Cerebiggum

Thrift Protocols, AJAX, and Language Support

Sean — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 22:35:04 +0000

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 [...]

Balance and Flow Maps

Sean — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 06:37:24 +0000

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. [...]

Game Review Scores – Part III

Sean — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:50:35 +0000

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 [...]

Game Review Scores – Part II

Sean — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:50:16 +0000

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 [...]

Game Review Scores – Part I

Sean — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:50:00 +0000

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, [...]

Building an Automated Build and Release Server for PixInsight

Sean — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 08:43:27 +0000

PixInsight 1.6.9 introduced a new automated update system – a system that allows developers to easily deploy updates as soon as they are ready. Automated deployment can be both amazingly convenient for your users and a complete nightmare for the developer. Without proper automation accidents will happen and user experience will suffer. This post details a method [...]

Sky Limited Exposure Script for PixInsight

Sean — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 06:20:36 +0000

This script now has its own page, http://www.cerebiggum.com/software/sky-limited-exposure/

First Light with the ST-8300

Sean — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 05:18:35 +0000

I decided to purchase an SBIG ST-8300M to replace the 10D and 5DMkII for astrophotography. Although these camera are amazing performers they just don’t hold up without modifications for deep sky subjects due to their muffled sensitivity to hydrogen-alpha light. I also own an SBIG STV and SBIG ST-5C and the company makes great hardware. [...]

Scaled Dark Frames in MaxIm DL and PixInsight

Sean — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 04:43:17 +0000

I’m evaluating MaxIm DL and PixInsight at the same time because I only want to purchase one image processing package. The first significant obstacle I’ve come across is that PixInsight doesn’t seem to scale dark frames very well. I’ve run the exact same calibration process on the same image and I get completely different results [...]

Worst Phone Ever

Sean — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:50:35 +0000

I love the iPhone as everything but a phone. I barely get any reception where I live or where I work. It feels like I get dropped calls all the time. I didn’t know there was any way to get real quantitative information about your experiences, until now. It turns out that when you sync [...]