The Republic of Climate Change Deniers / / No Comments The United States is currently undertaking the biggest act of climate change denial in history.One striking example is what is happening at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Over 200 FEMA employees have been fired by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Those who remain have been ordered to remove all language related to climate change from FEMA websites and Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Change, Climate, Deniers, Republic
Automating and Responding to Sentiment Analysis with Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph / / No Comments Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph has a simple purpose – bring the sum total of all knowledge to your fingertips via a search that emphasis data and relations over a simple text based search engine experience. Sourced by the entire web, Knowledge Graph lets you perform complex queries against billions of data points instantly via a simple API. I decided to take a spin with their API and build a "relatively" simple tool – news analysis for a product run in on automated platform. Should be easy, right? Let’s get to it. Note that the examples in this blog post assume you’ve gotten a free key from Diffbot. Be sure to do that before trying the samples. Designing the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Analysis, Automating, Diffbot's, Graph, Knowledge, Responding, Sentiment
Links For You (3/8/25) / / No Comments Happy afternoon, programs. I just got back one of my kid’s soccer games (unlike last season, the weather is pleasant and not scorching hot) and I’ve got a Saturday now that is 100% open! Which means I’ll get a lot done! (Or, more likely, play video games.) So that I can more quickly get to all the important chores and cleaning I’m not going to do, let’s get to the links. Code Listings via API First up is a two-fer kinda. Showcode is an excellent web app to create screenshots from code. It supports numerous languages, numerous display options, and so forth, and creates really good output. As an example: While it’s a great webapp, they also have a cool API... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 3/8/25, links
The Dot Map of America / / No Comments One of my all-time favorite interactive maps was created by Dustin Cable at the University of Virginia. Unfortunately, the Racial Dot Map of America was removed in 2022. This map used data from the 2010 Census to place a colored dot on a map for every American – all 308,745,538 of them. As the name suggests, the color of each dot was determined by race.The UVA map, based on 2010 Census Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America
Code Break this Thursday – Ray Finally Learns React / / No Comments Ok, so if you attended my last Code Break session you know I was hinting that I was really excited for my next one. For years now I’ve wanted to give React a fair shake and actually try to build something with it. Finally I’m making time to do so. This Thursday at 12PM CST, my next session will be: I Don’t like React. Let’s Learn React! To be clear, it isn’t that I dislike React, it’s just that every time I’ve looked at the code, it just didn’t gel with me. I know it’s incredibly popular, but I always felt like if I needed to build a proper "web app", I’d just use Vue (despite my feelings about Vue 3, feel free to ask me in... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Break, code, Finally, Learns, React, this, Thursday
Rebuilding the Berlin Wall / / No Comments choropleth election map showing the CDU dominant in the west and the AfD winning in the east In my round-up of 2025 German Election Maps, I commented on the “stark contrast between the results in former East Germany and the rest of the country.” It was immediately apparent to most observers of last week’s German election that there was a clear voting split along the old East-West German border. Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Berlin, Rebuilding, Wall
Parsing Uploaded Resumes into Form Fields with Google Gemini / / No Comments As I’ve recently become somewhat familiar with job application sites (sigh, thanks Adobe), I’ve noticed an interesting feature some sites use. After selecting your resume to upload, they will parse the resume and either offer to, or automatically, fill in some of the form fields of the application for you. I thought it would be interesting to try this myself making use of Google’s Gemini APIs. Here’s what I discovered. The Test Script As always, I began with a script that would take a hard-coded resume and attempt to parse it. For the most part, this is basic "upload a file and ask the AI to talk about", but in my case, I wanted a very particular set of data... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Fields, form, Gemini, Google, into, Parsing, Resumes, Uploaded
Quick Demo of Chrome’s Summarization GenAI (Upcoming) API / / No Comments I’ve blogged a few times recently about Google’s AI on Chrome initiative to bring AI features to the browser itself. Yesterday, my Code Break episode was specifically on this topic: Play Video In that session, I talk specifically about the Summarizer API, which does… wait for it… summarization. (It also covers the Writer and Rewriter API which I covered… woah, way back in September of last year: "Using Chrome AI to Rewrite Text") One interesting aspect of the API is that it offers multiple types of summarization: key points (the default) tl;dr teaser headline You can also request three different lengths: short medium (default) long According... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Chrome's, Demo, GenAI, Quick, Summarization, Upcoming