Two of the major strengths of Thrift are its support for a wide range of languages as well as its collection of available protocols. However, not every protocol is available for every language and not all protocols perform the same. I’ve spent a little time researching these issues and this is a quick summary of [...]
Heatmaps are an excellent tool for visualizing data with a two dimensional spatial component. They are frequently used to map out player deaths in shooter games. The most common heatmaps use the location of the victim and aggregate the number of kills as the visualized measure. However, this simple metric doesn’t tell the whole story. [...]
Scraping Data
All of the data used to build these visualizations was extracted from various web sites using a few Python scripts. The Beautiful Soup library was used to parse and traverse the HTML.
Google Chrome’s developer tools are an excellent way to discover the structure of a web site so it can [...]
In Part I we looked at review scores in isolation. When we combine review score data with sales data some interesting patterns emerge. This section includes sales data from around 7,000 Xbox360 and Playstation2 games as well as the review score data from Part I.
Sales and Scores
An interesting property of the [...]
Studies have shown that a good review score can propel a game’s reputation. However, with such a large amount of data available, the two review aggregation sites simply present a single number for each game. With a wealth of review score data available, a few web scraping scripts, and a couple data analysis tools, [...]
