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  • 16 Sep 2023

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    Not Geek, Ideas

  • 21 Dec 2009

    Crowdsourced Weather - Part 2

    So, I couldn't help myself. I had a niggling idea at the back of my head that I needed to get out. After coming up with this Twitter weather idea last week, I decided to spend a couple of hours this weekend building it. As if I didn't have other things I should have been doing instead...

    It works pretty much exactly how the pseudocode I mentioned last time describes. Every few minutes, a script will search Twitter for mentions of any weather words from several different languages. It will then look up the location of the person who tweeted that and store it. Single reports might be wrong and users might not have stored their actual location but over a large enough sample, this system becomes more accurate. The script removes any matching twets older than 6 hours.

    To display, I actually ended up using Geohashes instead of Geotudes because it is easier to simplify them when you zoom out just by cutting off the tail of the hash. For example, the physical area denoted by gcvwr3qvmh8vn (the geohash for Edinburgh) is contained within gcvwr3 which is itself contained within gcv. There are a few technical problems with geohashes but it seems the best fit for this purpose. If anyone knows of any better suggestion, please let me know. I do realise that this is quite possibly the slowest, most inefficient JavaScript I've ever written because it makes an AJAX call for every graticule and it probably should just send the South-East and North-West bounds and get back an array of them but, like I said, there were other things I should have been doing. Because the overlaid grid changes resolution based on zoom level, there are a few places where it is either tragically slow (resolution too fine) or terribly inaccurate (resolution too rough). That's just a case of tweaking the algorithm. Similarly, it's set to display reports of weather if there are 2 or more matches but it could be tweaked to only show if a larger number have reported something.

    So go, play with the Twitter-generated weather map. If someone can come up with a good, catchy name, or some better graphics, that'd be great, thanks.

    Source code is available: twitter-weather-1.0.zip [Zip - 298KB].

    You'll need your own Twitter login and database account to use it.

    Geek, Development, Javascript, CSS, Design

  • 17 Dec 2009

    Crowdsourced Weather

    This is a more general version of the #uksnow map idea. It's a crowd-sourced weather map which relies on the fact that any one individual tweet about the weather might be inaccurate but given a large enough sample, enough people will mention the weather in their area to make this a workable idea. It doesn't require people to tweet in a particular format.

    To get info

    Have an array of weather words in various languages (rain, hail, snow, schnee, ame, yuki)
    every 5 minutes:
    	foreach weatherword
    		search twitter for that word
    			http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=rain
    		retrieve latest 100 tweets
    		foreach
    			get user info
    				http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=username
    			get user.location if available
    			geocode
    			save:
    				username, time, lat, long, geotude, weatherword
    		Remove any tweets about this weatherword older than 6 hours.
    			
    

    To display info

    Show a Google map
    Based on current Zoom level, split the current map into about 100 geotudes
    foreach geotude
    	search database for any weather results for that block (probably using an ilike "1234%" on the geotude field)
    	sort by weatherword count descending
    	draw an icon on top of that block to show the most common weatherword
    	
    If the user zooms in, recalculate geotudes and repeat.
    

    I quite like that this uses geotudes which I think are an excellent idea.

    I built a very basic version of this. Read more about it in Part 2.

    Ideas, Development, Javascript, CSS, Design

  • 14 Dec 2009

    What's your Google Suggest number?

    • What's your Google Suggest number?

    The next step in ego-googling: how many letters of your name do you need to type into the google search box before you are the top suggestion? The lower the better, obviously. Including spaces, My name is the top suggestion after 10 characters so I have a Google Suggest Number of 10. My darling wife (who has recently changed her name) has a Google Suggest number of ∞ as she can type in her whole name and Google doesn't suggest her.

    Turns out somebody proposed this first over 5 years ago. Oh well. Nothing's new on the internet.

    Geek

  • 10 Dec 2009

    Side Tab

    • thumb of my Opera layout

    After reading Aza Raskin's post about Firefox moving its tabs down the side of the window, I decided to give it a go in Opera. It turns out to be very useful when you have a widescreen monitor. I usually end up with several dozen tabs open at once and it's much easier to be able to put them down the side in an area which is, for most websites at least, dead space. On the rare occasions I do find myself on a website which requires more than the 1470px horizontal space this gives me, I can just tap f4 and get my full 1650px back. As the window sidepanel also groups by window and lists all tabs open across all windows, I can keep them ordered thematically, too.

    This arrangement definitely doesn't work, however, when you have a small screen. When I tried this on my netbook, I had to choose between losing half of my screen to the tab list or only being able to read the beginning of each page title, even if I only had one tab open.

    A quick aside, when I first read about moving tabs down the side, my initial thought was "It's a shame Opera doesn't have add-ons, I'd like to give this a go" and very nearly fired up Firefox before I realised that Opera already has this functionality and has had since (approximately) version 5 (almost 10 years ago). Just sayin'.

    Geek, Opinion, Design

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Simon Madine (thingsinjars)

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Hi, I’m Simon Madine and I make music, write books and code.

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