Results tagged “internet”

Google announced today that it will provide free wireless internet access at 47 U.S. airports and on all Virgin America flights for the holiday season. Starting now through January 15, anyone should be able to log on to free Google WiFi at BWI, which is the only local airport included in the program. You can find the complete list of participating airports here. Naturally, Google says it plans to use the free service as a means to advertise its products, like iGoogle and Google Chrome, to potential new customers. Still, paying that extra $9.99 for a day pass for internet access at most local airports is a huge drag, so until every airport starts offering it for free, all the time, we'll take what we can get.

Local blogger Ben Somberg writes in to let us know he's had just about enough of front page stories about Facebook from the Washington Post. And he's got the evidence to prove he's not just a big whiner: since September of 2006, the Post has now devoted A1 space to stories about the social networking site a total of 15 times, by Somberg's count. Today's story, penned by youth reporter Ian Shapira, focuses on those rare individuals who aren't too old for Facebook, but still refuse to participate. Says Somberg: "It's alright, though I don't see exactly what it adds -- I don't leave the story having learned much I didn't already know. It belongs inside, not on Page 1."

The D.C. Public Library launched a redesigned web site today, and it appears to a substantial upgrade from its previous version. Check it out for yourself at www.dclibrary.org.

Click on over to www.washingtonpost.com/local to take a look at the new Washingtonpost.com 'Local' homepage, which launched in Beta at 4 p.m. this afternoon. Surprisingly enough, the design actually does look significantly different from the regular home page, a far cry from previous WaPo attempts to differentiate between the local and national editions of the paper by offering minor, barely noticeable differences for online readers with local IP addresses.

We wanted to extend our hearty congratulations to Prince of Petworth, aka Dan Silverman, who announced on his site last night that he has quit his day job in order to devote himself full-time to neighborhood blogging. Dan's been talking about making this move for a long time, so it's great to hear that his dream is finally coming true. As a 2+ year veteran of the Guild of Professional Bloggers, I can tell you that Dan is about to join an elite group of individuals who find themselves spending a preposterously high percentage of their time searching for coffee shops with reliable wireless internet, and far less time worrying about showering or putting on pants. Way to live the dream, Dan!

After collecting feedback ( i.e., complaints?) from staff, students, and parents for more than two years, DCPS has finally launched the redesign of its web site, and our first impression is that it looks pretty darn good.

The new big thing in online shopping seems to be these collective trigger coupon web sites that are popping up all over the place. The largest player in this category is probably Groupon.com, which offers shoppers in 17 cities a daily, emailed deep discount offer that only kicks in if enough people sign up to use it. For example, a recent "groupon" offered a spa treatment that normally costs $120 at a local salon for only $50. The deal required that at least 40 people made the leap before it went into effect, which turned out to be no problem: 951 people bought the discount before it expired. The D.C.-specific version of Groupon can be found here.

• The Trip Planner will now recognize abbreviated street directional indicators, such as S, or S. for South.
• Under the "Advanced" link, the Trip Planner will now allow address searches to be restricted to one of Metro’s compact jurisdictions, instead of searching the entire Metro service area.
• Search data will no longer disappear if you get the dreaded "Destination/Origin Not Found" message, so when you go back to try it again, you won't have to retype your entire entry.

The larger Examiner enterprise may be pushing its online platform hot and heavy, but the local D.C. Examiner newspaper's ability to integrate its stories on the web still leaves a whole lot to be desired. Take this story from this morning, with the headline: "Metro builds Web site about faulty track circuits." You might expect to click through to the story and find contained therein the url, and maybe even (don't get too radical now) a hyperlink to the web site that is the entire subject of this story. But no. Nowhere within the version of this story posted online do you find a single hint as to where you might find the actual web site it's talking about. The editorial decision making process here is just bizarre.

