Software Project Plans for December: Two Datasette Enrichments and a Gladych Podcast/Vlog

We have new software projects to play with here at the KD0FNR/KO6BTY ham shack in December.

First, Datasette announced a new toy to play with! Enrichments

If you've been regularly reading, or watching the repository for the logging software the kids and I have been building for oursevles, you've seen me mention Datasette before. It's a tool for browsing data sets using SQLite, and then applying various analyses to the data. The kids and I have used it to map QSOs in a number of different ways. Simon Willison announced that the tool now feautres something called enrichments. What do they do? In short, they allow the user to apply operations to data that can subsequently be written back into a database. The post linked to above demonstrates how enrichments work using a geocoding example. The example uses OpenCage to geocode addresses. We've been using the Google Maps API here to do a similar thing, so the first obvious project is

Creating a Datasette enhancement that uses the Maps API

This will give us a chance to learn how to craeate enrichments for Datasette. We're going to start with the geocoding example for OpenCage. The project will also teach us how to use secrets locally, (I hope), since the existing enrichment code looks for an OpenCage API key. We'll be adapting that to look for a Google Maps geocoding API key.

When we finish that, we'll cruise on into the second project

A qrz.com call sign to address enrichment

After we have geocoding down, it only makes sense to go the one extra step to add a qrz.com enrichment that returns a column of addresses given a call sign. By combining the two enrichments together, we will have basically re-written our current logging/mapping project in yet another different way.

Gladych Podcast/Vlog

In the last few months the number of hits on the antigravity post about Michael Gladych has gone up inexplicably. I mean, in terms of this blog at least, when something eclipses the post about deriving the divergence in a different coordinate system, something's up.

This increased readership about Gladych inspired the kids and I to start talking about Gladych stories again, and so, we've decided to set up a murder board. We'll be video-casting the results both becausei it's fun, and in hopes that someone will comment, (feel free to comment here also), with details on what drove readership for Gladych up in the first place. Who knows, maybe we'll turn the whole thing into a Datasette data source to boot.

Comments

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog