I recently looked at my texts to myself and realized it seems like a reasonable set of random numbers. Hello, hotel-based entropy*!

What can you do with a very very very slow random number generator? You could spend a lifetime generating enough random digits to encrypt a document (you can seed a pseudorandom number generator, of course, but what’s the fun in that?).

* Okay, this is a really bad idea. For one thing, I only have seven numbers right now, and that’s not even enough to run against any of the dieharder tests. For another, they aren’t at all random, as there’s a bias in the number of floors and number of rooms in various hotels. Also, 5160 was in Vegas, and so even though I was told to go to the “51st floor” when I got off the elevator and looked out the window I was on the third floor. Vegas is weird. If you do actually want some real random numbers, check out the NIST Randomness Beacon. Not my hotel rooms.

** Okay, here are the actual numbers:

11085
12321
707
613
5160
504
pack glasses
1534

So what are people going to do with this? It’s easy to imagine high-quality voice output from Amazon Echo or Siri, or even scary applications, like scam phone calls that sound like they are coming from your own friends or family members (explored here).

And that brings us to today’s bad idea. Let’s build an app that allows you to have a conversation with yourself… in your own voice. You can share all of your half-baked ideas and arguments, and have your own voice cheering you on and repeating things back to you!

Every Friday, I’m going to share a ridiculously bad idea. This should be very easy for me (I have a ton of them), it’ll keep me posting on a regular cadence, and it should also motivate me to write more, since I don’t just want this blog full of bad ideas.

Today’s bad idea is for storage of immutable historical data. When you have data you need to put in cold storage that won’t ever change, why not build a giant XY carving robot, install it against a blank wall in your office lobby, and have the data chiseled into the wall? You can even come up with a design scheme that makes it beautiful. You solve your storage and interior decoration problems at the same time!

Need to retrieve the data? Just take a photo, and decode it. The idea of storing digital data on old media isn’t new. I’ve just yet to see it on a grand scale.

I had to look up how to get OS X Sierra (10.12) to remember my SSH keys. This behavior has changed to mimic standard OpenSSH behavior, which is a good thing!

First, add the key to your OS X keychain:

ssh-add -k [key_file]

Then, when you start a shell, run this:

ssh-add -A

I added it to my .bash_profile and it’s working quite nicely.

I’d like this site to help you figure out who I am and what I do, share what I’m working on now, let people get in touch, and be a place for me to share some personal thoughts and works-in-progress.

If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

I’m excited that my short book, Data Driven: Creating a Data Culture, co-authored with DJ Patil, is out in the world!

We talk about processes and qualities of strong data teams and how to design for these cultural practices in an organization.

The book is available for free on O’Reilly’s site, and soon on Amazon. I hope you enjoy it.

Something fun to start off the new year — I found myself in Google Street View!

(A quick search of tumblr posts with streetview in the URL leads to a lot of fun, related stuff.)

Posted: February 14, 2014 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: data, food | Leave a comment »

I spent a few minutes this week putting together a quick script to pull data from the Locu API. Locu has done the hard work of gathering and parsing menus from around the US and has a lot of interesting data (and a good data team).

The API is easy to query by menu item (like “cheeseburger”, my favorite) and by running my little script I quickly had data for the prices of cheeseburgers in my set of zip codes (the 100 most populated metro areas in the US).

I’m a big fan of Pete Warden’s OpenHeatMap tool for making quick map visualizations, and was able to come up with the following:

The blue map is the average price of a cheeseburger by zip, with the red one showing the average price of pizza. The most expensive average cheeseburger can be found in Santa Clara, CA, ironically the city currently hosting the Strata data science conference this week. Have fun with those $18 cheeseburgers, colleagues!

You can also see some fun words in the pizza topping options:

In this plot, the x-axis is roughly geographic (ordered by zip code) and the y-axis is in order of popularity, with pepperoni being the most popular common pizza topping, and anchovies among the least.

This is just a quick look at some data, but hopefully it’ll encourage you to play with your food (data)!

Posted: December 18, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: email, hack, twitter | 3 Comments »

It turns out that it’s pretty easy to co-opt Twitter’s Lead Generation card for anything where you want to gather a bunch of e-mail addresses from your Twitter community. I was looking for people willing to alpha test a little side project of mine, and it worked great and didn’t cost anything.

The tweet itself:

Love tech discussion but looking for a better community? Help me beta test a side project! https://t.co/H3DYjbCy19

— Hilary Mason (@hmason) December 12, 2013

I created it pretty easily:

1. First, go to ads.twitter.com, log in, and go to “creatives”, then “cards”.
2. Click “Create Lead Generation Card”. It’s a big blue button.
3. You can include a title and a short description. Curiously, you can also include a 600px by 150px image. This seems like an opportunity to say a bit more about what you’re doing.
4. You do have to set up a privacy policy URL. I used a simple google doc.
5. You also need to configure a fallback URL, which is where people will go if they don’t have a Twitter client capable of the one-click signup. I used a Google form, which let people give me their e-mail addresses directly.

And that’s it! Tweet enthusiastically, then wait patiently, because if you don’t integrate your Twitter card with your CRM, you have to wait ~24 hours for the download link to appear in the Twitter cards manager. The resulting CSV looks like this:

Timestamp,User id,Name,Twitter handle,Email
2013-12-12T23:36:05,774485611,Robots Rule,RobotzRule,h+robots@bit.ly

A little bit of awk later and I had a list of e-mails ready to go. I ended up getting 49 responses through the Google form and 197 through the Twitter card. It was easy and I’ll definitely do this next time I need to collect people’s e-mail addresses for a project.

Yesterday I asked people on twitter for recommendations for things to read to improve as a programmer. I’m looking mainly for things on the philosophy side of software engineering. I do realize that practice is the most important thing, but sometimes you run into a design question and it’s always helpful to realize that very smart people have, indeed, thought about these things before.

I assembled the book recommendations into a bitly bundle. I’ve only read a few of these (generally the older books) and so I can’t recommend specifics, but if you’d care to take a look here they are!

If you see something that you think should be included, please do let me know in the comments and I’ll add it to the list.