Revfad Blog

Author: David Faden

  • California cities from CDTFA

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    David Faden
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    At least based on the dates listed on https://lab.data.ca.gov/dataset/california-city-boundaries-and-identifiers — still says “03/24/25” — I’m guessing the city boundaries haven’t been updated yet. For a current project, I want the best boundaries available so let’s work directly with the source pointed out by the CIO, GIS: https://gis.data.ca.gov/datasets/CDTFA::city-and-county-boundary-line-changes/explore?layer=0&location=33.924386%2C-118.008294%2C11.67. > library(sf)> d <- read_sf(“~/Downloads/City_and_County_Boundary_Line_Changes_217120214122415134.gpkg”) It turns out…

  • A hole in Los Altos (continued)

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    David Faden
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    The city clerk got back to me this morning. (Thanks much for the prompt response!) The hole in the map is also a hole in the ground — a reservoir belonging to the City of Mountain View. We happened to be in the area after checking out Tom’s Depot Cafe yesterday so I snapped a…

  • A hole in Los Altos

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    David Faden
    in ,

    Looking at the Census page for Los Altos, something funny caught my eye: there’s a hole in the map for Los Altos: https://data.census.gov/profile/Los_Altos_city,_California?g=160XX00US0643280 Returning to the data from https://lab.data.ca.gov/dataset/california-city-boundaries-and-identifiers, we see the same thing: > library(ggplot2)> library(sf)> cities <- read_sf(“~/Downloads/California_Cities_and_Identifiers_Blue_Version_view_-6943741225906831761.gpkg”)> losAltos <- subset(cities, CDTFA_CITY == “Los Altos”)> ggplot(losAltos) + geom_sf() What’s in that hole? >…

  • What Wittier Whittier

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    David Faden
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    I was really impressed to get an almost immediate reply from the CIO, GIS to my note about Whittier appearing to some extra stuff in the geometries provided here: https://lab.data.ca.gov/dataset/california-city-boundaries-and-identifiers. They pointed to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration as the original source of the geometries, which has been updated in the meantime:…

  • California cities (continued)

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    David Faden
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    Let’s get back roughly to where we were with the R session from California cities, reading in a copy of the data pulled from Wikipedia. > library(dplyr)> library(fillpattern)> library(sf)> library(ggplot2)> cities <- read_sf(“~/Downloads/California_Cities_and_Identifiers_Blue_Version_view_-6943741225906831761.gpkg”)> stats <- read.csv(url(“https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fadend/ca_cities_data/refs/heads/main/ca_cities.csv”), stringsAsFactors=FALSE) Oops. There’s some disagreement on names: > setdiff(stats$city_name, cities$city_name)[1] “Angels Camp” “California City” “City of Industry”> setdiff(cities$city_name, stats$city_name)[1]…

  • Fun with Xorshift

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    David Faden
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    I’ve been hacking on an old game I wrote for the school paper I founded: Hangman. (Code: https://github.com/fadend/hangman.) One feature I like: the ability to create your own games with a shareable link. Here’s one for you: https://revfad.com/hangman/?w=JVFUVAT+LBH+N+JBAQRESHY+QNL. Since I didn’t want the URL parameter to give away the answer, I have the game run…

  • California cities

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    David Faden
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    Here’s something fun: boundaries for cities in California: https://lab.data.ca.gov/dataset/california-city-boundaries-and-identifiers. Working with this in R: > library(sf)> cities <- read_sf(“~/Downloads/California_Cities_and_Identifiers_Blue_Version_view_-6943741225906831761.gpkg”) There are a few columns with the city names; “CENSUS_PLACE_NAME” and “CDTFA_CITY” (CA Department of Tax and Fee Administration?) agree so let’s just use “CDTFA_CITY” > sum(cities$CENSUS_PLACE_NAME != cities$CDTFA_CITY)[1] 0 It’s nice to see that there…

  • Hack to get DBeaver a JRE

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    David Faden
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    I was happy to get DBeaver to build, following the directions at https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver/wiki/Build-from-sources: git clone https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeavercd dbeaver/tools./build.sh But the new app was failing to run: cd ../product/community/target/products/org.jkiss.dbeaver.core.product/macosx/cocoa/aarch64open DBeaver.app A dialog was popping up: A short term hack I found: just copy “jre” from the installed version of DBeaver: cd DBeaver.app/Contents/Eclipsecp -r /Applications/DBeaver.app/Contents/Eclipse/jre .rm -rf jre/Contents/_CodeSignaturecd…

  • Julia sets in Julia

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    David Faden
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    I decided to draw some Julia sets for my first little project in Julia: https://github.com/fadend/JuliaSetCycle Example output: I’m pretty happy with that, at least for a start. One thing that has surprised me is the focus on running things via the REPL, which on second thought reminds me of R. See, e.g., How do I…

  • Interview with Ginny Hunt of Seedhunt

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    David Faden
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    Huge gratitude to Ginny Hunt of the wonderful Seedhunt.com, “Seeds of California Native Plants and More”, for being up for answering a few questions via e-mail. Previous articles about her work include “Unusual Seeds For Curious Gardeners” (2004; Archive), “Sowing Wildflowers” (2009; Archive), “Hunting for seeds: Watsonville woman”s website offers hard-to-find natives, salvias, restios” (2018;…