Welcome to RichardSpackmann.com! I post various activities I participate in with the Maple Avenue Fire Department, and personal opinions surrounding my position as Fire Commissioner of the Greenfield Fire District. The most recent entries are listed first, but you can also sort based on the categories listed below, or search by date via the calendar to the lower right. (All times are in Eastern Standard Time [GMT-5])
Tuesday, June 30
R.I.P. Janet Travers
It is with sadness that I have been notified of one of the Greenfield Fire District's greatest members passing away.
I recieved word that Firefighter Janet Traver passed away the evening of June 29th.
I'm fairly certain that Janet was a charter member.
Many people have many fond memories of Janet.
When I joined MAFD as a "young pup", it didn't take long to learn how special Janet was. Everyone in the county knew of Janet - her trademark "grandma" voice was the corner stone of the Maple Avenue Fire Company.
As a young and inexperienced firefighter, having Janet at the firehouse just seemed to make everything "easier," well, at least "safer." Even with the "bad calls", hearing her voice over the radio - "KYK three O eight to fire control", created this sort of "safety blanket". I just knew - hearing her voice, that no matter what it was, that everything would be okay in the end.
I remember vividly when one of our junior members had something in his teeth and decided to spit on the firehouse bay floor - in clear view of Janet (a mistake he soon regretted). I'll tell ya what, for a older lady, she was quick on her feet! Janet boxed his left ear in so hard it almost knocked his shoes off. He stumbled a few feet to his right and almost fell over.
My jaw nearly hit the floor.
As he stood there rubbing the left side of his face, he looked at Janet puzzled. And Janet raised her finger and got right in his face and said "you don't spit on your floor at home do you?"
His eyes swelling up with tears he replied, "no ma'am". She then said, "if I ever see you spitting again, you'll be even more sorry - now go in the bathroom and put some cold water on that." And I dont' think he ever spit again!
But that was the type of lady Janet was, standfast in her convinctions, passionate and strong. Perhaps the best way to describe Janet is "dedication" - arguably her most endearing quality, although its hard to pin-point just one - as Janet had so many. She made every fire call, every meeting, every fundraiser - and she served the community with distinction.
Essentially the way internet browsers "render" (or show) a given website changed slightly with the new versions of both FireFox and Internet Explorer - so this fix was necessarily to be consistent and make the page look the way it used to with older browser versions.
I also was able to integrate Google Analytics into greenfieldfd.org.
a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew.
So essentially this just means that we now can view visitor traffic to our site, what pages they view, and how often particular portions of our site are utilized.
Long story short, this just allows us to get a good idea of the usage of greenfieldfd.org, and how we could potentially make it better.
First a disclaimer, I'm not a Twitter "fan", advocate, user or opponent. Obviously there's
been plenty of press and news regarding twitter - if you watch TV, follow the news, or surf the net, you've no doubt heard about Twitter.
But I started to hear reports that Twitter will allow you to receive and send SMS text messages to interact with their service. The software that I wrote to send text messages does require a (albeit small) fee - and by using Twitter, we could eliminate this overhead for a fire department. I found this particularly appetizing as fire department budgets are becoming increasingly lean, and some smaller departments, already have constrained budgets. Secondly, text messaging is probably the preferred method to receive call notifications on your cell phone (compared to say email or voice dialing) - so having this service free, is that much more appealing.
So is this all about cost?...Absolutely not! When I started investigating the feasibility of using Twitter, I began to see that the "twitter methodology" does suit itself nicely to the concept of our "Rip and Runs" and "call records".
Now what do I mean by this? Well Twitter is basically a way to record a quick status about your life, so if you consider a fire call (or an emergency) an event, you can quickly abstract this concept out to see that using Twitter can essentially provide a method of recording all emergencies that a fire company is dispatched to.
With this listing of calls, a fire company could - in effect, be getting a "quick and dirty" call listing (for reporting perhaps), and also a "quick and dirty" website for some public relations. Some may choose not to publish the content of the emergencies that the company responds to, and there is a way to hide all of the postings so that only "friends" can see them - i.e. the people that are granted permission to see them can.
So you can see that right out of the box, Twitter provides functionalty that readily lends itself to call recording. If a department doesn't have this type of reporting available, you could simply go to the Twitter page of the rip and run for your company, and see the most recent calls for your agency - for free. So no software costs - no installation costs, its all available easily for all your members to see online.
Additionally, I have found that its very easy to include "tweets" (individual messages posted on the Twitter webpage) on another website via a widget. So you could, for example, provide a listing of a fire company's calls on the fire company's webpage - which is completely separate from Twitter. This way, you can get real-time updated call information on a fire company's home page, without having to pay development costs (you can view some of these free apps on the twitter webpage: http://twitter.com/downloads).
Perhaps the biggest reason to move towards Twitter, is because then the subscription and permissions concerns are pretty much taken care of separately from the Rip and Run software. So there would be no "development" or configuration changes that need to happen on the Rip and Run server - which is a big plus. So the way I envision that firefighters will "subscribe" to recieve SMS text messages from my Rip and Run software is:
Simply create a Twitter account
Configure with your cell phone information (directions available on twitter.com)
Request to be a "follower" of the given "Rip and Run" Twitter account. For example, GFD's Rip and Run account is http://www.twitter.com/greenfieldfd
The administrator then either grants permission to this requests, or denies it. This provides a level of security to ensure that only the authorized people (granted by the administrator).
