got the idea for this project when I was obviously stuck in a traffic jam. I began to first wonder why no one bothered to help push the stalled car off the road. Second I began to wonder why the city doesn’t come out and tow the problem vehicle and avoid the headache of having intersections blocked by cars that got caught by the gridlock ahead.

Keeping that in mind I started to come up with an estimate of how much it would cost the city to simple move the vehicle vs. the time and money wasted by the people affected by the delay.

Gas costing what it does and lets not forget that time is money. So I came up with this little calculator that takes the fuel cost, the time it took to get though the traffic jam, as well as the length, and how many lanes of traffic were effected. Take that figure out how many sets (time to get thought divided by total time of the traffic jam) get thought and that should give you a total average cost of the traffic Jam.

I did make some speculations such as the average car being about 14 feet long and being about 3 feet from the next car in front of it.

The average wage numbers came in my case from Stats Canada.

The information collected on this site will possibly go towards a national average or total cost of all traffic jams entered in the site.

Traffic Jam Calculator

Its been a long time since i updated my Spoke Calculator, i have actually had the new version working for some time but lacked the necessary time to get things tested and updated.

So the time has come.

whats new?

Improved Code.
I added the ability to add rims and hubs to groups in bulk, so no more one at a time! i got tired my self of grouping 1000s of pieces of information.
Refreshed the design.
Accordion sorting in the Get info section for calculations.
Refined the search field to be more intelligent.
Improved the manage page and how you can sort information.

Demo Spoke Calculator Pro

If you like this script, please help support it by making a donation.

The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts. The thumbnail for this article is generated by Google’s Chart API. The API is simple, the image is generated from url parameters. The following Code chunk breaks down the images into its basic components.

Read on..

A few months ago i made a small script that will take the Del.icio.us history of a URL and convert it to a CSV file. you might ask what the heck would this be good for. well i at first wondered the same thing when i was asked to make it.

Gene Smith a co-worker of mine is in the process of writing a book for Peach Pit/New Riders on tagging. So the Del.icio.us to CSV spits out a file that gene can open in Excel to look at tag order (and anything else that’s interesting).

I used a free php app called Magpie RSS is an XML-based RSS parser. So after a bit of mucking around and trial and error i was left with a little script that would do Genes bidding, it seams to work on a URL with under 500 bookmarks, anything after that it dies.

Check out the Original Post:

http://atomiq.org/archives/2007/07/delicious_to_csv.html

Ruby on rails is a fairly new programing language to me and version one was released a little over two years ago and it benefits from the open source community. For more information on ruby check out there website as well as Wikipedia.

The other half of the language involves what is called Rails or Ruby on Rails, and Rails is an open source frame work makes programing a breeze. Imagine adding a database table to your MySQL DB and then having it show up in your website without changing any code! its that smart.
Read on..