The Pragmatic Geographer

If you follow economics at all, the news has been awash in a sizable scandal involving a pair of economists and their bold claim - a specific level of government debt causes economic slowdowns - ...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-programmer-by-any-other-name.html

I have a new repository on github that demonstrates a couple of basic machine learning and AI techniques, principally picked up from CS_373 and Stanford's Introduction to AI. It's all explained ...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2012/04/aimachine-learning-python-samples.html

THE PROBLEM - OLD DATA, IMPORTANT DATA Some of the most important spatial data is old. It was built up and maintained over decades by paper and early computer systems, and it represents power li...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2012/02/spatial-correction-using-particle.html

We were promised jetpacks, but I'll take Tilemill as a temporary replacement: http://mapbox.com/tilemill/ The MapBox/DevelopmentSeed team has created one of the the last pieces really neede...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-tilemill-means.html

Recently went to an HTML5 Hackathon at Google Kirkland. My group's project was an in-browser IDE Chrome extension that zipped up a user-provided series of HTML/CSS/JS files into a package that co...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2011/08/html5-file-system-api-basic-tips.html

In no particular order: Making Apps that Don't Suck: UX Basics for GeoNerds (video) By Kirk Van Gorkum I only caught the last half of this because I didn't know Kirk was doing this one and ...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2011/03/some-must-see-development-summit-videos.html

It's been more or less done a while, but here is finally a blog post about it. nx_spatial is a collection of addon functions for the networkx python graph library. What can you do with it? Lo...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2011/02/introducing-belatedly-nxspatial_27.html

I love doing side projects. There are many reasons: No better way to learn some technology than to put it into practice. Can actually turn into a real thing, even a day job (a good example is Ins...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2011/02/side-projects-green-projects.html

I really didn't know what to expect. Information on the official site and wiki was limited. The location, percise problem definitions, available resources, what we should bring - all quite hazy...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2010/12/random-hacks-of-kindness.html

Two articles recently came to my attention - one describing how location based services like FourSquare are used by some vanishingly small percentage of young people and basically no one else. T...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2010/09/location-based-services-are-going-to.html

It's going to take me some time to fully decompress and write this up, as a good portion of what I saw in Portland was new to me in some form. It is easy enough to read about the hacker community...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2010/09/wherecamppdx-2010-some-of-sessions.html

I got this question from a recent grad and I'm not sure if I gave a good answer. Or, for that matter, if there is much advice that would help someone graduating into this job market. One theory ...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2010/08/to-i-get-gis-job.html

I've been hammering away at a GIS migration project that has been going on far longer than anyone expected it might take, but I've gotten the opportunity to hack away at some Python to more or le...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2010/07/geometric-network-geoprocessing.html

The Washington URISA conference is just about over, and it's made me realize how long it has been since I've gotten a chance to interact with the local GIS community. Some impressions: The panels...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2010/04/waurisa-2010-conference-wrapup.html

First, an adorable picture General nerd stuff Android iTouch killer ? $155 is cheap. Looking seriously at this or the Dell Mini 5 . Vendor's site. MIX 10 : what Microsoft is doing this year. AI...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2010/03/link-cleanup-time.html

Why can't my GIS data be as easy to organize/provide metadata for as my music collection? I want a clean, detailed interface to explore my files. I want an indexed library for fast searches and...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2010/02/you-want-more-metadata-make-organizing.html

This is old hat by now, but I love how much cruft can be killed by outright avoiding older APIs. A unique location number needed to be generated for an engineering design tool. A vendor contact...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2010/02/fun-with-sql-spatial.html

Why? Back up old versions without scattering dozens of files everywhere. Free online hosting with Google - create a message board, wiki, group commenting section Immediately push in revisions fro...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2009/12/use-source-control-for-your-thesis.html

The new job is different from my former one in the kind of work so far, the organization, and the environment. The responsibility for other systems - customer service, outage management, geogr...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2009/11/sortalogic.html

So, there has been a little change of scenery since I last posted. I got a job in Washington and didn't have to be in too much of a rush to move (unlike when we moved down to Arizona). It went so...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-state-new-faces.html

My last interlude with tracing the water system involved looking for hydrologic hazards - specifically other potential sources of water that could confound maintenance efforts. Apparently I impr...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2009/08/more-graph-tracing-this-time-for-water.html

I fancy myself as a very competent user of SQL (particularly T-SQL), and from school, on-the-job training and experience I've come to understand a comprehensive list of things SQL does well: Basi...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2009/06/stored-procedure-hell.html

Yesterday at their I/O conference, Google demonstrated a new communication/collaboration tool that appears to be intended to kill email as the standard form of personal web communication. My firs...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-wave.html

The company I work for is both a water and power utility. Both sides have their own geographic information systems, with parts of IT trying to integrate both systems into one big GIS database. Wh...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2009/05/future-roles-of-gis-analyst-problems-of.html

In the first part of this post, I tried to put together a simplified list of some of the activities that I have found GIS analysts doing as a part of their job. The goal was to get folks talking ...

http://pragmaticgeographer.blogspot.com/2009/05/future-of-gis-analysts-part-2.html