-
My name is Dan Nguyen and I'm a journalist, programmer and photographer.
Follow me on Twitter: @dancow
Read my guide to programming: The Bastards Book of Ruby.
Category Archives: works
A HTML GUI for training Tesseract on character sets
The Tesseract OCR Chopper, by data journalist Dino Beslagic. I’m making this short stub post because ever since I’ve used tesseract to convert scanned documents into text, I’ve wondered why the hell is it so hard to train tesseract (to… Continue reading
Tools to get to the precipice of programming
I’m not a master programmer but it’s been so long since I’ve done my first “Hello World” that I don’t remember how people first grok the point of programming (for me, it was to get a good grade in programming… Continue reading
Big Faces – a mashup of The Big Picture and Face.com
Just put up another quick side project: Big Faces, which aggregates the excellent Big Picture Blog (by the Boston Globe and its many contributors) and just shows the faces. I used the Face.com API to crop the faces before uploading… Continue reading
Discussion
Leave a comment
Category works
Analyzing the U.S. Senate Smiles: A Ruby tutorial with the Face.com and NYT Congress APIs
Who’s got the biggest smile among our U.S. senators? Let’s find out and exercise our Ruby coding and civic skills. This article consists of a quick coding strategy overview (from the full code is at my Github). Or jump here… Continue reading
A Million Pageviews, Thousands of Dollars Poorer, and Still Countlessly Richer.
Update: This post rambled longer than I intended it to and I forgot that I had meant to include some observations on what I’ve noticed about Flickr’s traffic pattern. I’ve added some grafs to the bottom of this post. My… Continue reading
Discussion
8 Comments
Category thoughts, visuals, works
SOPAopera.org – A hand-made list of SOPA / PROTECT-IP Congressional supporters and opponents
I’ve always been interested in exploring the various online Congressional information sources and the recent SOPA debate seemed like a good time to put some effort in it…also, I’ve always wanted to try out the excellent isotope Javascript library. I… Continue reading
The Bastards Book: A Programming Tutorial for journalists, researchers, analysts, and anyone else who cares about data
Back when I wrote my “Coding for Journalists 101″ guide about a year and a half ago, I barely realized how useful code could be as a journalistic tool. Since then, after the Dollars for Docs project at ProPublica and… Continue reading
New Hurricane Irene data predicts increased chance of high speed winds
UPDATE 1:30PM: New NOAA numbers project REDUCED probabilities, table updated: According to raw data from the National Hurricane Center, the probability that NYC will suffer sustained high winds has increased significantly I had yesterday's numbers saved on my web cache… Continue reading
Discussion
Leave a comment
Category thoughts, works
photos.danwin.com: My new portfolio site in HTML5, with responsive CSS
After trying too hard to rewrite my really old Flash gallery as a jQuery plugin, I thought “to hell with it” and decided to join the one-pager trend: http://photos.danwin.com. I have to say, this was one of the more pleasant… Continue reading
Reactions to Osama bin Laden’s death: Female and non-U.S. residents more ambivalent. Via the NYT Reactions Matrix
This (totally not-double-checked) analysis is a riff off of the excellent New York Times visualization (The Death of a Terrorist: A Turning Point?) of how people reacted to Osama bin Laden’s death. In the days following the news, the Times… Continue reading
Discussion
2 Comments
Category thoughts, works
Tags 9/11, new york times, Osama bin Laden, visualizations