Tom Morris

New Routemaster designs look pretty awesome

Londonist has an animated video of one design and there’s a picture of another.

I love the Routemaster, and would be absolutely delighted if they made a new revision that had the open rear exit and access for those with disabilities. It’s fantastic to be able to jump off the bus at the point where you actually want, rather than getting stuck in traffic waiting for the bus to reach the next stop. It’s a perfect design for a city like London. I still take the Routemasters they run on the Heritage Routes - specifically, the number 9 from Aldwych to Hammersmith, although the Routemaster goes only as far as the Royal Albert Hall. Having to walk a few blocks at the end is a minor penance for a beautiful piece of design. The other route which has a Routemaster running on it is 15, which goes from the Strand/Aldwych to Tower Hill.

When Boris - sorry, Mayor Johnson - announced a revived Routemaster as part of his transport policy, all the political commentators were rather sniffy about it. Not me. For those who aren’t disabled, the Routemaster is a lot more pleasant to ride on than the other buses in London.

One problem with the ‘H4’ design: the presence of televisions on-board. I have no idea why that is needed or desirable. What’s wrong with looking out the damn window? Oh, right, it’s for the stupid people who need constant distraction in everything they are doing in order to feel comfortable - you know, the same people who the government’s library policy (sorry, mild-mannered suggestions) is targeted towards.

Google from Vim, Ruby-style

In 2003, Danny O’Brien put up a script that would Google

for selected text in Vim and insert a hyperlink into the text with the first result returned. This was later added to the HTML bundle in TextMate. But as a Vim user, I thought it would be very nice to have in Vim. The depdendency of the original was on PyGoogle, Mark Pilgrim’s

Python

interface to the old Google SOAP API - now defunct, alas. I have recreated that part of the functionality in Ruby with Hpricot. The code is up here, on Gist.

Basic install instructions: take the Gist, save it into a file called ‘ghref’, put it somewhere on your PATH, then copy and paste the instructions from Danny O’Brien’s post into your .vimrc file. Then enjoy being able to add thousands of pointless hyperlinks to your posts. The Ruby is fairly self-explanatory - if you want to add stuff like title attributes and so on, feel free.

Andrew Baron from Rocketboom is battling to try and get the CEO of Biogen to approve the use of Tysabri for multiple myeloma. Please read the post, take action if you think it’s appropriate and spread the word. (Via Scripting News)