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 the results. Language Support Thrift supports a wide range of languages, but the support is not uniform.

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. With a few simple tweaks we can build balance and flow maps, which can be useful tools for understanding the way players use the map.

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, some very interesting patterns emerge. The Data The following charts are backed by 46,000 review scores for 800 games.

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 sales data is the lack of sales variation below a score of 70. Games that score above this threshold show a clear trend of increasing sales.

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 be traversed quickly with scripts. Scraping data from web pages is easy as long as you completely ignore the impulse to follow good coding practices.

Download Zeo.NET Requires .NET 4.0

One of the fun technical challenges in astrophotography is the meticulous attention to detail that you must apply to every step. One of these details is correctly balancing the desire to take long exposures to minimize the effects of readout noise and the desire to take lots of short exposures to minimize the wasted time of an exposure with a random defect such as cosmic ray strikes or tracking errors. Additionally, multiple exposures lets you use advanced pixel rejection techniques that require many images to function well.

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 bebothamazingly 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 for automating the deployment of your software in an effort to minimize defective releases. The example content is a simple PJSR script, but the described method applies to PCL modules.

This script now has its own page, Sky Limited Exposure

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. The ST-8300 is a bargain when compared with most other dedicated astrophotography cameras and when combined with a filter wheel and good filters you can take extremely high quality pictures for a fraction of what the ultra high-end hardware costs.