Author Archives: Dan Rabin

Personal Geotagging: Data wrangling

I recently learned that the process of cleaning datasets so that they can really be used is called “data wrangling”. At first, I thought that the main data wrangling task in personal geotagging was going to be cleaning the GPS … Continue reading

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Personal geotagging: note 1

The common item that lets you find a photo’s location in a GPS track is the time it was taken. In database terminology, time is the join column. Since I’m starting with photos that are already timestamped, I want to … Continue reading

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Personal data: geotagging photos

I have over 50,000 photos I’d like to tag with the locations they were taken. In a perfect world, this would be a relatively simple matter of looking up each photo’s creation date and time, finding that date and time … Continue reading

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Finding data, not just information, on the Web

Matthew Hurst at Data Mining points to his experimental site. d8taplex, a site for exploring data sets found on the web. The current state of the site only has 50,000 data sets from a few countries, with a limited set … Continue reading

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Martin Odersky founds Scala-based startup

Peter Delevett reports in the San José Mercury-News that Martin Odersky (with whom I did my Ph.D. research at Yale) is starting up a company to serve the Scala programming language, which he developed. [via TechMeme]

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Slower than paper

Palo Alto’s Peninsula Creamery operates two restaurants with identical menus. The one downtown uses traditional paper order pads; the one at the Stanford Shopping Center uses a bulky portable electronic gadget. Yesterday I ate at the shopping center branch, and … Continue reading

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Economist: Information Overload

The Economist has a special pull-out section on information overload this week. It’s a useful non-technical overview of where things are.

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Thoughts on XML namespaces from James Clark

Influential XML personage James Clark has posted a very carefully thought-out essay on XML namespaces. Everybody loves to bash XML namespaces, but this essay is the most careful and dispassionate I have seen to date. You should read the whole … Continue reading

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New York Times article on mining local government data

The New York Times has an article on mining local-government data for unforeseen purposes. Nothing new here, but its being in the Times means my mom reads about it, and yours might too.

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Dueling GPSes: Garmin vs. Android G1

For the last 2.5 years I’ve been using a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx device to record my travels. It’s not bad overall, but sometimes if I don’t replace the micro-SD card just right it doesn’t record my tracks. Recalling that my … Continue reading

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