It's probably been close to a year since the iPhone-optimized DC metro status page Meenster.com vanished from the scene (it now resolves to a blank page.) For those of us who ride the metro regularly, knowing when the next train will arrive before you enter the station is a major convenience -- especially given last month's tragic metro collision and subsequent service disruption.

Well, wait no longer - the DC metro on your iPhone is back!

http://echodittolabs.org/wmata

With fabled AT&T coverage coming in October, you'll never miss a train again.

And now for the nerdy details:

We're not using any of WMATA's APIs or feeds, but rather just old fashioned screen scraping using regex. Since the train status pages on wmata.com are already pretty handsome, I elected just to scrape out the body and wrap it in Joe Hewitt's excellent iPhone CSS.

Suggestions, complaints? Drop me a note!

Art in DC is excellent, although not typically fodder for tech-focused blogs. Hooray for exceptions.

Leo Villareal's installations are really something to behold. He makes big LED-based works whose lighting patterns are based on rule sets of his design. He claims Conway's Game of Life as a major inspiration. And goodness, does video make his stuff look cool. Lucky for us, he's currently working on his largest installation yet, and in DC! At the National Gallery of Art! The concourse between the NGA's East and West wings will be lit by somewhere around 40,000 LEDs for the next year. Installation is going on now. I've never had a chance to see the artist's work in person, and I'm really, really excited to walk through it.

He's also going to be showing at the soon-to-reopen (and historically awesome) Conner Contemporary gallery, starting on September 27th until November 9th. The gallery plans to have an opening reception on the first day, but the press release says it's invite only. Something tells me that nerdy programmers won't have an easy time making the list. Still, I'm excited to get over to their new spot in NE. Bigger is always better.

Art!