Waggle Dance

Through an odd chain of events, I offered to create a map of home addresses of registered sex offenders in the Augusta area. Here is a 1st look:


Since I didn’t want to spend hours on end looking at, or reading about these animals, I went searching for method to take the addresses parsed from the Augusta PD site, convert them to longitude/latitude positions, then plot them on a street map. The site scraping was pretty easy with Perl LWP (although getting useful info out of the HTML exported Word docs the folks at Augusta PD use is a PITA!) and creating a map with pointers through USGS TIGER maps is pretty easy. Just the geocoding part was missing. Dan Egnor to the rescue with his 2002 Google Programming Contest winning code to search the TIGER/Line data and return long/lat for an address. In the great tradition of unix tool chain, his tool takes address on stdin so I can pipe the out put from my screen scrap to it, pipe it through some slice and dice to get a murl file for TIGER and away we go!

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After getting into a discussion about coding styles and conventions, I figured I better get some clearer definitions for mixed case names in code:

• studly caps - an arbitrary capitalization of letters. sTudLyCapS
• camel case - run together words with the first letter of each of the word capitalized. CamelCase
• lower camel case - like the above camel case, but with the first letter remaining lowercase. lowerCamelCase
• bicapitalization - studly caps cooped by marketing type to distinguish product names and brands from common usage such as NeXT or DymlerChrysler

Other variations or synonyms include MixedCase, InterCaps, BumpyCase, and HumpBackNotation,

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I’m in the process of moving my blog to WordPress from MovableType. While I wish the authors of MT the best of luck with their new pricing model, I have to agree with Mark Pilgrim and his reasons for switching to WordPress. I still need to tweek the fonts and such to match my site better, but, I’ll get there… sometime…

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One of the side effects of being a computer geek seems to be the proliferation of junker computers on the home network. Currently we have 4 machines running pretty much full time and another 3 that get used off and on. While these machines are on all/most of the time, it doesn’t mean they are doing anything useful, they basically idle, burning electricity and wasting CPU cycles. I’m not the 1st to notice this “waste”, there are a number of “distributed computing” projects designed give those bored computers a reason to live:

• Seti@Home
  While not the first, this project put distributed computing into the mainstream with it’s cool screensaver and the chance of finding ET by scanning radio telescope data for intelligent signals
• Folding@Home
  Following on the success of S@H, this project hopes to understand the processes that turn the long chains of protein created using DNA instructions into the complex, chemical “nanomachines” that makes life possible. While the direct result of any one computer’s work isn’t as exciting as finding ET, the rewards are higher, because understanding protein folding will lead to tailor-made therapies for everything from Mad Cow disease to old age.
• Distributed.Net RC5
  While not as noble as proving we are not alone in the universe or ridding the world of disease, Distributed.Net’s goal of breaking RC5 encrypting keys by brute force has lead to higher standards in encryption key sizes and security in general. A 56 bit test key fell in 250 days, a 64 bit key took 1757 days, and a 72 bit keys is being chip away at a rate of about 147,300,000,000 keys per second!
• More Projects
  The above are just some projects I’ve tried, but there are many more. The above link lists many of them.

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