Adrian Holovaty

Maybe not "daily", but very frequently: here is a small selection of some of the small sites on my newsblur newsfeed list: [0]

http://www.jamesaltucher.com : Much self-pity, but also sometimes quite funny.

http://www.astrobio.net/latestnews_rss/news.xml : Is there life on other planets?

http://kaygun.tumblr.com/

http://www.friday.com/bbum : Coding, hardware projects, generally interesting.

http://bestyoucanbe.blogspot.com/ : Insights into the education system in regard to the raising of his neurologically non-typical son.

http://blog.lmorchard.com

http://ex-muslim.org.uk : Oppression of atheists in the Muslim world.

http://clojurefun.wordpress.com : Clojure!

http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath : Bad science, denialism.

http://blog.willbenton.com : Music, logic, programming, etc.

http://www.groklaw.net : Maybe not "small"; detailed analysis of important legal cases.

http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal : Web design.

http://www.holovaty.com/ : "I'm co-creator and co-Benevolent Dictator For Life of the open-source Django Web framework"

http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones : Combines talented photography, photoessays, and study of the retina.

http://lee-phillips.org : I regularly check my site to see if it's still working.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca : Language issues; can be amusing or stupid.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie : Freedom for women in the Muslim world.

http://math-blog.com : Infrequently updated, but often…

I did (some of) this with chicagocrime.org in 2005... :-)

...and I've since learned the error of my ways. It's just too misleading to do these types of overly simplistic data reports. The data set is flawed in many ways, including:

* Data model. The Chicago crime data only has a single date/time field. For many crimes, such as break-ins, the victim/reporter isn't able to pinpoint an exact time; they might just provide a time range. That doesn't jive well with the data model.

* Data mistakes. I dealt with public record databases extensively from 2005-2012 (Washington Post, chicagocrime.org, EveryBlock). Government data sets (like any data sets!) contain mistakes, which are compounded when you do aggregate queries.

* Systematic police department effort to reduce crime numbers through data trickery. See the amazing recent piece by Chicago Magazine: http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2014/Chicago-crime-statistics/

All in all, obviously this post is harmless link bait at face value, but more thought should be given to these issues. Open govt. data is a good thing, but it's healthy to be skeptical.

(Note chicagocrime.org is no longer around, as I redirected it to my other project, EveryBlock, several years ago: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/)

This release brings some really great features to the table. Here are some things that affect me directly:

- Lots and lots of improvements to the admin app. Also, dropped support for IE6 in the admin ;)
- Better password hashing.
- A cookie-based session backend that uses cryptographic signing to store session data in the browser.
- A new form wizard. This is a big one for me since I needed something like this for one of my side projects.
- Improved WSGI support.
- Custom project and app templates.
- OMG OMG OMG timezone support. "When it's enabled, Django stores date and time information in UTC in the database, uses time-zone-aware datetime objects internally and translates them to the end user's time zone in templates and forms." You could always do this manually, but it's one of those things that should be handled by the framework.

Pretty nice stuff. Best part is, since I'm in very early stages of building a personal website using Django, I can start using this release right now.

PS: does anyone else think activity around Django has increased ever since Adrian started spending more time on it? (see http://www.holovaty.com/writing/back-to-django/)

You just described the Adrian Holovaty thesis. http://holovaty.com/

He's the Django co-creator, gypsy guitar-playing developer of Everyblock.com

His big idea is that reporters have been gathering all this data for years.....and organizing it in the worst, least helpful format ever, the "text blob." What he's doing with Everyblock is the same thing Google's been doing since day 1, converting text blobs into useful, actionable, structured data that you can reassemble into graphs, maps, interactive features, or articles if need be.

He's certainly onto something. My question is whether that's going to completely blot out narrative journalism. My guess is that people who like narrative journalism are going to keep liking it while the many many people who never cared and who just read the headlines anyway will flock to Google News, sites like this and anything else that gives them something "worse" than narrative journalism but "good enough" to attract their eyeballs.

Note: I did not comment on my own comment. For some reason user jaydub deleted his comment as I was responding to it.

Soundslice is a service where you can transcribe music easily. Many sites that offer "guitar tabs" use either an ASCII-based format or files for GuitarPro and similar programs. Soundslice allows you to transcribe directly from a YouTube video, so you get the original sound together with the tabs, looping, slowing down and the ability to transcribe songs yourself.

Here's an example: http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/2865/adrian-holovaty-everything-means-nothing-to-me-elliott-smith-tab/

Now they've launched a sheet-music player that's featured on the homepage. Adrian has posted an article about it on his blog: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/soundslice-sheet-music/

Currently, only they transcribe the sheet-music, via their Pitch Perfect program: http://www.soundslice.com/pitch-perfect/

An idea for new news:

Start with the reddit concept: users submit and vote on links to articles, blog posts and so forth.

Then, allow users to tag each link (or otherwise add metadata), and vote on the relevence of the story to the tag. Also allow users to vote on the trustworthiness of each link and/or each source or author. Could also allow users to vote on other users, to get networks of trust.

Then you just take all that data and use it to generate personalised news, or whatever else you want.

I also like Adrian Holovaty's ideas about a data-oriented approach to news: [http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/09/06/0307/] [http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/06/_future_of_journalism_adrian_h.html]