laur.ie's blog

It’s a quiet Sunday-after-boxing-day and I’m wondering if I should go to the shops.

I was somewhat surprised to see that none of the large shopping centres in Hampshire give any indication of whether their car parks are full. I was more surprised to find that the Hampshire traffic information website ROMANSE gives live data on the car park status. As in, the exact number of spaces that are available updated every minute, and a couple of estimates on the number of spaces coming available soon. I actually only found it by searching for webcams of the area to try and look at the traffic on the roads, so I don’t know how many people know this wonderful resource exists.

A bit of PHP, HTML parsing and Cacti later and I’ve set up graphs to monitor how many spaces are available and the predictions. “If it moves, graph it”, my favourite motto.

So if you happen to live in Hampshire, and use any of the large car parks you can now check how busy it is, and work out the best time to visit based on the graphs.

All the graphs and details here: http://denness.net/carparks/

It’s been a while coming and I apologise to those who have been waiting but finally I have publicly released CactiView.

All the details are in the README inside the tar.gz, but here is a quick description for those who do not know:

CactiView gives you a clean and simple view of one graph from Cacti at a time. You can
name the graphs, and set the automatic rotation duration.

The display includes one main large graph for the last 12 hours, 3 smaller graphs with longer time periods and a couple of other bits and bobs of information.

Please let me know what you think.

CactiView is available for download here: http://denness.net/downloads/cactiview-0.1.tar.gz

Or on Github here: http://github.com/lozzd/CactiView/