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Plotting My Google Location History

I have been using Android phones since about 2010 and for the most part of it I have had location history enabled. If you enjoy data like I do then you may agree that this service is pretty awesome because Google let's you download a copy of the data it collects from you using Google Takeout . I recently downloaded a copy of the places I have visited and got to analyzing. My data set for the period consists of approximately 985 000 records starting from 2012-02-19. I wanted to try the out the folium plotting library which combines the data analysis strength of Python and the mapping prowess of Leaflets.js however rendering all the records on a single map proved problematic on my machine. Therefore in order to reduce the data set I used k means to assign each point to 1 of 100 clusters. After reducing the data set I then proceeded to use mean longitude and latitude per cluster as a proxy for my location history . This reduced data renders instantly and it is interactive which is
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Building Modular Web Apps with Blueprints

I was recently hacking about with the express framework in node.js. One thing I really like about it is that the request and response objects are passed into the callback of the route functions. Another thing which I thought was really awesome was the Router object. Specifically it allows you to isolate parts of your application which I like because it makes maintaining the application much easier. This got me thinking "I wonder if a similar concept exists within the Flask framework in Python?".  Enter Flask Blueprints . Flask is a microframework for Python based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and good intentions. I thought as a exploratory exercise I would put together a simple application using blueprints within flask. So let's build a web application which lets you post comments and displays those comments on a web page. Okay okay, this is perfectly stupid but our purpose is to learn a little about blueprints. A Simple Application For this application we will have a s

Something interesting on the side

So I have had this blog for a few years and until now I have yet to post a single article (I have never really found time or been that interested in writing a blog). Anyway I have decided that if I am to maintain a blog, or at least make a once off post, I will try keep it aligned to what I am passionate about; Data, open source and travel for now. So without further adieu I present, something interesting on the side. While browsing  /r/algotrading  I came across an interesting article about identifying mean reverting spreads in US listed equities using Python . The article itself is not very detailed, but I enjoyed it none the less. My discovery of the article coincided with the start of the JSE Challenge  and I thought it may be an interesting side project to build a small system/series of scripts which I could use to identify trading opportunities and then trade on them in the game. It at the very least would be good refresher in  pandas  and a nice way to practice writing in py