Ryan Robitaille

Just got back from SF – one of the things we did was visit the Museum of Modern Art – the building is a wonder in itself, but obviously the museum hosts countless photographs and art installations from many famous (and not so famous) artists. I had no idea I’d find inspiration that can be DIRECTLY applied to modern data visualization practices. Advice that doesn’t get followed as much as it should…

Answering life’s Big Questions with Data Viz: The San Diego Padres are changing the wall dimensions for their home stadium, PetCo Park, for the 2013 MLB season. In a notoriously large “pitchers park”, how might this change affect the amount of Homeruns, the Padres record, and (possibly) ticket sales?

With the release of Tableau 8 just around the corner, and the Tableau 8 Public servers in a (very) limited release beta – I figured that it was good a time as any to see what I could come up with using (a couple) of the new features. Specifically the “floating tile” option for dashboards…

Howdy. Cheers to all ya’ll down there in internet land. I got in a conversation earlier today regarding geocoding addresses in data-sets – it’s a pretty common thing, and I’ve done it numerous times for a WIDE variety of data-points (Bigfoot, Sex Offenders, Concert Venues, etc.), so I figured hell, I’ll clean it up and offer it to the Google gods. Maybe someone will find it useful…

So here we have the 3rd in a series about using Tableau 8′s ‘Data Extract’ API to automatically create TDE files from various data sources without using the desktop client. This time we’re focusing on good ole’ Comma Separated files….

Get yo CSV on!

Coming off the excitement of my last post about writing a simple bare-bones python usage of Tableau’s brand-new Data Extracts API from version 8.0 – I figured that it was time to build on that. Let’s take a step forward and get a little more complicated – AND a little more useful…. Let’s do this.

If you were learning (and / or partying) with us at the Tableau Customer Conference 2012 in Beautiful San Diego – then you’ve probably been playing around with the Tableau 8 Beta over the past few weeks. Tableau 8 bring a whole new slew of features – INCLUDING 2 new APIs… I’m going to go over some sample Python usage for the new ‘Tableau Data Extract’ API…

I’m always on the lookout for cool new data feeds that I can mess with – as you can clearly see from some of the other posts on this site. Usually it involves some scripting, screen-scraping, system fiddling, and general madness – basically meaning that some people can get it to work, while others cannot. [...]

I’m always looking for data from unlikely sources, especially sources that are close to my own bizarre interests. Anyone who played guitar at one point or another has probably used tablature.
What if we scripted out a way to crunch through an old school tab text file, split it up in a logical way, and insert it all into a database for display / analysis…