So today, being stuck in the house, I decide I should streamline some of my things in the unix world. So I picked up some BASH scripting. I got some serious flashbacks to the 90′s. I would have flashed back earlier, but I’m not old enough. It really makes you appreciate the UNIX geeks of yesteryear. Those guys were clever. And this code looks ugly. But it could be worse… I could be doing MUMPS.

Some sites that aren’t Google I found helpful:

• linuxconfig.org
• ibm.com
• Awk – A Tutorial…

And some random grep links:

• old age and treachery…
• why GNU grep is so fast

September 9th, 2010 | Life=Boring, Nerd | No comments

A few days ago, I learned about a map visualization libary called Polymaps from FlowingData (Design advanced online and interactive maps with Polymaps). This weekend, I resolved to play with it and come up with something useful.

The Texas Tribune has a neat Flash based map of county-by-county election turnouts. My goal for this weekend… make a Polymaps version. My version can be found here: http://crccheck.com/map/.

The data source I found for counties didn’t let me limit it to just Texas, so a lot of counties outside Texas end up getting colored. The data source for the election data is from the Texas Tribune, and the only processing I had to do with it is to change the case to make it consistent with my other data source. I guess I could have just made it case-insensitive too.

Chrome renders the map much better than FireFox. It supports the SVG title element and takes less CPU.

August 23rd, 2010 | Nerd | No comments