Ryan Robitaille

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…

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…

Just a quick little one-off I did over the weekend while testing some stuff. I’ve been toying with a couple of USB>OBD2 adapters and some linux scripts for a few days in order to spec out and build a much-bigger car-based “data” project.

But in the meantime…

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.

Baseball. If is ANY sport in America that is “all about the data”, it’s baseball. Although we touched on this topic last year, I never really gave it its full round of posts that it deserves.

Well, finally that day has come – except now its even better…

Did a data refresh on 2 of my most the most popular visualizations last night – Metallica has played about 15 shows since I last ran the data-gathering routines, and Bigfoot has been reported another 40+ times! Holy cats! I also have a cool announcement for all you data-junkies out there…