, Seattle, Atlanta and Chicago. I've had problems with tests on Hawaii, New Hampshire, Alabama, Alaska, Utah, South Dakota, Idaho and others. Your mileage may vary.

Below are some places with different options showing. Feel free to change the URL. (I chose Boston for most of these - because of the Big Dig and the general busy-ness of the place, I know that there'll be traffic problems, at least for a while! )

Seattle, WA (Grazr)

Boston, MA with map (Grazr)

JFK St, Cambridge, MA (Grazr)

ZIP 02118 (Boston area) (Grazr)

ZIP 02118 (Boston area) with map (Grazr)

I've realised that the street level data isn't particularly useful at the moment - that is easy enough to fix. I also need to know whether people are bothered by the times - I'm not sure what time-zone those times are. I can always do a time-zone lookup (so that it'll give you the right time-zone based on the state you are in), but that's more work.

Due to the fact that I'm over 3,000 miles away from the US, it's difficult to know whether I've done this right. If you've got any suggestions (remember that I'm only using what's available in the Yahoo API), please feel free to comment or send me an e-mail.

I'd like to build a similar thing for the UK - although it's probably fairly easy to predict the traffic in the UK (the M25 = a boot trampling on a human face forever, for instance), if anyone does know of any APIs that I could use to build similar little pieces from, either for the UK or for other countries.

For the states that aren't covered, it may be possible - if you can point me towards a source for traffic reports for that particular state, I might be able to build in exceptions (although I'm not going to spend hours and hours building a complex screen-scraper so you can know whether there's traffic problems in Nowhere, pop. 53., I might be able to build something of a compromise in to the system).

In short - enjoy. If this helps you avoid wasting your life away in a traffic jam for even half an hour, then it's mission accomplished. I waste time at my computer so you don't have to waste time in your car.

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