Locally Sourced Data and Software

The gang and I are very lucky to live in a San Francisco neighborhood where we have markets, a family owned pharmacy, and family-owned restaurants, coffee shops, and delis all about a ten block walk from the house. Here’s the haul from our Farmers Market that we walk to along with our local butcher shop and dim sum bakery a few weeks ago.

Consequently when I saw a mention of local-first software,[via] I was intrigued. (As a side note, the presenter, Maggie Appleton, at one point in the not to distant past, worked with Elicit, a research paper summarizing AI startup with an office in Oakland, so kind of surprisingly local, but I digress.)

It turns out that local-first development advocates for keeping the data for an app offline, i.e. keeping the data with the person who created or is using that data by default. But, what happens to collaboration? Well, the local, offline data is synched to the cloud when a connection is available allowing for collaboration while also creating a bit of a task to keep everything synched.

Another aside: reading this local-first article turned me on to why my Bluetooth keyboard locks up when on airplanes. Google Docs synchs on a keystroke by keystroke basis. I have discovered this before as proven by a dim memory that I used to keep a local, (there’s that word again), html page on my personal devices. That page contained only a html text input control. I could free-type into that control at breakneck speeds, and then cut and paste blocks of text at a time into more formal location such as Google Docs.

Point being, local-first is a good idea, an idea I have believed in for quite a while as proven by implementation history if not by my knowledge of what to call it. I do love what its’s called though.

I’m slowly but surely working though what local-first looks like with respect to our QSO mapping apps. Here are some thoughts

F2 data from ionosondes (probably good since it’s for a specific date, time, and location, and caching it at least momentarily will speed up our QSO mapping apps.)
Elevation profiles (doesn’t seem useful yet since each QSO path is pretty unique)
QSO physical addresses and locations (reduces geocoding calls and QRZ lookup calls)

Also of Interest:

Bi-directional links and digital gardening

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