A 16-year-old girl was stabbed last night at 1024 Kenyon Street NW at about 11 p.m., WJLA reports, and the attack stemmed from a feud between two "girl gangs" who were upset about something one of them posted on a MySpace page, according to D.C. Council member Jim Graham. The victim, Graham says, is thankfully expected to recover. The incident is sure to prompt several infuriating "Are Your Children Safe on MySpace??!!!" stories on the local news stations tonight, as there's nothing broadcasters love more than blaming the medium of the Internet for bad behavior. It would certainly be refreshing to see a report on this story based on the facts: teenage girls are often mean to each other, with or without social networking web sites.

D.C. residents who are subscribed to the District of Columbia Department of Motor Vehicles email alert system were reminded Monday that the agency has discontinued in-person vehicle registration renewals. The email, which was sent on the same day the change became effective, explained that from now on, for all vehicle registration renewals, customers must use online or by mail services. And if you missed the message and show up in person to a DMV service center, you'll be directed to a dropbox to drop off registration renewal requests for processing. Dropbox renewals will be processed within 48 business hours, the DMV says. The change is tied to Mayor Fenty's FY2010 budget plan, which proposed eliminating in-person vehicle registration renewals and most safety inspections in order to cut spending. You can sign-up for email notifications from the DMV at their web site.

Yesterday, we mentioned in the Morning Roundup that our DCist_Updates Twitter feed is officially one year old this week. We're not exactly gunning for Ashton Kutcher-like numbers here, but we are pleased to note that just today we reached 5,000 followers. Thanks so much to all of you who already follow and retweet us on a regular basis! For those of you who don't yet, know that DCist doesn't blast every post we write onto our Twitter feed. Instead, we try to keep you updated when breaking news hits or when especially interesting or popular posts go up (you don't want to miss Overheard in D.C., do you?). Twitter accounts are free, and you can follow DCist_Updates here.

Last August, we wrote about Marissa, a 19-month-old baby girl living in Annandale, Virginia, who was diagnosed at two months with a rare pediatric condition called Infantile Spasms (IS). IS is a type of epilepsy experienced in infancy that causes clusters of seizures and can lead to development problems. Marissa's father, Mike, who spearheaded a global online effort for IS awareness, recently e-mailed us with the sad news that Marissa has "taken a turn for the worse." Mike wrote, "She was recently hospitalized, and we discovered that she had constant seizure activity in her brain. 24/7. Non-stop." According to Mike, Marissa has been placed on a treatment that costs around $5,000 per day, per shot. The folks over at deviantART, an online community for artists, have announced the Fairfax Art Drive, in which artists can donate a portion of their commissions to Marissa and her family. A list of commissions can be found here. You can find more information about Marissa and her bunny, Fairfax, at Marissa's Bunny.

While Metrobus users have been eagerly awaiting the official July re-launch of NextBus, DDOT and Mayor Adrian Fenty announced today that Circulator riders now have a mobile application, dubbed "Where's My Bus?", that allows smartphone users to track Circulator buses in real time. All you have to do is go to http://circulator.dc.gov/ from any mobile device (the url works in any browser, really), select the Circulator route and bus stop, and it'll tell you where the closest bus is.

The Washington Post's Paul Duggan has a story up detailing new improvements to the Metropolitan Police Department's Sex Offender Registry. The main addition is a new map that allows users find registered sex offenders within either a .25 or .50 mile radius of any address in the city. Previously, users could only search by PSA, or police service area. The map can be found at sexoffender.dc.gov.

You may have noticed that DCist has a brand new mobile version, working as of this weekend on the iPhone, the BlackBerry (or if you're like me, the really old, crappy Sidekick), and most every other mobile device. All you have to do is access DCist.com from your mobile device and you'll be redirected (or you can go straight to mobile.dcist.com). There you'll find a tinier and tidier version of DCist that's optimized for your smaller screen. Let us know how it's working in the comments.

