29 August 2013 0 Comments

RiffBank – Parsing arbitrary Text-based Guitar Tab into an Indexable and Queryable “RiffCode for ElasticSearch

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” […]

7 December 2012 14 Comments

Build Tableau Data Extracts out of CSV Files? More Python TDE API madness!

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!

4 December 2012 16 Comments

SQL Server Query to Tableau Data Extract LIKE A BOSS – Some more TDE API fun with Python & Tableau 8

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.

2 December 2012 21 Comments

Building Tableau Data Extract files with Python in Tableau 8 – Sample Usage

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…

7 August 2012 1 Comment

Turning Guitar Tabs into structured Data. Silicon crunching Metal.

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…

26 July 2012 2 Comments

Python Snippet: Sending HTML email with an attachment via Google Apps SMTP (or Gmail)

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…

17 July 2012 3 Comments

Cars, Computers and Software: Quick Tableau of data from my VW’s “On Board Diagnostic” (OBDII) port

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…

5 July 2012 18 Comments

How to Harvest Facebook updates with Python, MySQL or SQL Server

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.

7 June 2012 15 Comments

Building and Loading Sexy Operational Dashboards with DucksBoard.com

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 […]

Page 1 of 212