Ryan Robitaille

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…

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.

This is just one of those things that I had to do in a project (as part of a much bigger system), and wish I had it all laid out for me like this when I was writing it.

Here it is for your cut-n-paste hacking pleasure…

Data Party! Most people focus on search.twitter.com (or automated pulls from their API) for data collection regarding the “pulse” on a particular topic or brand – they often overlook the fact that the public Facebook timeline can be a useful source of data as well. I’ll show you how to harvest it and store it in a database of your choosing for later analysis.

Twitter. It’s everywhere. It’s Data. Realtime, Social, Contextual Data. But, if you want to do any real trending, data mining, post-processing, or even simple analysis on it – you really need to be making a historical record of what you’re looking for and store it in a usable way. I will show you how to create SQL Server tables and use a simple Python script to pull out tweets and save them for future analysis.

One from the “Random-Shit-Pulled-Out-of-the-Junk-Drawer” Department… as I sit here and watch my beloved Red Sox cement their way OUT of playoffs… {sigh} Here’s a little function I use when building sexy little graphs in my PHP Reporting / Web Interfaces. Its good to calculate a MAX value for the graph axis. Since we never know […]

Now any Python duct-taper integrate-anything junkie like me has a need to schedule their things (in production) every once in awhile. Usually this is not a problem – Unix / Linux cron jobs handle this nicely – but for a client or job that runs on a Windows server – the built-in “Scheduled Tasks” just […]