Ice Man, here's a little update on what's happening with PetrolTracker:
The prototype is shaping up decently, I spend about an hour a day working on it.
Right now it can parse a message, extract location, return cheapest price etc etc, and geocode the location (turn the location name, e.g. "Koinange Street" into a latitude-longitude like -1.284227, 36.818868)
The hard part is getting it to return the cheapest price *closest* to you. This involves calculating the distances between the user's lat-lon and the stations' lat-lons. It isn't a trivial problem, but there are excellent libraries that make this a bit easier.
I collected about 30 stations' worth of lat-lons, though I was surprised at how many petrol stations there are in Nairobi! This tiny list is for testing purposes, there are still too many stations missing.
There's a central project status page for anyone wishing to get involved or to keep up with what's going on. The going is slow as I'm the only one working on it. If you feel inclined, check out the info on the site below and decide how to get involved.
Saidi
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 4:38 PM, The Ice Man
<aki275@googlemail.com> wrote:
The past few days I've looked at various information on writing blogs.
The advantage of mailing lists is that you can write out things
quickly and move onto other subjects. Blogging is very interesting for
writers. Though I've not written any blogs so far, I realized that
content is different. You do things based on analysis which I find
quite interesting, something we do many times here. I'll do some blogs
over time for skunksWorks KE and if time further allows on my site. (
it'll depend on subject as I can only assume that skunks blog site
will be moderated towards mostly tech info and discussions. I'd hate
to rant about safcom or other things on official blog sites) My search
also led me to blog aggregators and it seems we only have 2 in kenya.
I think its KWB and Mashada. My view is that there should be more blog
aggregators with more information and stats of blog sites etc.
I feel we have let down @Saidimu who had started a very interesting
project and went to a lot of effort to put down the threads that could
have been a key development here, there has been no chat back and
fourth on his threads since last week unless it went offlist.
@Saidimu, kindly update please.
Gentlemen, Ladies. Happy blogging on skunksworks KE. The site is here
: http://blog.my.co.ke/ as pointed out by @Phares and if you look at
the comment portion, it shows the kind of feedback kenyans are looking
at out there. Hope to see you online at the blog or on email.
Geographically we are ahead of the game in ICT and we should take the
lead with content on technology and other things too.
As usual, its me thots and corrections are welcome. :-)
Rgds.
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