There was some lamentation in the local tech community over D.C. Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra's decision to leave city government for a post with the Obama administration. Under Kundra's watch the Office of the CTO did some cool things, most notably the city data catalog and the Apps for Democracy contest (which was a great idea, even if the money-saving numbers quoted in relation to it are transparently ridiculous). But — the occasional FBI raid notwithstanding — there are encouraging signs that OCTO* is going to continue to pursue a spirit of innovation even after Kundra's departure. Yes, the diminished quality of the city's crime incident data feed is disappointing, but that seems to be MPD's fault, not OCTO's. More encouragingly, a second Apps For Democracy contest is underway; the city's geographic shapefile repository seems to have removed some of the hoops through which users previously had to jump to acquire its larger datasets; and — most excitingly — OCTO is rolling out a new 311 API. If you haven't checked out the city's online service request center, you really ought to. From scheduling bulk trash pickup to reporting broken streetlights to arranging for graffiti removal, there are nearly forty different city services can be accessed through the system. And although I'm still waiting on a new recycling bin (any year now!), my admittedly anecdotal experience with the system has been mostly positive. By providing a standardized and reliable interface for developers, the new 311 API aims to make these capabilities available through sites and programs other than the dc.gov website. The example most often cited is a theoretical iPhone app for reporting potholes: fire it up, snap a photo of the offending divot, and press submit. The phone could then whisk the information (along with your current latitude and longitude) to the city government without the need for additional information. At least, that's the dream. The API is still under development, and things are in flux. For instance, it's not yet clear exactly how users will obtain the API keys that will let them use the system — or how griefers will be prevented from reporting every parking meter in the city to be broken every hour of every day. But that hasn't stopped developers from beginning to work with the system. For instance, local developers Zvi Band and Aaron Brazell have released Ruby and PHP libraries, respectively, that aim to make it easier for programmers working in those languages to access the API. And we're sure that the next Apps For Democracy will include many entries that make use of the API, whatever state it's in. There are some functions that are already useful, like the capability to convert a geographic position to a nearby street address (which can be surprisingly difficult to do when using conventional mapping services like Google's). It's an exciting time to be a D.C. resident with a computer and a desire to get a streetlight fixed. What kind of apps would you like to see? * Also: is it just us, or is OCTO's logo in desperate need of improvement? The current state of affairs is inexcusable — particularly when you consider the anthropomorphic octopus options that are open to whoever's responsible for the agency's graphics.

UPDATE: Wow, huge apologies for directing anyone to this site, as an alert tipster points out that much of it appears to be blatantly plagiarized from The Phat Phree's Look at My Striped Shirt!. We weren't familiar with that particular work, but you should definitely not count on the DC Summer Interns blog for anything good after all, based on this evidence.

Frustrating but entirely predictable update on Metro's federally mandated cell phone service expansion plan from the Examiner's Kytya Weir today. You'll recall that as part of a $1.5 billion funding package passed by Congress last fall, Metro is required to expand cell phone service coverage to all major companies, including Verizon, Sprint Nextel, AT&T and T-Mobile, to the 20 busiest underground rail stations by October. But of course as Weir writes, it turns out the entire project will "remain a patchwork of service for up to three more years." You will be able to use your phone inside those 20 stations by the end of the year, but not in the subway tunnels adjacent to those stations for a long time later. Metro isn't required to have service up and running in all 47 of their stations until October 2010, and the entire system, including tunnels, until October 2012. So in other words, you'll soon be able to make calls regardless of your service provider while you're standing on many station platforms, but at least for the next couple of years, don't necessarily plan on continuing those calls once you board a train.

Here's the statement we got back from a Google spokesperson about this morning's seemingly large outage in the Washington, D.C. area: "The issue affecting some Google services has been resolved. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and we'll share more details soon." So basically, not really an answer at all. We'd press them on the issue, but today's outage really drove home how completely and totally this company appears to have taken over our ability to function on a daily basis. Angering The Google would be like hanging up a big sign in our yard saying "We Hate Oprah" in Chicago. You really shouldn't do that if you value your life. UPDATE: More from the Official Google blog: "An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and "always on," so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again."

It's not just you. It's all of us, too. Gmail, Google Reader, the entire Google family of products seems to be out across the region. Friends in other cities say they're not having the same problem, so who knows what's up. In the meantime, while you're waiting for the ability to do practically anything else on the Internet, consider leaving say, one or two or twelve comments on DCist! UPDATE 12:15 p.m.: We have Gmail! We have Gmail! International crisis averted.

