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
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
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
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
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]
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
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.
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
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.
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