Caktus Blog

The OpenBlock geocoder is powerful and robust. It uses PostGIS for spacial queries, can extract addresses from bodies of text, and can understand block and intersection notation. We've run into a few issues with it, however, including a low geocoding success rate. This is a tough problem to solve and depends on a lot of factors (the extent of street and block data in OpenBlock, format of the street addresses, etc.), so your mileage may vary. Below I constructed a simple test using Google's Geocoding API to have as an alternative.

Amazon's Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a relatively new offering in the family of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It's also an appealing one, because it proposes to quickly and easily replace a common component of the stack in a typical web application, thereby obviating the need to run a separate queue server like RabbitMQ. While RabbitMQ — the typical favorite for Celery users — is not necessarily difficult to install or maintain, removing it from the stack of a web application means one less component that might fail, offloading that service to AWS — especially for applications with a small to moderate queue volume — might prove financially advantageous.

This is the second post in our OpenRural series reviewing OpenBlock and it's geocoder. OpenBlock Geocoder, Part 1: Data Model and Geocoding covers the internals of the OpenBlock geocoder and it's geocoding capabilities. As this posts builds upon topics covered there, you may wish to read Part 1 before proceeding. In this post we step back from the internals of the geocoder and explore how to use it along with other OpenBlock tools to parse unstructured text.

As Tobias mentioned in Scraping Data and Web Standards, Caktus is collaborating with the UNC School of Journalism to help develop Open Rural (the code is on GitHub). Open Rural hopes to help rural newspapers in North Carolina leverage OpenBlock. This blog post is the first of several covering the internals of OpenBlock and, specifically, the geocoder.

We're currently involved in a project with the UNC School of Journalism that hopes to help rural newspapers in North Carolina leverage OpenBlock.  The project is called OpenRural, and if you're a software developer you can find the latest code on GitHub.

One of the things I like best about Django is how easy its ORM makes it to work with databases. Too bad Django is only for web applications. Sure, you could deploy a Django app and then make use of it from a non-web application using a REST API, but that would be too awkward.

I'm excited to announce that Caktus is looking for candidates for our summer internship program. It is a 12 week paid position in our Carrboro, NC office. We're driving distance from UNC Chapel Hill, NC State Univeristy in Raleigh, and Duke in Durham, so students from all parts of the NC Research Triangle are welcome to apply.

Here at Caktus, we love Django and use it to make all of our web applications. To help support the Django community, we are hosting a development sprint on November 12th and 13th at our office in Carrboro, NC in preparation for the 1.4 release. The sprint is a great is an excuse for people to get together and focus their undivided attention on improving Django. You will be helping out by providing bug fixes, improving the documentation and also adding features to existing packages.   

I'm delighted to announce that Julia Elman has joined our growing team of web developers here at Caktus. Julia started her design career almost 10 years ago in an internal marketing group, and first learned about Django at the SXSW Interactive Festival in 2008. Prior to joining the Caktus team, Julia worked at the Lawrence Journal World (the birthplace of Django) and as a freelance designer.

I recently found a way to speed up a large data import far more than I expected.

The task was to read data from a text file and create data records in Django, and the naive implementation was managing to import about 55 records per second, which was going to take far too long given the amount of data that needed to be imported.