Solstice Release

Hello again, after a two week break. It feels like I’ve been flat out over the last couple of months, churning out maps like there’s no tomorrow.

I’ve managed to fix a handful of small problems with the maps:

There are also some other bugs that I know about and am trying to fix:

  • On the Charing Cross, Cannon Street and London Bridge to Forest Hill map, trains never step out of the berth for signal L156, and are (seemingly) manually interposed in to the berth for signal L148. This could be a fault with the train describer itself, which I’ll have to work around
  • There are occasional problems with some trains being linked to schedules which are not the right ones
  • Some signals and TRTS indications always show on when they’re not – I believe this is linked to the problem above

I’m working hard to try and get them fixed, so please accept my apologies for the fact it’s taking a while.

That’s it for this week – the next maps are a surprise (read that as "I haven’t decided which ones to tackle next").

// Peter

Swindon and the Cambrian Lines

There’s only time for a very quick blog post this week, as life is getting in the way. So, on with the show…

Two new maps this week:

  • The Cambrian Lines map is ready – although it looks easy, it took much longer than expected
  • The Didcot Parkway to Swindon map is up, covering from just west of Chippenham to Didcot Parkway, including an overlap with the Oxford map, which will be slightly redrawn and extended later

And finally, before I go to tackle the gardening – last week’s update introduced an unfortunate latency bug, meaning at peak times, the maps were lagging behind reality by as long as 30 minutes in some cases.

I’m really sorry that I didn’t spot the bug during testing – but I’m pleased to say it should now be fixed, and I’ll be keeping an eye on the maps this week. For the technically minded, this was caused by the train describer handling code searching all berths for a train description, rather than searching specific berths. The fix is simple – as with a SQL database, an additional index.

So, that’s it for this week – I realise I’m also behind on fixing some of the bugs on the site, which I hope to tackle this week. There won’t be any new maps next Sunday, as I’ll be busy preparing my presentation for OpenTech 2015

// Peter