You gotta love the Washington Times for splashing this story across the top of their local coverage today: "EXCLUSIVE: Capitol Police probe officers' Facebook pages" reads the headline, with the subhead, "Complaint cites degradation of women, hedonism." Apparently a couple of officers are "members" of a public group on Facebook called the "Make-it-Rain Foundation for Underprivileged Hoes," which we gather means these guys want it to be known that they are fans of going to strip clubs. Talk about a snoozefest. But wait, there's more!

One of the three men also listed himself as a member of the "He-Man Woman Hater's Club" and founded a Facebook group called "Passed Out in Trashcans" - a three-member group geared toward "anyone else that has woken up from a long night of drinking to find themselves in the trashcan."

Capitol Hill mainstays Bruce and Adele Robey have gone back to their internet roots with the recent launch of Hill-Talk, a Capitol Hill neighborhood-focused online news aggregator, discussion board and community calendar.

D.C. Wire tips us off to a new Twitter feed and Facebook page for the D.C. Fire Department and EMS services. In a nod to the Washington Post city desk's sometimes strained relationship to blogging, they don't actually provide you with direct links to the new features, instead just suggesting that you search for them yourself, so here you go: twitter.com/dcfireems and Dc Fireems on Facebook. DC Fire/EMS spokesperson Alan Etter told D.C. Wire he plans to post breaking news and other official department updates on the Twitter feed, which today has already garnered entertaining results. To wit:

There were long delays, petition drives, and some final technical hiccups, but WMATA has finally released its schedule data in the Google Transit Feed Specification format. What does that mean? Well, most obviously it means that Google Transit will soon be adding D.C. to its list of supported cities (UPDATE: or perhaps not — see below for a comment from Michael Perkins of GGW, who explains that there are lingering complications surrounding WMATA's legal relationship with Google). But far more exciting is the opportunity this dataset represents to third-party developers. You can bet that geeks across the region were feverishly importing schedule data into databases last night (I certainly was). So what's in a GTFS file, anyway? You can read the full spec here if you'd like, but the short version is actually pretty simple: a bunch of text files are zipped up into a single archive, which can be downloaded from the transit agency's website — in WMATA's case, the file clocks in around 20 megabytes. These comma-separated text files have names like routes.txt, stops.txt and stop_times.txt, and they can be opened in a text editor or spreadsheet program. The setup is pretty simple to understand: for example, stops.txt contains a list of bus and rail stops, complete with information like name, latitude and longitude, and assigns each one an ID. stop_times.txt, on the other hand, has a bunch of entries that assign arrival and departure times to individual routes, linking back to the stop information via each stop's ID.

The White House today announced that it will distribute tickets for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll online for the first time, doing away with the decades-old tradition of Washington families who line up for hours on the Ellipse the weekend before the event to receive their tickets.

Last year, local NBC news affiliate WRC/NBC4's web site got a major facelift. Gone was the relatively dull NBC4.com, and in its place was a nationally-launched web site template, in this case nbcwashington.com, that's trying to be both a home for the news content of WRC, as well as its own online brand, offering aggregated and exclusive content on top of the station's regular stories.

The Examiner editorial staff is understandably outraged that the D.C. government appears to have blocked access to its web site on all city-owned computers. Given the ongoing tumult at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, it's certainly plausible that the news site has been blocked by OCTO (hopefully, by employee error—blocking a legit news web site on purpose would be an incredibly stupid policy).

WMATA put out a press release this afternoon announcing that Metro's board has finally given the go ahead on a plan to build a new network that will allow companies besides Verizon to offer cell phone access in stations and tunnels. A contract has been awarded that will allow Verizon, Sprint Nextel, AT&T and T-Mobile to build a new wireless network inside the Metro system over the next four years, which would also eventually include wireless internet. In order to comply with rules written into a $1.5 billion funding package passed by Congress last fall, 20 of the busiest underground rail stations will have "expanded cell phone service" by the end of 2009.