Peter’s Useful Crap

TransLink, the Vancouver publish transit authority, has a nice “mobile site” at m.translink.ca. I use it frequently even though I don’t own a web-enabled phone.

TransLink says the following about the mobile site:

TransLink’s mobile information service - m.translink.ca - gives you quick and easy access to transit schedules, alerts, advisories and even the Buzzer blog – all via your mobile device!

The mobile site is also accessible from any device that is Internet-enabled and that uses a web browser, so there’s no reason why you can’t use it from a desktop computer or laptop!

If you’re looking for the next bus times, first and last SkyTrain, SeaBus, and West Coast Express times, this is a much more efficient site than the main TransLink site. It addresses a few of the deficiencies of the main TransLink site, as the mobile site is:

• Faster
• Simpler
• Provides bookmarkable URLs (so that you can return to find key routes or stops much quicker)

Now, the mobile site is not as fully featured as the main site, as it doesn’t provide things like maps, full bus schedules (or schedules for specific times), and lots of other general information. (In particular, I think that bookmarkable HTML pages of full bus schedules would be really handy.) But consider it as the better alternative for day-to-day lookups and usage.

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If you’re a developer, consider experimenting with the unofficially documented TransLink API or the static full dump of route data.

Supposing you have a spreadsheet with keys (Domains) and values (Count):

If you want to display the count for “orange.com” in a different cell, you would use the function VLOOKUP, whose basic use is nicely described here.

But as in the screenshot above, certain domains such as “green.com” appear several times. What if you wanted to sum the values of all of the “green.com” counts?

The solution doesn’t actually involve VLOOKUP, although it is somewhat in the spirit of VLOOKUP. Rather, you would use the function SUMPRODUCT, which multiples two columns and sums, well, the products. However, we only want to include certain rows if they match our criteria. This involves testing the key (Domain); the result of our test would be TRUE, which has a value of 1, or FALSE, which has a value of 0.

In E2 (replace comma with semi-colon for OpenOffice.org Calc):
=SUMPRODUCT($A$2:$A$10=D2,$B$2:$B$10)

In E3:
=SUMPRODUCT($A$2:$A$10=D3;$B$2:$B$10)

… and so on. E2 is essentially summing 1 * 2 and 1 * 4 for the blue.com rows and 0 * the count for all the other rows.

The actual spreadsheet I was working on involved full URLs containing the domain:

Therefore, I couldn’t do a simple comparison. I had to do something more like “does the URL contain a certain domain”. This is where the function SEARCH (case insensitive, as opposed to the case-sensitive function FIND) came in.

In E2 (replace the commas with semi-colons for OpenOffice.org Calc):
=SUMPRODUCT(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(D2,$A$2:$A$10)),$B$2:$B$10)

In E3:
=SUMPRODUCT(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(D3,$A$2:$A$10)),$B$2:$B$10)

… and so on.

Since the SEARCH function returns a number (specifically, the placement of the needle in the haystack) and the error “#VALUE!” if the search term does not exist, the ISNUMBER function will return 1 or TRUE when there’s a search match.

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Limitations: If you’re doing something similar to this with URLs, note that we are searching for “blue.com”, “green.com” and so on to appear anywhere in the URL. You’ll need a more robust solution to support matching those strings only in the domain (since technically you could have a URL “blue.com/green.com”.

With storage, bandwidth, and the quality of network connections and solutions getting better, CDs and DVDs are being shared — hopefully legally — and backed up more frequently. These often take the form of *.iso, *.bin, *img, *.udf and other files, freeing you from having to carry discs around.

There are programs such as Alcohol 52% or 120% (which also enables you to create backups) and the unsupported, Microsoft-released “Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP”, which enable you to “mount” the backup files as virtual drives. This is useful if you don’t have a CD / DVD drive on your computer or you simply don’t want to wastefully burn a disc. My favourite such program for Windows is Virtual CloneDrive.

With the sole purpose of emulating a CD / DVD drive, Virtual CloneDrive is efficient and simple to use.

Its options are straightforward, it’s a lightweight program, and it’s free.

Once you’ve mounted the disc image, it will appear like any other actual drive on your computer, as if a disc was inserted into that drive.

The Bridgeport Canada Line SkyTrain Park & Ride in Richmond is actually the River Rock Casino’s multi-level parking garage.

This may be obvious to many people, but for me, who’s used to the outdoor lots at the Scott Road and King George stations, it was a bit confusing the first time. The lack of clear signage and the politically-sensitive naming of the station (”Bridgeport” instead of “River Rock Casino”) added to the confusion for me.

Technically, the casino’s address is 8811 River Road and the Park & Ride’s address is 8888 River Road. The casino’s parking garage is directly connected to the SkyTrain station. If you’re a visitor to Vancouver or simply heading to the station for the first time, just think Bridgeport Canada Line SkyTrain Station = River Rock Casino.

Canadian consumers often complain about hidden non-governmental fees such as system access fees in cell phone plans and airplane ticket surcharges. Ticketmaster takes the trick of false advertising one step further with the non-disclosure of its order processing fee.

If you’ve purchased tickets from Ticketmaster before, you might already be familiar with its facility charge and convenience charge. These are silly enough, especially after you read the explanations for those fees. And one theory states that Ticketmaster is happy to take the blame for the fees as it’s the easiest way for both Ticketmaster and the artist or event organizer to charge the actual, higher, final fee. But at least Ticketmaster discloses these charges in the first step of the order process (this example happens to be exempt of a facility charge):

When you get to the billing step, however, Ticketmaster tacks on the order processing fee. This fee is described as covering “the cost to fulfill your ticket request when you purchase the tickets online or by phone”.

Steps 1 and 2 of the Ticketmaster online order process both occur… online. This means that you are going to pay the order processing fee if you order online, no matter what other options (such as shipping method) you pick. Remember what step 1 is hiding from you.