TwitterGoggles requires Python 3.3. I’m new to Python, and 3.3 is (relatively) new to everyone. So, getting help is both necessary and challenging. I want to run TwitterGoggles on Amazon EC2 instances, so I’m setting up an AMI that has all of the requirements: gcc 4.6.3 git 1.8.1.4 mlocate 0.22.2 MySQL 5.5 Python 3.3...
Read more →Many of the networks I retrieve and analysis are two-mode affiliation networks – meaning they’re networks of people connected to share objects or communities. For instance, Senators using the #gopconference hashtag on Twitter, where I’ll have an edgelist of Senators and the hashtags they use. NodeXL, my free network analysis software of choice, doesn’t currently...
Read more →Now that we’re using Amazon EC2 for our lab computing needs, I find I’m doing many server maintenance tasks over and over again. One of my least favorites is adding new MySQL users. So, I wrote a bash script that makes adding them easier. You can get the script at our Github organization or...
Read more →You can tell by today’s posts that I’m getting something started on EC2. You can also read what’s already installed on the free instance or how to get started. PHP and MySQL are not installed on the free instance, so this post is about getting setup so I can run 140dev’s excellent Twitter Database...
Read more →I’ve been having trouble finding out what’s installed and/or running on the free Amazon EC2 instance, so I’ll use this post to list the processes and installs as I uncover them. Default versions of stuff I use: Python 2.6.6 ruby 1.8.7 (2010-12-23 patchlevel 330) (You’ll need to install Rubygems yourself)
Read more →I’m setting up some free Amazon EC2 instances so I can run my Twitter data collectors without violating the terms of my Dreamhost hosting agreement or worrying about losing power on my office machine (happened just last week). Despite the many Google results for “getting started with ec2 on a mac”, the process is...
Read more →Twitter’s Streaming API requires user_id for just about any user function, but only screen_names are easy to find. The documentation for the Twitter and Twitter4r gems has the wrong syntax for the user.lookup method. So, I wrote a little script that accepts a list of screen_names and gets the associated user_ids. The original version...
Read more →I finally tackled the (hopefully) last bit of my Snow Leopard upgrade today: getting Ruby (and Rails) ready to go. I’m working on an information visualization project and am using Ruby to write the app. Mike Gunderloy at A Fresh Cup has a great step by step guide (I started at step 19 since...
Read more →Jeremy Whitlock has a great blog post about how to set up your OS X-based Subversion server. His post includes instructions for Apache configs, but not for svn+ssh. When you type svn+ssh://user@host/repos you’ll likely get an error such as svn: Expected FS format '2'; found format '4' which means that you’re repository was created...
Read more →Sometimes we ask users to enter a date range. I wrote some code today to check whether the date a user entered was (1) after today and (2) before some other date she entered. In my situation, I was building a flight search form and wanted to check that the user-entered departure date was...
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