Code

I recently forked the defunct eyefiserver project. The new project is called eyefiserver2. It is a server for eye-fi cards that runs on Linux using Python, however, it should be possible to run it on any OS, I just haven't tested it on anything other than Linux.

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So far I've solved about 24 of the Project Euler problems. I'm not sure how long it took me, probably a few months working on them here and there. I would like to continue solving more of these when I get the chance.

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When the Vancouver Sun came out with their Vancouver parking tickets database I immediately had some burning questions, like, did the meter maids work on holidays? Do the work less in the evening than during the day? I found it difficult to answer these questions using their interface, so I decided to screen scrape all 1.6 million parking tickets in to my own MySQL database. This was a bit challenging as they made it difficult to screen scrape the data but eventually it could be done simply by first getting an AppKey, a hidden value inside the HTML source and then doing queries using that AppKey as a parameter. It took about a week to get all 1.6 million tickets downloaded. By using Django, it was easy to get them in to a database and view the results. Initially I just put all the data in to one table, then later I decided to normalize the data a bit which was interesting as I decided to do that in pure SQL which I hadn't done before. I did the scraping itself using a combination of BeautifulSoup, lxml, and mechanize.

vancouver-parking-tickets project at GitHub

MySQL SQL dump (42 MB)

Here's some data:

[img_assist|nid=362|title=Django Recipes Screenshot|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=98|height=100]

My mom was writing a family cookbook using Microsoft Word and I thought this was a bad idea for several reasons. At first I thought about using LaTeX to separate the style from the content a bit, then I thought about using XML, then I settled on a database as being the most generic to store recipe data. I quickly decided on using Django to create this cookbook framework because Python is probably my strongest language and it makes creating custom websites really easy.