code in the ruins

I recently put together a new website, HenricoCrime.org. It's a crime data/Google Maps mashup in the style of ChicagoCrime.org and RichmondCrime.org.

The crime data comes from the Henrico County, VA police department website… the heavy lifting is handled by a set of PHP classes that search the site and scrape the HTML for event data. I use Yahoo's geocoding service to find the latitude and longitude of each event. I first tried Google's but I found that it guessed wrongly too often… Henrico County has several different localities, and I have no way of knowing which one I'm looking for. Google will return hits on similar street names in the wrong places, where Yahoo is more strict. I then store the whole mess in a MySQL database on my server.

All that happens on the backend - the website itself just queries the database and assembles a Google Map with info markers for each event. I also generate some basic statistics from the database for each day.

The other interesting bit is The Cloud. I was trying to think of interesting ways to display trends over a long period of time… The Cloud loads hundreds of crime events at once and marks each one with a tiny, nearly transparent dot on the map. As events stack up in the same place, the marks become darker. So if you pull in a few thousand events, you can see where much of the police activity is happening. Generally, it seems like many of the events cluster along the main roads in suburban Richmond. The best places to be, crime-wise, appear to be Glen Allen (the area in the North right around 295), and eastern Henrico (which is mostly rural).

I'd like to keep coming up with different ways of looking at the data; for instance, weekly, monthly, and annual statistics, breakdowns by crime type, RSS feeds, etc. Most events have more data than I'm actually displaying here, so there should be some other possibilities.

Oh, and I also recently completed a site for my aunt, who runs Connections Speech-Language Therapy in Boerne, TX. So, shameless plug there.

Today I listened to my computer's memory. Here's a sample. Kind of interesting, actually; I expected it to be all static, but some patterns do actually emerge. All in all, I think it sounds pretty much like what it is.

You can try this, too…. here's how:
sudo cat /dev/mem > /dev/audio

To record it:
sudo cat /dev/mem | oggenc -rq 1 -o mem.ogg -

oggenc assumes the raw data is 44.1khz at 16 bits per sample, so, if I calculate correctly, each second of audio represents 689K of RAM.

Update: IBM DeveloperWorks has an article on monitoring your system with audio. The idea is that you use the numeric values from a monitoring program like vmstat or top to synthesize musical tones using MIDI. When the CPU, memory, or I/O activity on the system increases, you can hear certain tones increase in intensity. I'm picturing a sysadmin sitting in the data center with all the machines humming along, occasionally going to investigate the occasional outburst of strings or horns…