Some hopeful developments

There have been a number of developments since I last wrote.

1. I successfully loaded all the points to the fusion table. It was much smaller as a CSV.
2. I modified the javascript so only points that fit the exact time criteria were shown, with appropriate radio buttons to control it.

For verification I wanted to look at the description of the points, but because I have so many fields, I couldn't see the description in the pop up bubble. In my attempts to figure out how to show only what I wanted in them, I decided to try deploying one of Derek Eder's existing projects called 2nd City Zoning. This process became a huge mess, but today I finally figured everything out. I'll try to outline everything I did here, in case anyone needs to replicate this.

• The instructions in his README seem simple, but to get it to work requires a lot of setup.
• A lot of it had to do with setting up the right Ruby things. This site provided most of what was needed. Some highlights:
• Install Homebrew, which in turn allows easy installation of other things.
• Install rbenv, which allows for custom ruby environments. Instead of using the built in OSX ruby, we can choose which ruby version to use, and easily switch between different ones.
• Ruby Gems is configured to install things to the local user directory.
• I created environment variables GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH, both set to a ".gem" directory in my home folder.
• Had a hell of a time figuring out why I was having problems. Turns out it was because I had quotes around the path names, like this: GEM_HOME="~/.gem".
• The correct way is shown below.
• GEM_HOME=~/.gem
• GEM_PATH=~/.gem
• I also installed Bundler, which takes care of installing all the dependencies.
• Seems to work with the "Gemfile" files.
• Still, I had trouble running jekyll, which complained about a dependency that I could see was installed.
• The answer was to execute the command using bundle, since I was managing the packages with it.
• The instructions also talks about adding a line to my bash profile, which perhaps removes the necessity of doing this. I don't know, haven't tried.

Now that I have it running I want to start playing with the javascript, so I can see how to modify what shows up in the pop up bubble. Then, I need to display the description.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the points aren't labeled properly because it doesn't pass the eye test. There seem to be too many no parking areas at night. Maybe this is actually correct, but I want to be sure.

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I went to a hackathon on Sunday, and it was time very well spent. I got to meet LA's chief data person Abhi, who was hired by Mayor Garcetti to open up a treasure trove of LA's data. I asked him about the parking signs, and unfortunately he said that data doesn't exist in consolidated form. That's fine, I had a feeling. Still, I just know that it exists in some form, probably scattered, simply because of the existence of parking enforcement. How could they do their jobs without this information being available some how? We just need to get the data from them, and put it together.

There's a project competition due in September. I'm going to submit my project for it. The winners will get funded for 4 months, which sounds awesome. If I can't get the data I need by then, I might manually walk around a bunch of city blocks and record the data. Then show my project using this data, as a proof of concept. Hopefully it is compelling enough.