Tuesday, February 14, 2006

San Jose and office vacancy

A recent article discussed the high vacancy rate of downtown San Jose office space (roughly a quarter vacant). One concern mentioned was the cost of parking - San Jose is one of the few places other than San Francisco and Palo Alto that charge for parking.

San Francisco is served by extensive public transit. Palo Alto has decent transit, and a large number of cyclists and pedestrians. San Jose has... well extensive car-centric infrastructure, and not much that is appealing. Public transportation is limited. Sure there is a light rail, but 15 minute service? And where does it go? A few park and rides and other business parks.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

GPSActionReplay

GPS Action Replay is a cool tool that has some simulated replay like the dot racing (though it looks like only one at a time.) However, it takes a little while to get used to. It is written in java so it can be run locally on most any platform.

http://users.info.unicaen.fr/~mathet/gpsar/ or www.gpsactionreplay.com

motionbased.com

mostionbased.com has some cool functionality for analyzing GPS track logs. The dot racing is a really good way to see the slow points in a commute.

However, it does have some issues. Since it is a web app, you have to upload everything to view it. The entry can get downright tedious. (Need to manually mark everything as cycling, road, transportation, and give it a name - it doesn't import the track names.) And they only let you run your 10 most recent tracks unless you pay. Furthermore, the dot racing seems to croak if you give it too many dots. It would be really nice to see that functionality in a standalone app. Maybe I'll have to work on writing one.