Archive for the ‘Programming’ category

Announcing the NYT API Tool – Open Blog – NYTimes.com

July 26th, 2009

The New York Times just announced the NYT API Tool on their website. Geared toward making use of their API easier, the web interface shows the options, allows for setting custom parameters, and facilitates pulling data from their site as easy as possible. For real use, you’ll need a key, but once you have it, you can pull data from their site programmatically. It won’t be as easy as their API Tool, but at least you can make more calls with fewer keystrokes.

Interested in their API, but don’t know how to program? Know how to program, but don’t know if it’ll be worth the effort? Either way, give their API tool a shot.

[Thanks to DataVisualization.ch for the link.]

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Posted in Programming, Software, Tools

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Turning Statistics Into Knowledge: Seminar Review and Notes

July 24th, 2009

I had the pleasure of attending the Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge, hosted by the US Census Bureau, the World Bank, and the OECD. While Robert Kosara, from UNC Charlotte, has a fairly thorough review (but not focusing on the technical aspects) of the seminar, and I would agree with most of his points (except for the presentation by David Spiegelhalter and Mike Pearson; their presentation was geared toward (and succeeded in) linking data with decision making), I didn’t read much about the technical side of things, so I thought I’d cover those areas here.

Here’s the low-down:

» Read more: Turning Statistics Into Knowledge: Seminar Review and Notes

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Posted in Data Visualization, Programming, Software, Tools, Website

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Essential Guide To Regular Expressions: Tools and Tutorials | Smashing Magazine

June 6th, 2009

I’m always struggling with the various regular expressions, even after using them for over a decade. Maybe it’s because of all the variations (perl vs. your favorite windows-based text editor’s flavor of regexps vs. bash vs. you-name-it). Maybe it’s because I’m just plain getting old. (nah!)

Although better known for photography tips, Smashing Magazine has a nice collection of tutorials on RegExps — Essential Guide To Regular Expressions: Tools and Tutorials. Check it out.

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Posted in Programming, Software

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New R script: Plot Nike+ runs

June 5th, 2009

I’ve been playing around with R and Nike+ and thought I’d put the two together, so I wrote a little R script that pulls your public data from the Nike+ website and plot out the graphs. It’s a little rough around the edges (see below for a list of enhancements/fixes), but it generates plots. I like SlowGeek, but found their smoothing function a bit too “smooth” — it was shaving 1/2 mph from my run speeds. I wasn’t happy with that ;) Read more to get the source code, below.

Sample: Sample

For an example of what it might look like, you can see my plots.

» Read more: New R script: Plot Nike+ runs

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Posted in Programming, Running, Software, Tools, Website

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User Interface Patterns

May 26th, 2009

ui-patterns.com

Since first reading the Gang-of-four’s book, I have thought patterns were a great idea. Now that I’m getting into design and data visualization more, I’m intrigued by the possibility of merging interface design with software patterns. Makes sense, don’t you think?

So, when I found UI-patterns.com, I thought “yes! here’s the merging of the two disciplines/approaches. Great. Now if I can just merge these patterns with Tufte-based principles and OVID-based development, I should be able to come up with a potent app in any environment.

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Posted in Data Visualization, Design, Graphic Design, Programming, Software, Tools, Website

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