Blogroll
- Adrian Holovaty
- Analytic Journalism
- Brian Hamman
- del.icio.us Popular
- Depth Reporting
- Derek Willis
- Extra Extra
- Jacob Kaplan-Moss
- Jeff Croft
- Journerdism
- Matt Waite
- Matt Wynn
- Online Journalism Review
- Programmable Web
- Simon Willison
Links
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Thursday, September 11th, 2008
Do point interpolation rasterizing like Spatial Analyst. For free.
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Monday, August 25th, 2008
Doing Journalism in the 21st Century
Come see me and Jaimi put on a Future Talk.
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New app: Neighborhood Watch | mattwaite.com
As usual, Matt does great work.
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Friday, August 22nd, 2008
Visualization Strategies: Text & Documents
Analyzing free text has been an interest of mine for a while. Here are a few ways data visualization can add to the mix.
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Bus firm in crash often gets used by school districts | Chron.com
Angel Tours, the charter bus company tied to a deadly North Texas crash this month, also shuttled children and students on dozens of trips since 2006, mostly for extracurricular events paid by local schools and universities, records obtained by the Houston Chronicle show.
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Charitable donations with a political twist | Chron.com
At Harris County Commissioners Court, campaign donations of $5,000 or more come along as often as hot days in a Texas summer. So, donors looking to stand apart from the throngs of high-dollar givers have found another way to make their generosity known: charity.
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Fuel scams slip by feds' watchdogs | Chron.com
A little-known federal program designed in part to protect consumers from bogus fuel-saving gadgets has done little lately to help debunk claims - even as gas prices have climbed to record highs.
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Friday, June 13th, 2008
Cool little tool for splitting names into component parts. Hat tip to Neil Reisner.
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Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
Congressmen want jail for NASA's credit card abusers | Chron.com
Congressional supporters of a bill meant to curb government credit card abuse called Monday for stricter sanctions — including termination and jail time — against employees who misuse the cards at NASA, as well as other agencies.
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Sunday, May 4th, 2008
NASA employees big spenders on government credit | Chron.com
NASA employees have used government credit cards to ring up iPods, video games and even clothes from the agency's own gift shop, while at other times using the cards in ways that sidestep competitive bidding rules.
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Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
Houston Politics: Contractors invested in NASA funding fight
A quick look at federal contracting records shows that of the 30 members who signed the letter - Lampson included - 26 represent districts that received NASA-related contract business in 2007.
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Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Oklahoma Leaks Tens of Thousands of Social Security Numbers
And this, friends, is why we always sanitize our input.
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Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Javascript marker clustering for Google Maps
Handles clustering and loadtime issues for Google Maps with large numbers of points.
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Thursday, March 27th, 2008
Houston Politics: Schatte's Big Easy ties
Local developer Andrew Schatte, in the news for his federal indictment alongside business partner Michael Surface, has long made his name in government circles, keeping politicians as close friends, doing myriad land deals, and at times attracting investm
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Introducing Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and new public AMIs/Kernels
Finally. Stable IPs.
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Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
Baseball Hacks - Google Book Search
For a "limited preview", they sure have a lot of this book scanned in.
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Saturday, March 15th, 2008
County facilities chief to seek review of real estate deals | Chron.com
Harris County's facilities director said Friday that he will ask the Commissioners Court to authorize a financial review of three real estate deals linked to indicted developers Andrew Schatte and Michael Surface and could recommend jettisoning them if th
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Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Harris County's real estate deals raise questions | Chron.com
Harris County officials have signed off on a series of real estate deals, valued at more than $60 million, with companies linked to two local developers at the heart of a federal corruption probe, the Houston Chronicle has found.
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Thursday, January 24th, 2008
DA staff pay hikes include $11,000 for Rosenthal aide | Chron.com
Embattled District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal this month approved an $11,000 raise for his executive assistant, Kerry Stevens — his former extramarital partner and recipient of the affectionate e-mails that have embroiled his office in scandal.
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Monday, January 14th, 2008
How Crime in the United States is Measured
A detailed CRS report outlining the history and limitations of federal crime data, such as UCR and NIBRS.
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Friday, January 11th, 2008
Spiffy Web-based PDF-editing interface.
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Monday, January 7th, 2008
Harris County judge pushes campaign e-records | Chron.com
Harris County's top political executive advocates for online disclosure and other campaign reforms.
