• Posts
  • RSS
  • ◂◂RSS
  • Contact

  • Automatically Updating Apartment Map

    August 19th, 2013
    boston, housing, map, tech
    I've set up my apartment price map to update automatically. What did this entail? (Warning: boring programming stuff.)

    There are two scripts involved:

    $ crontab -l
    ...
    # fetch the data at 2:02am on the 18th of the month; update the maps
    # at 2:02 on the 19th.
    02 02 18 * *         python /home/jefftk/query_padmapper.py
    02 02 19 * *         python /home/jefftk/draw_heatmaps.sh
    
    The first, query_padmapper.py, pulls apartment data from PadMapper and saves it in a timestamped file like apts-1376823721.txt. Unless Eric changes something, this just does its job. If something goes wrong, cron sends me an email with the error message.

    (I really like this method of doing background tasks. Unless they're critical, don't try to recover from errors. Crash, print something informative, and have it show up in my email.)

    The second script is a wrapper around draw_heatmap.py. It's safe to run any time because it looks for apartment data dumps that haven't been processed yet, but I intentionally only run it when I know it needs ot do something. It is:

    set -e # exit on error
    
    WORKING_DIR="/home/jefftk/jtk/apartment_prices/"
    
    function compute_dates_available() {
      echo '<script type="text/javascript">'
      echo 'var dates_available = ['
      ls $WORKING_DIR/*.boston.bedroom*.png \
         | awk -F. '{print $(NF-1)}' \
         | sort \
         | while read line ; do
        echo '  "'$line'",'
      done
      echo ']'
      echo '</script>'
    }
    
    function update_index() {
      INDEX=$WORKING_DIR/index.html
      cp $INDEX $INDEX.pre_$(date +%F)
      cat $INDEX \
        | grep '<!-- begin list of date files -->' -B 10000 \
        > $INDEX.pre
      cat $INDEX \
        | grep '<!-- end list of date files -->' -A 10000 \
        > $INDEX.post
      compute_dates_available > $INDEX.middle
    
      cat $INDEX.pre $INDEX.middle $INDEX.post > $INDEX
    }
    
    for x in $WORKING_DIR/apts-1*.txt ; do
      if [ ! -e $x.started ] ; then
        YYYYMMDD=$(date --date=@$(echo $x | awk -F/ '{print $NF}' | sed \
                                  s/apts-// | sed s/.txt//) +%F)
        touch $x.started
        for style in room bedroom ; do
          python /home/jefftk/code/apartment_prices/draw_heatmap.py $x $style
          mv $x.$style.1000.png $WORKING_DIR/apts.boston.$style.$YYYYMMDD.png
        done
    
        update_index
        touch $x.finished
      fi
    done
    
    What's this all doing? The for loop at the bottom considers every apartment data file. It only considers the ones where it hasn't started work, which it tracks by creating a file like apts-1376823721.txt.started. It extracts the timestamp from the filename and converts it to a date like 2013-08-18. Then it runs the real code, draw_heatmap.py, which produces an output file like apts-1376823721.txt.room.1000.png. It renames that to the format the UI expects, then calls update_index.

    The update_index function changes a small piece of index.html which has a list of which dates have data available:

    ...
    <!-- begin list of date files -->
    <script type="text/javascript">
    var dates_available = [
      "2011-06-16",
      "2013-01-29",
      "2013-02-18",
      "2013-03-18",
      "2013-04-18",
      "2013-05-18",
      "2013-06-18",
      "2013-07-18",
      "2013-08-18",
    ]
    </script>
    <!-- end list of date files -->
    ...
    
    It figures out the available dates with compute_dates_available, formats that into a javascript array, then uses some grep to replace the portion of the file between the marker comments with the newly calculated dates.

    So now the page stays up to date without me doing anything. Or else I wake up to an error in my email and figure out why.

    Comment via: google plus, facebook

    Recent posts on blogs I like:

    Rereading Roald Dahl

    Taking out a few words doesn't change much. The post Rereading Roald Dahl appeared first on Otherwise.

    via Otherwise March 25, 2023

    What does Bing Chat tell us about AI risk?

    Early signs of catastrophic risk? Yes and no.

    via Cold Takes February 28, 2023

    Why Neighborhoods Should Have Speed Bumps

    I have several reasons I think why neighborhoods should have speed bumps. First, speed bumps are very useful to stop cars from hitting people in the streets. Second, when construction workers installed speed bumps on the street in front of our house it was v…

    via Lily Wise's Blog Posts February 27, 2023

    more     (via openring)


  • Posts
  • RSS
  • ◂◂RSS
  • Contact