Ryan Robitaille

Guitar tablature is meant for human readability…not for machine consumption. Granted it’s “procedural” and “linear” already, but it’s also column-based AND row-based at the same time (readers read down a short row and then over) – you are dealing with text chunks that are easily understandable by a human, but require a lot of “context” […]

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 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.

You never know what awesome stuff you’re going to find… While I was browsing the web yesterday evening, I landed upon a article explaining how ‘Starting Pages’ are out-of-fashion and now everyone wants a ‘Data Dashboard’. Which, intrigued me – since dashboards and operational analytics are a big part of what I do for a […]