The Ammazing iOS6 Maps

omg: somebody painted the landscape in white.
Three types of image quality in southern switzerland.

The Helsinki Central Railway Station has magically turned into a park


Helsinki’s biggest open-air marketplace (Kauppatori) has also been magically been turned into a park (along with a bunch of other marketplaces)

Walking across there seems like fun…

Apple thinks that much of the east side of Portland, Oregon is a nature park

New Orleans famously misplaced Crescent City Connection bridge, otherwise known as the Greater New Orleans Bridge to no one

New Orleans famous Huey Long Bridge now available at Home Depot

Apple seems to have left out half of one of Southeastern Europe’s biggest tourist destinations

Apparently Belgrade, Serbia has no rivers

Visualizing large scale Uber Movement Data

Last month one of my acquaintances in LinkedIn pointed me to a very interesting dataset. Uber's Movement Dataset. It was fascinating to explore their awesome GUI and to play with the data. However, their UI for exploring the dataset leaves much more to be desired, especially the fact that we always have to specify source and destination to get relevant data and can't play with the whole dataset. Another limitation also was, the dataset doesn't include any time component. Which immediately threw out a lot of things I wanted to explore. When I started looking out if there is another publicly available dataset, I found one at Kaggle. And then quite a few more at Kaggle. But none of them seemed official, and then I found one released by NYC - TLC which looked pretty official and I was hooked.
To explore the data I wanted to try out OmniSci. I recently saw a video of a talk at jupytercon by Randy Zwitch where he goes through a demo of exploring an NYC Cab dataset using OmniSci. A…

HackRice 7.5: How "uFilter" was born

I have a thing for Hackathon. I am a procrastinator. A lazy and procrastinator graduate student, not a nice combination to have. But still when I see hundreds of sharp minds in a room scrabbling over idea, hungry to build and prototype their idea. Bring it to life, it finally pushes me to activity, makes me productive. That is why I love Hackathon, that is why I love HackRice, our resident Hackathon of Rice University.

TL;DR: if you just want to try the extension, chrome version is here and Firefox version is here.
I have been participating at HackRice since 2014, when I think for the first time it was open for non-rice students, and have been participating ever since. What a roller coaster ride it has been, but that is a story for another day. HackRice 7.5 being the last one I will be able to attend at Rice, it was somewhat special and emotional for me.
HackRice 7.5 was a tad different form the other iterations. For starters it was the first time it was being held in Spring semester…

FirefoxOS, A keyboard and prediction: Story of my first contribution

Returning to my cubical holding a hot cup of coffee and with a head loaded with frustration and panic over a system codebase that I managed to break with no sufficient time to fix it before the next morning.

This was at IBM, New York where I was interning and working on the TJ Watson project. I returned back to my desk, turned on my dual monitors, started reading some blogs and engaging on Mozilla IRC (a new found and pretty short lived hobby). Just a few days before that, FirefoxOS was launched in India in the form of an Intex phone with a $35 price tag. It was making waves all around, because of its hefty price and poor performance . The OS struggle was showing up in the super low cost hardware. I was personally furious about some of the shortcomings, primarily the keyboard which at that time didn’t support prediction in any language other than English and also did not learn new words. Coincidentally, I came upon Dietrich Ayala in the FirefoxOS IRC channel, who at that time was a P…

RK's Rambling

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