By Mike Lin
My new iPhone app is out:
Toronto Bike Map
It’s made using Toronto’s new bikeways data set that was released on July 15th. I completely didn’t realize this when I decided to make the app over the weekend of July 17th-18th. I just googled for it, found the data, and made the app! I don’t think I’ve ever been so timely in my life 
With the help of some twitterers It’s been getting some decent buzz and it even got posted on Torontoist! Unlike my last app, which has potential users throughout the English speaking world, this one targets iPhone owners, in Toronto that also bike. With such a small demographic I’m reasonably pleased with the 160 downloads in the first day.
A confession to make. There were supposed to be ads on it. Feeling adventurous I tried to incorporate iAd, Apple’s new ad network, but it turns out they aren’t serving ads for Canada yet, so the app is currently ad free. I may switch to another ad network in the future.
By Mike Lin
Check it out! No more lame TTC site for me. This will be so great for newcomers. Anyway click to bigify the screen shot, or try it out on google maps directly 
By Mike Lin
iPhone developers! I found an easy and automated way to cut an image up into tiles at different zoom scales for the purpose of UIScrollView image tiling as shown in Apple’s ScrollViewSuite sample code!
Just get imageMagick, a command line image editor you can get from MacPorts. I made a bash script to automatically resize and tile at 100%, 50% and 25% resolutions.
tile.sh:
#!/bin/bash
file=$1
function tile() {
convert $file -scale ${s}%x -crop 256x256 \
-set filename:tile "%[fx:page.x/256]_%[fx:page.y/256]" \
+repage +adjoin "${file%.*}_${s}_%[filename:tile].${file#*.}"
}
s=100
tile
s=50
tile
s=25
tile
If you run: tile.sh bigimage.jpg it’ll dump out 256×256 sized tiles called bigimage_100_0_0.jpg, bigimage_100_0_1.jpg etc for each tile at 100% scale, as well as bigimage_50_0_0.jpg et al at 50% scale etc.
By Mike Lin
I find this restaurant review of Ajisen Ramen amusing. It contains this quote of a vegetarian complaining about the lack of vegetarian soup in a ramen house. That’s like asking for vegetarian steak. If it’s not a meaty soup, it’s not ramen. There are some places where one can’t expect a lot of vegetarian options, like most Chinese restaurants, ramen houses and Alberta. It’s fun schadenfreude reading about people trying to fight these truths and not getting their way.
When I ask my server if the suspiciously milky broth that comes with Ajisen’s assorted vegetable ramen ($6.99) is vegetarian, she points at its picture on the menu. We’ll take that as a no.
A little background:
Toronto has no good ramen. I’ve searched. It doesn’t exist. This isn’t Vancouver people. The only ok ramen I’ve had here was from the uptown location of the previously dissed as non-vegetarian Ajisen, yet that place is Chinese run, and puts too much MSG in the soup. So I’d be ok with an unfavourable review if it were written from a position of authority. Unfortunately the reviewer brings up how much he loves Kenzo Ramen, a Korean run ramen place that I enjoy much less than Ajisen (eg tepid soup). I guess the problem is ramen experts seem to only migrate as far as the west coast… as it stands though, Ajisen is the place.
By Mike Lin
Canada finally (well, since September or something) has cell phone providers with interchangeable networks (for newer phones)! Incredible. It’s taken forever, but you can now not only take your number with you to a different provider, but also your phone… provided you can unlock it.
Cell providers don’t want to make it easier for you to leave than they legally have to, so they apply a ‘lock’ on phones you get from them which prevents their use on other providers’ networks.
Fortunately with many (most?) phones (but not iPhone) you can get a code that unlocks them for a small fee. I’ve done this on my last two phones. The first being a Rogers Blackberry 8900, and my new one, which is a Telus Motorola Milestone, an Android phone. I unlocked both to use on Fido.
Steps (for Motorola and Blackberry):
- Buy phone from store like BestBuy.
- Get imei number (a phone id number) by typing *#06# into the phone.
- Send imei to unlocking service like mobileincanada.ca
- Pay $20, receive unlock code.
- When you put in your sim from a different provider, type in the unlock code and you’re done!
Pretty easy.
Unlocking an iPhone, in contrast, requires resources from the iPhone hacking community and is definitely not for most people.
So there you have it. You too can be free to have your cell provider of choice, with the phone of your choice (except iPhone).
