Randoom a Michael Friis production

Non-trivial Facebook FQL example

This post will demonstrate a few non-trivial FQL calls from Javascript, including batching interdependent queries in one request. The example queries all participants of a public Facebook event and gets their names and any public status updates they’ve posted recently. It then goes on to find all friend-relations between the event participants and graphs those [...]


Wikileaks Iraq wardiaries data quality

til;dr: The Wikileaks Iraq data is heavily redacted (by Wikeleaks presumably) compared to the Afghanistan data: Names — of persons, bases, units and more — have been purged from the “Title” and “Summary” column-texts and the precision of geograpical coordinates have been truncated. This makes both researching and visualizing the Iraq data somewhat difficult.
(this is [...]


Facebook Open Graph at ekstrabladet.dk

(This post is a straight-up translation from Danish of a post on the Ekstra Bladet development blog)
Right before the 2010 World Cup started, ekstrabladet.dk (the Danish tabloid where I work) managed to get an interesting implementation of the new Facebook Open Graph protocol up and running. This blog post describes what this feature does for [...]


Roskilde Festival 2010 Schedule as XML

@mortenjust and @claus have created the excellent Roskilde Festival Pocket Schedule Generator. They gave me access to their schedule data, and I’ve used that to scrape more tidbits from the Roskilde Festival website. Fields are:

Name (all caps)
Stage where band plays
Time of performance (in UNIX and regular datetime)
Roskilde Festival website URL
Countrycode
Myspace URL
Band website URL
Picture URL
Video-embed-html
Tag-line

Get it [...]


Posted
2 June 2010 @ 12pm

Tagged
Meta

Google sampled my voice and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!

I’ve just submitted a voice-sample to help Google in their efforts to build Danish-language voice search. See what voice search is about in this video. In case anyone is interested, here’s how Google goes about collecting these samples.
The sampling was carried out by a Danish-speaker hired by Google for the specific task. The sampling was done [...]


Screen scraping flight data from Amadeus checkmytrip.com

checkmytrip.com let’s you input an airplane flight booking reference and your surname in return for a flight itinerary. This is useful for building all sorts of services to travellers. Unfortunately Amadeus doesn’t have an API, nor are their url’s restful. Using Python, mechanize, htm5lib and BeautifulSoup, you can get at the data pretty easy though. [...]


Posted
26 May 2010 @ 11pm

Tagged
C#

ASP.Net MVC Layar layer, ghetto-style

Layar is a really great meta-app for iPhone and Android that lets you see a lot of third-party geo-based augmented reality layers on your phone. A “layar” consists of a JSON webservice that provides Points of Interest to users. There is HttpHandler implementation available for .Net, but the Layar specification is so simple (in the [...]


Posted
26 May 2010 @ 10pm

Tagged
C#

Dynamic Sitemap with ASP.Net MVC (incl. geo)

Here is how I generate sitemaps using the XDocument API and a ContentResult. The entries are events that come out of the EventRepository, please substitute as needed. Note that it would be vastly more elegant to use ActionLinks in some way. Note also that the first entry is a link to a Google Earth KMZ [...]


LinqtoCRM obsoleted

Shan McArthur put up a notice that the latest version (4.0.12) of the Microsoft CRM SDK includes Linq querying support. The CRM Team have a couple of blog posts describing the new features. I haven’t tested the new SDK, but I definitely recommend you try it out before using LinqtoCRM and I’ve put a notice to that [...]


Posted
16 May 2010 @ 5pm

Tagged
C#, LINQ, SQL

Linq-to-SQL, group-by, subqueries and performance

If you’re using Linq-to-SQL, doing group-by and selecting other columns than those in the grouping-key, performance might suffer. This is because there is no good translation of such queries to SQL and Linq-to-SQL has to resort to doing multiple subqueries. Matt Warren explains here. I experienced this firsthand when grouping a lot of geocoded events [...]


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