Recent Posts
OCTO: DC police cite privacy to rollback public access to crime data. UPDATED.
UPDATE I, UPDATE II, UPDATE III, UPDATE IV After Derek Willis flagged the sudden absence of crime narratives in DC's public data feed last Friday, I buzzed a couple emails over to the CTO's office in DC. Here's the response I received Monday morning from David Strigel, program manager of ...
OpenLayers Recipe: How to map proportional symbols.
Have you heard of OpenLayers? It's a JavaScript library you can use to throw up maps. And I think it's pretty awesome. I've used it at work to to plot out the neighborhoods of Los Angeles. But in the future, I'd like to use it for other stuff, like mapping proportional ...
Django recipe: Dump your QuerySet out as a CSV file.
I am lucky to work with really smart people. And part of what makes it fun is that they like to do data stuff. But they don't like to do Django. At least yet. They like SAS and Access and Excel and all the usual toys. So one thing I'm ...
Django recipe: Add an auto-count field to your ForeignKey model
Nothing fancy here. A common thing I want to do with Django is publish an "object_list" generic view drawn out of a ForeignKey table that includes each object's total number of occurances. In English: A list with counts. Like this page reporting the occurrence of different ages in our California's War ...
When mashups attack: nytimes.com implicated in Somali’s execution.
From Google Reader:
Five ways your data app can catch the big news hook.
01. Practice news-driven development Most data-driven news applications I've encountered follow what I would call The Chicago Crime model, a name lifted from Adrian Holovaty's famous site. Steady streams of government-provided data are repurposed into a flexible interface that allows users to compare disparate sources ("the mashup") and easily localize the ...
How we got here, or Which past are we prolouging again?
There are some interesting j-posts floating around trying to puzzle out how and why big media companies missed the boat online. One piece of history that I'm interested in, but never see come up in these sorts of attempts to wring meaning out of the past, is the derregulation of major ...
Permalinks, low-rent data viz and other stupid Caspio tricks.
Today marked the release of a new Times investigation into the poor performance of for-profit fundraisers hired by not-for-profit charities. The poster child is Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), an advocacy group that rails against reckless government spending. According to reporting and analysis by Charles Piller and Doug Smith: Records filed ...
The blogosphere says goodbye, Sen. Jesse Helms.
Behold. A wordle.net depiction of the most common words found in the comment thread attached to the LA Times' obituary of Sen. Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina.
Gasoline and his pet snake.
While walking to work this morning, I came upon Gasoline. Bike courier by day, graffiti artist by night, he told me his cold-blooded companion, an unnamed snake, enjoys soaking up the sun on warm days here in downtown Los Angeles. Gasoline said his buddy is a python. I'd like to believe ...