And that's it - pretty easy and it requires no configuration changes on the Rip and Run server - which as I said, is a big plus. Anytime you make changes to the server, you typically have to take it off line for a small amount of time - and that's a hassle.
I am currently working on Twitter integration and so far things look very good - it does look very possible to get this to work as a "Rip and Run" text messaging service.
I'll post more information as it becomes available and in the meantime, if you have questions, please feel free to ask! Hopefully it won't be too long until we start field testing this!
As always, there is plenty of Rip and Run testing going on "behind the scenes" that members don't necessarily see - which is the norm in software development. People use the "end product", i.e. the actual software package to perform some type of job, but the end product doesn't necessarily show all the effort that went into creating it.
For example, every fire call that Maple Avenue gets dispatched to (for the most part), my rip and run server gets a fax. This fax is just another "test case" that is used to validate the logic in my programming code, and testing its robustness and longevity. To date, I have not had any of my code crash - so it is proving to be pretty robust. Additionally, each fax is sent through a myriad of tests and analysis after the call as part of the development process. So even though there may not be active conversation or posts on my blog regarding my rip and run initiative, it does not mean that there isn't anything going on - you just can't see it.
On average, I would say I spend probably 20+ hours a week on "rip and run" related stuff.
I have released another software version to development testing on my test server at the Maple Avenue firehouse. The latest release has these features:
a variety of minor bug fixes in the OCR (optical character recognition) to increases the software's accuracy. I would approximate that we are now running around 99% accuracy for character recognition - this is a major accomplishment.
I spent some time and actually listed out and created "road files" for Greenfield Center, Porter Corners and Middle Grove hamlets. These files are used to, for lack of a better way of explaining it, "confirm" the road address listed on a given fax. This helps to correct OCR errors or dispatcher spelling mistakes, and greatly increases the accuracy of the software.
fixed bug in OcrParser when a town is null (would crash via NPE). Now it will just remain null.
There are conditions sometimes where a dispatcher may omit the town in the rip and run fax. So my software must be able to "guess" (intelligently and accurately) which town the call (most likely) is in for mapping purposes. This functionality is now included.
added ability to determine TOC when time is specified *before* the TOC token. Also, added the ability to use the "TOA" (time of alarm) token to set the TOC (sometimes dispatchers use TOA rather than TOC). This is necessarily because there is an inherent latency between the time a dispatcher receives the call via 911, and when the fire company is actually dispatched (notified of the emergency).
Added ability to have a "default" address for FireTracker when one isn't available from the rip and run fax.
Finalized functionality to clear out all the temporary files generated from this service. This job can be scheduled at any given interval - this is very useful and necessary to clear out the large fax files (data size wise) that can accumlate on the server.
Modified address logic to take into consideration the situation where dispatcher selected the wrong road suffix - i.e. "Road" instead of "Lane".
I have another phone call scheduled with the county this Saturday to get an update on the software upgrade initiative. We spoke earlier this month, and apparently they ran into issues with their redundantSQL server. As always, I'll try and post updates once I hear them.
I have been asked often about when the other sister companies of the GFD (Greenfield Center, Porter Corners and Middle Grove) with my rip and run software and that depends on when the county can upgrade their software. The county has agreed to send rip and runs for these companies as well, its just a matter of completing this upgrade. Rest assured, this will happen eventually.
I also wanted to comment on "text messaging" capabilities. The capability does exist with my software to text message call information to firefighters - this was briefly tested and was very successful. I haven't yet launched this into full beta testing yet - because I have decided to roll in a different direction with this. There are some online services that will provide *free* text messaging capabilities - one such service is Twitter and I am now working on integrating my rip and run service with the Twitter service. More on this later...
I have finally completed a web-based application that shows all the hydrants located in or near the Greenfield Fire District (GFD).
The neat thing about this is that the application allows you to click on a hydrant, and calculate the distance from your house to that given hydrant. This distance is important for homeowners because most insurance companies give home owner insurance discounts if your house is within a determined XYZ radius.
You can view the application on the greenfieldfd.org website:
It seemed like a natural extension to post this data online for our community members to benefit from - and while the majority of hydrants do exist in the commercial cooridor of the GFD, there are some hydrants that people probably don't even know of that exist in our more residential areas as well.
I have pushed the latest Rip and Run code into live testing.
Here is a break down of the latest developments (in no particular order):
added new functionality to filter the dispatcher notes section of the rip and run fax, this improves the accuracy immensely of that section
emails sent out now include the call type in the subject line, along with company name and "run number"
the new version of FireTracker automatic run upload has been running for nearly two weeks now, very stable and very accurate.
new version of voice dialing has been running for nearly two weeks now and has shown no problems. I will most likely test this for another week or so, and then move onto the SMS text message testing.
The GIS (mapping) component is due to be delivered at the end of this month. As I have previously posted, I collected hydrant information, which is ready for integration into the GIS software.
An assortment of bug fixes...
I am still working with the county to integrate the other stations, I have yet to sync up with their personnel via phone, but I plan on trying again this weekend.
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Tuesday, June 30
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