Rational Thaumaturgy

Written by aliasmrchips next to the Rio Grande in Northern New Mexico. You can follow me on Twitter

Getting Started with JupyterLab

July 20, 2018

Notebooks may not have completely replaced the scientific paper. However, they are increasingly used for exploration and “to create and share documents that contain live code, equations…

Introduction to K8s at D11s (w/o yaml)

October 16, 2017

At Descartes Labs we currently ingest about 25k images every day. By which I mean we download, recompress and store (in Google Cloud Storage) about 10TB of raw satellite data every day. This allows…

Multi-dimensional Choropleth Maps using PostGIS, GeoServer, and Google Earth

September 22, 2017

A choropleth map is a “thematic map in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the statistical variable being displayed on the map, such as population density or…

Postgres is Incredibly Awesome

April 14, 2017

I suspect that a large percentage of users come to Postgres for PostGIS. You get spatial data and operations wrapped up in a familiar SQL syntax. This enables a developer familiar with relational…

The Influence of The Castle of Cagliostro on Romancing the Stone

February 11, 2017

I was recently re-watching the classic 80’s movie Romancing the Stone (1984) and at some part I started noticing some striking similarities to one of my favorite movies; the Miyazaki classic The…

Secure Web Services using Postgres and WFS

July 26, 2016

Let’s say you have a bunch of data in a postgres database and you want to be able to access that data through a secure web service endpoint… and you don’t really want to write any code to do it…

Who needs backups?

March 20, 2016

A couple of months ago I spilled a glass of water on my laptop. For the few days my laptop spent covered in rice in a cooler, I was able to continue working without disruption on a ChromeBook from…

A Practical Guide to the Celery Distributed Task Queue

March 20, 2016

Celery is an “asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing”. The documentation is pretty good, and you should follow their guide to get started. However, the examples are…

Rapid Prototyping Web Applications With Ozone

March 20, 2016

The Ozone Widget Framework (also Ozone Platform or just plain Ozone) is, “A customizable open-source web application that assembles the tools you need to accomplish any task and enables those tools…

GeoServer Rendering Transformations

March 20, 2016

Given a large number of vector shapes, GeoServer already does a pretty good job of rendering them. In particular, GeoServer can easily render a vector layer that would cripple Google Earth. Believe…