January 24th, 2010 | by Derek Willis | published in django, Mapping, Python
Update: Simon has updated his library to make it easy to reverse the order of coordinates. Thanks! For a “15-minute project“, Simon Willison’s geocoders library is pretty handy if you’re doing geocoding with Python. It offers a common interface to the geocoding services provided by Google, Yahoo and other sources. When we were looking at [...]
August 23rd, 2008 | by Derek Willis | published in django, Mapping
One of my tasks this summer was to learn a bit more about the GIS branch of Django, which is now in trunk as a contrib app thanks to the hard work of Justin Bronn, Travis Pinney and Co. Although there are many folks in the CAR community who are quite proficient at mapping technologies, [...]
October 13th, 2006 | by Derek Willis | published in Local Data, Mapping
Allison Klein and Dan Keating of the Washington Post used local crime data to show that “some of Washington’s most vibrant neighborhoods, destinations for suburbanites, barhoppers and urban professionals, share a lesser-known distinction: They have the highest concentrations of holdups in the city.” On Friday and Saturday nights, up to five robberies an hour occur [...]
September 15th, 2006 | by Derek Willis | published in Mapping, State Data
Tim Nelson of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, with CAR assistance from MaryJo Sylwester, mapped the results of the Ramsey County judicial primary on Sept. 12, posting the map and other data on paper’s City Hall Scoop blog. The results showed a broad city-suburban split in the vote.
September 12th, 2006 | by Derek Willis | published in Mapping, State Data
Dan Murtaugh of the Mobile Press-Register used state data to show that Alabama’s sexual offender “law has had little effect in Mobile County, with at least 101 of the county’s 282 registered sex offenders listing home addresses within the restricted zones around schools and day cares.” Some exceptions within the law could permit registered offenders [...]