Saturday, July 27, 2013

Quick Visualization of Aam Aadmi Party Donations per District

Update - Check out the New Visualizations of AAP Donations using Google Maps Visualization API
I did a quick scraping of Aam Aadmi Party donations list to get some insights on how this political movement is going on. A quick and dirty visualization on 2 parameters - Number of Donors and Total Amount donated from each district would give a good idea of their support base. Thanks to S Anand of Gramener for providing the district level SVG map of India, I was able to plot the crunched numbers in form of Chorolpleth using D3 and do the analysis. Here is the generated graph -

Observations

  • AAP has support in pockets. Mainly Delhi - Jaipur and surrounding areas, Mumbai - Goa - North Karnataka
  • It has good support in first tier cities of Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad
  • And 2nd tier cities of Pune, Nagpur, Indore, Jaipur
  • A handful of people in other cities which is better compared to regional parties which are non-existent in other states

Disclaimers

  • This is a quick and dirty visualization presented based on public information. I take no guarantee on correctness or completeness of the analysis presented. Kindly use your own judgement in forming any conclusions.
  • The color coding needs to be worked on and is not propotional. So kindly rely on dynamic data presented on hovering the districts
  • The observations are based on donation information. So any conclusions needs to take account of it.

References

  • All the code to scrape the website and raw data can be accessed at Github repository.

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Thank You Pragmatic Programmer

Thank you Pragmatic Programmer for being so nice, for that cool Dropbox integration and for caring so much for your readers.

I purchased Agile Web Development with Rails 3.2 in July 2010, but you have been sending me updated editions ever since. The last I checked there was Agile Development with Rails 4-b4_0.pdf updated on 26th June in my Dropbox folder. I never expected, and moreover, I was prepared to purchase a new edition, but finding it in my Dropbox folder was a pleasant and wonderful surprise.

That also brings me to the goodness of ebooks. These days I tend not to purchase physical ebooks. First of all, planting trees is definitely going to do a lot of good, if not, saving a few trees from being cut down will. So why waste paper on those monster size books that go out of relevance in less than a year. That also makes them hard to carry, harder to search, even harder to bookmark and put notes on. All you need is a good pdf viewer like 'Preview' on Mac and you are good to go.

I came across a saying on the carry bag of Landmark stores -
One who lends a book is a fool and one who returns is a bigger fool.
So, a book lent is as good as lost, not so with ebooks (if you have the rights).

Coming back to the goodness of Pragprog, the best feature I liked so far was their Dropbox integration. Now you don't need to download it every time there is a newer version and it automatically gets synced via Dropbox.

Apart from this, thank you for being so awesome publisher publishing so many creative titles. For being so nice as not to have DRM on digital content and trusting that your readers will do the right thing. For being a die hard Lisp fan, and spreading your passion about functional programming. For not being greedy and in the end thank you for being so genuine :).

I look forward to learn more from all the hard work you put in.

Thanks.