We're back
Glad to be!
Accursed Ware
Latest posts
Whither Rent Regulation
The rent stabilization law that keep apartments affordable for millions of New Yorkers was just renewed, warts and all . The fight in Albany between tenant advocates and politicians centered around closing loopholes in the law. The worst allows stabilized apartments to exit the program when their rent gets high enough, resulting in the loss of thousands of affordable apartments every year – far…
⅕ of NYC collision data wrong
New York has really stepped up its open data game in the last year. Data sets like ACRIS (the city property records) and MapPLUTO (GIS) that used to cost thousands of dollars are now free. While it’s in beta with limited access, the city now makes available its official geocoder, too. This openness is drawing into harsh relief excctly how poor the quality of the city’s collision statistics are.…
A YouTube CLI for Mac
Out of laziness, I mostly listen to music off YouTube these days. As a library it’s pretty unbeatable, and I don’t have to worry about plugging in an external HDD with a big library. Using the browser for selecting songs is a drag, but I’ve always used visual interfaces (originally iTunes, then a combination of VLC and Vox ). Also, Flash player munches on your battery pretty bad. And I generally…
Introducing NYC Crashmapper
For over a year, I’ve been archiving and processing the New York City Police Department’s collision data on the Crash Data Band-Aid . With some help from generous people , all valid intersections have been geocoded in the past several months. So now all the collision data, in addition to being free for download above, can be visualized and analyzed in your browser using Crashmapper ! The project…
New Google Maps Mutilates Bike Layer
Update 8/1 : Google fixed it yesterday! Thanks everyone who filed tickets with them, maybe it made a difference. :) Anyone who bikes in New York City and uses Google Maps to look up their route is in for an unpleasant surprise. The new-look Google Maps totally mutilates NYC’s previously excellent bicycle lane layer. I wouldn’t be surprised if it messed it up elsewhere. Since the old Google Maps…
New NYC buildings less efficient
Large buildings constructed in New York City since 1935 are by today’s standards less energy efficient. Reading this article from Metropolis Mag on what’s wrong with green architecture, and LEED certification in particular, I noticed references to New York City measuring energy efficiency for some famous buildings: the Chrysler Building, the new 7 World Trade Center, and the Seagram Building,…
Preparing a Mac laptop for your Grandma
My grandma got a new laptop for Mother’s Day. She’s in her nineties, and first started using a computer a few years ago. Email, watching music on YouTube, and playing bridge online are now essential parts of her life. Her first computer was an old iBook, which still works fine, but the services she uses have rendered it unusable: The pace of obsolecence on the Internet is unacceptable. A huge…
JS-Free Live Chat
I built a real-time web-based chat without a line of client-side code. No JavaScript, no Flash, no (ew) Java applet. 100% HTML. It even works in Internet Explorer 4 , emulated with SheepShaver . Because I remember the canonical node.js example being a chat server, I had to call it No.JS (no-dot-JS, got it? Haha. Sorry.) To be fair, the backend could have been built in JavaScript using Node,…
NYPD crash data band-aid
Yesterday, Streetsblog wrote about the previous day’s New York City Council hearing on traffic safety. There have been several particularly gruesome incidents in the past year where New York drivers maimed and killed pedestrians and cyclists. The New York City Police Department has not only barely investigated the crime scenes, but it has been incredibly callous towards the victims, their…
The Long Reach of Industry Research
PIPA is, for the moment, dead in the water. Reid is not going to vote on cloture. His statement reads, in part: …Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs… The part about “supporting 2.2 million jobs” looked familiar. Last night, I checked out mpaa.org when I heard that…