Yes, for obvious reasons, this is now top of my mind again. I will see where the planning is on this…
I know there’s a danger of “too many cooks” with these sort of things, but just let me know if you need a hand with anything technical.
Also, I’m still very keen to do some BI (Business Intelligence) stuff around this, which could be completely separate from the main project,
I think it would be really interesting (and potentially even very useful for law enforcement agencies) to slice and dice reports and using data mining tools to extract trends and correlations. Things like correlation between type/brand of bike and area where it’s stolen, or time of the day etc could be really interesting.
Anyway, if you are interested, I could probably mock up a star schema and cube with some made up data to show you what I mean?
As a suggestion, for a temporary intermediate solution, would it be possible to have a single google map which records all thefts?
If there is ~1 theft/day then this wouldn’t be too much of an onerous task for a willing voluteer to update manually. There could be somewhere for people to notify and then this information could be stored for later when a full solution is finished.
The benefit is that it raises peoples awareness of the project, lets people see something, provides a halfway house to a fully automated solution, and gives an indication of might would ultimately be required. By going the whole way now it takes a lot longer to get something off the ground taking up peoples valuable time.
As long as there is contact information for people notifying then if furthe rinformation is necessary at a later date this could be requested.
Would like to see work as I had 2 bikes stolen when I first started riding a couple of years ago.
Thanks
S T O L E N !!!
Last night my honda cr 125 was stolen along with my mountain bike from my garage, can you all listen out for one for sale. It was stolen from Highams park / chingford, any info appreciated [Sad]
Not being funny but last summer I have used facebook to create an awareness group for all bikes stolen in London, it’s simple, yes very spartan too, but all you have to do is put down as many identification details as possible in relation to your bike and its parts, and pray that someone hears something, or is offered to buy parts such as cans, rims etc, and then contact you via the group or, as ideally intended, immediately report the stolen bike or parts from it to the authorities.
Have a look, see if it interests you, you are more than welcome to here’s the link:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=30789069615
Cheers
Fran
More stolen bikes, I’m afraid:
Two matching MZ250 race machines were stolen along with his trailer outside a home in the Northampton area last night. Please PM me with any news on the bikes or parts. They are very distinctive:
Only prob with that is you often wont know how it was take. If you do find out or have insight it would be noce to know, but I think that lack of evidence for that would make the stat unreliable… What you guys think?
I would just like to know how many anchored bikes go missing compared to bikes that are just lifted into a van without any anchorage.
Just to let folks know, I’ve begun work on the website. Those interested in the technical details can read it here on my blog:
http://jayadair.com/2009/04/open-project-stolen-vehicle-database.html
Had my orange tiger 1050 nicked last week from a bike bay in fulham, waiting for insurance to provide another set of wheels. have used bikes for 15 years in London and this is the first to go walkabout. Apparently two guys got on it and then raided a bike shop nicking two helmets and sped off.
So i am all ears as to what prevention methods to use from now on. a chain seems best but not all bike bays have anchors, perhaps just a large sign on the screen stating “bike has tracker fitted and datatagged”.
Police have just sent a letter saying they are closing the case, so assume its long gone or in bits.
would like to start a rant but feel this will just cause more problems, better wait till I am more level headed, and the anguish has subsided…
Suggar. How on earth…!
And no one stopped them?
You didn’t leave your keys in it I take it. But they still got it started and rode away?
make it not specific to LB nor branded as LB, but available to all localised forums to be able to show as an RSS feed.
More coverage and more eyes
LX06 DHU
Pinched from Pond Square in Highgate, my bro’s Orange KTM 950 SM, Reg LX06 DHU, with full Akras, tail tidy and RG crash protection.
The bike will have had the lock barelled, and it’ll be ridden two-up or with another bike or scooters in company.
The bike was rolled away from Pond Square while my bro went indoors to fetch his gloves (IIRC) for 2 mins. They rolled it downhill, so either towards Archway or Camden, presumabley so they could barrel the lock out of sight.
If you see this bike, feel free to tackle to rider and break their legs (assuming he’s not my bro, having just got the bike back. He’s 6’2" and where Dainese and a TourX, not likely to be the kit of the scrote who is on it now.
The bike lookes like this, minus yellow number boards and redbull decal.
Note that the silver 950 SE grab rails are now replaced by top box fixing plate (top box not fitted), full Akras with blued downpipes (quite rare), RG tail tidy, mini indies, R&G kit, black engine cover (rare). I think there’s also a GPS mount now.
BLACK FRAME with 06 decals and grey wheels is **unique ** for an 06 bike.
This is still in development by the way. I’ll be opening the project up to contributors soon once I’ve got a little more basic functionality complete. It’s been slow going as we have other things to concentrate on, but I’m dead eager to see it opened up and made us of.
We’ll be looking for ASP.net developers. It’s built using the 3.5 SP1 framework (MVC 1.0), Velocity d-cache and SQL Server 2008. We have an SVN server for it and more hosting capacity than you can shake a big stick at.
Security concerns from open sourcing? Might want to let the openbsd guys know.
Why not just not take any personally-identifiable information save for some contact and location info that’s never released?
Personally, I’d want it to be as accessible as possible, since it’s a bit useless if it can’t be used by everyone. Most ideal would be to have an interface whereby shops can get a feed of everything nicked in the last few weeks within a 15mi radius or somesuch, so they can have a list of numberplates to keep an eye out for.
I’ve got the skeleton of something sort-of similar (bicycle orientated) hiding away somewhere, but as you might’ve guessed by my above comment, it’s not in .net.
This needs to step up 
Agreed.
Come on Jay, publish your prototype and let some other talented bods pore over it.
I know you like the way Micro$oft works (just teasing ), but open source methodology is the way to get complex products built quickly with multiple users attacking the problem. Like a team.
Obviously, they would be required to work to guidelines, but this would be part of construction process.
You would have a strong construction, and then you would oversea the implementation, and be the one that actually allows that implementation to make any builds.
So ultimately, you would still retain control of the product, you just wouldn’t be doing all the monkey work.
Here is my suggestion:
Take a Google Maps example like here: http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/manymarkers/markerhash.html
I’ve not used Google maps but its quite obvious from looking at the source that the data is stored in http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/manymarkers/markerdata.xml and is just Long,Lat parameters. These are quite easy to convert to from Addresses or pointing at a normal google map.
Took about 10 mins just playing around.
I’ve resumed work on this and am now looking for additional asp.net developers to help out. Do we have any? The tech for the project is this:
- C#
- Linq2Sql
- ASP.net MVC3 beta on .net Framework 4, using the Razor view engine
- SQL Server 2008 R2
Though as the MVC3/Razor stuff is bleeding edge, realistically I’m looking for asp.net developers who can pick up the MVC3 stuff as they go.
As per the original plan, we’ll develop this in-house, as an open team, and then when there’s a stable first release, make it an open initiative with a longer view to move the whole thing into the public domain.
Anyone who can spare some time, please contact me via the email button below.
Driesie, if your offer is still available, we should look into this. The success of any such database depends in part on having relevant data that is accessible and usable in the way partners would expect.
Hi Jay.
Been working on this for a the last few evenings. I’ve got a google maps API integration page done.
Technology stack, although same skillset, will be different though. I’m using the google Fusiontables to integrate/visualise with maps and will be using either a document db or sqlLite for the backend. Still using C#, but no ASP.NET as it’ll all be AJAX.
Data will then be loaded into a SQL Server data warehouse every nice and I’ll be building some OLAP cubes on this afterwards.
Don’t mean to be competing, but I will definitly do this and want to keep it non-LB branded as I want it to be as generic as possible. I will allow anybody to take customised feeds.