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Friday, December 14th, 2007
An Amazon Web service for databases. What do we even need physical servers for anymore?
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Sunday, December 2nd, 2007
Spending of campaign cash veiled | Chron.com
A story about how the campaign filings of several county commissioners may violate state disclosure requirements.
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Monday, November 26th, 2007
County commissioners have few rivals, plenty of donors | Chron.com
The first comprehensive look the Chron has taken at campaign donations to county government. Includes searchable database built from paper records.
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Thursday, November 8th, 2007
Crib sheet for the command-line spatial data formatting tool. In case you ever want to go from SHP to KML and back again.
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Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
Innovation Belongs in the Newsroom
Derek. Is. Right.
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Monday, November 5th, 2007
Perry's UT regent pick not without critics | Chron.com
An investigative profile of a native Houstonian recently appointed to the University of Texas Board of Regents.
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Thursday, October 18th, 2007
Another cool app newspapers could have built but didn't. Type in your ZIP and get all the demographics you'll ever want.
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Are you paying attention, online editors? I'm excited about this and I don't even have an iPhone.
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Sunday, September 9th, 2007
Search For Steve Fossett Expands To Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
I wonder how crowdsourcing projects like this could be used more often in investigative journalism ...
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Thursday, September 6th, 2007
The Black Wire and the White Wire
Wired EIC Chris Anderson's take on the need for different tiers of IT security within corporate networks. He argues that networks need to be secure while maintaining enough freedom for users to experiment with cool Web services.
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Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
Jack Shafer at Slate clearly and concisely pokes holes in a Boston Globe story he says misleads by statistics. He makes some excellent points.
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Monday, September 3rd, 2007
Amazon EC2 Basics For Python Programmers
Excellent guide to EC2 in general, specifically geared toward Pythonistas.
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3 Texas counties slow to adopt '05 campaign law | Chron.com
This non-CAR story I stumbled into shows that three of Texas' largest counties have failed to meet some online campaign finance discolsure requirements passed two years ago.
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Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
Converting Shapefiles (and more) to KML
Another slick application of a command-line GIS tool. This one converts shapefiles (or just about anything else) to KML for Google Maps.
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Thursday, August 16th, 2007
O'Reilly Media: Programming Collective Intelligence
"Toby Segaran's new book, Programming Collective Intelligence, teaches algorithms and techniques for extracting meaning from data, including user data. This is the programmer's toolbox for Web 2.0."
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More food imports from Mexico, not China, rejected | Chron.com
Thanks to Griff Palmer for this idea, which wouldn't have been possible without scraping.
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Monday, August 6th, 2007
Orlando Sentinel: Twitter alerts on launch day
The Orlando Sentinel will use Twitter to update readers during the Endeavor launch this week. I'm curious to see how many people pay attention.
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Friday, August 3rd, 2007
mod_python installation on x86_64 machines
If you ever run into this problem, as I just did, this post will save you two hours. Mod_python apparently has compilation issues under x86_64 machines. Also remember to compile python with the --enable-shared flag.
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Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
Run Django off of a thumb drive! No more fighting for administrator privileges if you just want to roll a simple app.
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Has useful tips for testing and other advanced topics.
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Thursday, July 19th, 2007
A tool for finding where a phone number is from based on the area code and prefix. It did a pretty good job with the numbers I fed it.
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Monday, July 9th, 2007
A new Python ORM by Canonical that emphasizes multiple database support. Via <a href="http://www.simonwillison.net">Simon Willison</a>.
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Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Beginner's Guide to the Vi editor
Code like a true geek with vi. I'm proud (ashamed?) to say I use it almost exclusively.
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Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
Houston council keeps public waiting since 2004
The CAR behind this was driven by a Python script with the handy pyPDF module.
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Monday, June 4th, 2007
Flash Yahoo map of Houston traffic light cameras | Chron.com
Nice work by the guys upstairs to turn out this map of Houston's red light cameras. It's based on the Yahoo Maps Flash API, which seems to have a lot of potential.
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Friday, June 1st, 2007
Videos from around the world of Google Developer Day presentations.
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Thursday, May 31st, 2007
A Javascript file I've been modifying to overlay WMS-generated tiles atop Google Maps. More on this very soon.
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Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
A promising WMS based in Python. I have little doubt that it's more intuitive than MapServer.
