Brand new version

hello all, this version is now defunct and replaced by a brand new version at http://emocrat.org/carpool.

see you there. It is all still all open source and now uses the phenomenal python framework django for a much saner experience.

cheers

Project Carpool Update

Update: Project Carpool has been moved to the much more user-friendly environment at Launchpad and can be acquired via bzr or from Project Carpool on Launchpad.


After several months of intensive coding, an upgrade to Project Carpool is now available. The url is http://patang.org/projects/carpool/

Many new features have been made available. Some of them are

• Wikimapia search interface - search for any place on Planet Earth using text.
• PhpBB Integration - Users are signed up and for the accompanying phpBB forums automatically. Login is automatic. phpBB provides a private messaging mechanism between users so that your email address remains secure. In addition, it provides a platform for community discussion.
• Groups - Start a group and share trips only with your colleagues and friends. Protect your privacy.
• Pleasing additions to the user-interface....

Some things yet to be implemented properly include better trip management so users can easily accept ridesharers, delete trips etc. A low-bandwidth and mobile version also need to be implemented. Also, a version that looks as pretty in IE as it does in Firefox. Currently, IE does not seem to be happy with the rounded corners and hover effects that show up just fine in Firefox, but I think that's a discussion best left to developers.

Here are some screenshots

Logged in

Searching for location by name

Searching for trips starting in a 2km radius from Mani Bhavan

Sometimes it seems like this application is never going to get out of beta....though that's not such a bad club to be in per se ;-) I am looking for developers to help me out so please leave a comment if you wish to contribute code, css, icons etc.

Some Programming Notes

The application is written in PHP with a MySQL database and javascript for the frontend work. I have attempted to preserve clean separation of data and presentation. The backend talks only XML and XHTML, so it can be used as a webservice with the results being plugged into your client of choice. A very quick and dirty templating engine makes sure that there is no confusion between the core classes and the XML generating backend. A particular query can quite easily be switched between returning an XML document or an HTML files.


Open Source - I do believe that this effort represents the worlds first open source carpooling engine (hear hear!). It's on sourceforge. To check out the code do:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~sidsharma/carpool/devel

You will need the bazaar client bzr.

Back online!

Project Carpool had been offline for a few months due to a server crash. It is now happily back online, running with a new template engine making for a more robust and elegant codebase. This is still a work in progress, so please make sure you report any bugs, annoying behaviour and general evilness in the application.

Project Carpool on sourceForge

Project Carpool's code has been released under the GPL on SourceForge. The project can be found here. If you're a developer and would like to contribute to this project, please drop me a mail. All the code is available for anonymous CVS checkout, naturally.

Thw code is very simple, so there isn't much documentation. The core classes do most of the work and the rest of the files are basically HTML templates. The core class files start with 'C', i.e. CUser.php, CTrip.php and basically export two main methods (toHMTL and toXML) that are used to render the objects back to the user. Any output on the screen comes mainly from these two methods. I am trying to implement a simple templating engine to handle this.

Also, there's one bugs that need to be fixed ASAP. The timezones are all wrong. The app should check the users timezone and set a cookie called 'date' (or something) and compare the time values with this number, and not with the server time() (duh).

Please let me know if you have any problems with the CVS checkout or with getting a working app running on your machine. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. Enjoy the code. I really enjoyed writing it. There's still a lot more to be done, and any help I can get from out there would be great.

Project Carpool is now worldwide!

Seeing as how little enthusiasm the initial Project MumbaiCar generated in Mumbai, I feel that the server at patang.org can safely take this new development.

In an effort to delegate most of the work to users (such as they aren't :-), users can now add their own cities and landmarks. This means that the carpooler can be anywhere in the world. Project MumbaiCar is therefore, officially dead, and we're looking for a cool new name for the....thing (anything's got to be cooler than Project Carpool, right?)
Users also now have the right to add landmarks (as opposed to custom locations), thus allowing them to map their city in ways that they see fit.

New cities are added using a really cool, free international geocode database provided by the folks at ZeeSource.

There is still much work to be done. Here's a list of features that are topmost in my mind:
a) Messaging between users.
b) Trust establishment - I'm waiting for Orkut to release an API, or for any of the social-networking sites to change their terms of service to allow bots to scrape their pages, so this feature will have to wait until then. I'm not too keen on re-implementing the social networking features to have them on this site, but if anyone else wants to pitch in, hop aboard!

Carpool 1.0 and Taking A Break

So I figure we can safely call this Project Carpool 1.0. It's open for all to play with and can be found here: http://patang.org/projects/ajaxcarpool/
Bug reports welcome as usual.

The project is now on the backburner, so future feature upgrades only on request (or as and when the fancy strikes me), so actually nothing really has changed except perhaps my blog might not be as monotonous as it had become while I was obsessing over this.

Thanks to everyone who chipped in with words of encouragement and bug reports. A shout out to Rajan for pointing me in the direction of XmlHttpRequest and making my life very interesting indeed. Special thanks also to Anoop, Anannya and Fadereu for helping test the application and for their insightful comments ('Dude, the colours suck!').

Carpool Beta Release

I released the Mumbai Carpool site to a limited audience on C**S**F on Saturday. I think it is safe to call this a beta release. If all goes well and people start adopting it, I'm planning to take it to the mainstream media in a couple of weeks. Here's the url: http://patang.org/projects/carpool4 and a screenshot.



Why did I write this? It was during August 2003 that I found myself involved quite heavily in a debate about something that shouldn't have been a matter of debate at all. The Pune authorities wanted to break up a mountain so that they could shove a road through it. To me, it seemed like a no-brainer. Of course you can't take away one of the last remaining green spaces in Pune and replace it with tar and concrete and Ford Endeavours. To my horror though, there were enough people, educated people, well-meaning people, to whom that fifteen minutes saved on their commute was more precious. I found myself engaged in endless debates about this issue, and so to educate myself more, I started doing some research. This is when I stumbled upon Enrique Peñalosa, the incredible Mayor of Bogota. What he has to say is much better said by him. Suffice to say that his ideas brought tears to my eyes, for example

One common measure of how clean a mountain stream is is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It’s the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.

or

If we in the Third World measure our success or failure as a society in terms of income, we would have to classify ourselves as losers until the end of time. Given our limited resources, we have to invent other ways to measure success, and that could be in terms of happiness. It may be in how much time children spend with their grandparents, or the ways in which we are able to enjoy our friendships, or how many times people smile during the week. A city is successful not when it’s rich but when its people are happy. Public space is one way to lead us to a society that is not only more equal but also much happier.

Here are some links definitely worth following.
The Politics of Happiness
Bogota-A City Transformed
A Tale of Two Mayors:The improbable story of how Bogota, Colombia, became somewhere you might actually want to live
Academic Turns City Into A Social Experiment

Yes, I recognise it for the childish idealism that it is...:-) but I figure if it can be done in Bogota, it sure can happen anywhere.


Wouldn't you like to be able to ride a bike in your hometown if you wanted to?