Lack of Pubski post structure does my heading.

Thesis

Finally feels like I can go full steam ahead on this one. After waiting a few weeks, I got the Ruby scripts that control the traffic model this monday. Just before I headed back home today I started a new running the traffic model. It'll do a full model run for the next nine hours or so on a beastly dual-Xeon 24-core workstation, calculating 40.8 million choices for 80 permutations of the model. I'm very glad the traffic model guys had some friends in the IT department. Now I can finally run the numbers and build a bunch of Python scripts to analyse the result.

I also wrote two chapters and finally made the supporting twenty or so maps. For example, here's a map depicting Rotterdam's job density:

(which reminds me! AnSionnachRua shoot me that PM, man.)

Writing

Had lunch with one of the journalists for The Correspondent last week. I got her in contact with a bunch of urban planning people, so we talked about her (urban-planning related) article ideas. We ended up talking for quite a while and I pitched a few article ideas to her along the way. She ended up liking one of my ideas so much that I've now committed to writing it as a Freelance Journalist™. Deadline in three weeks! If it works out, there could be more down the pipeline for me.

Tech

In the Tech corner this week: I made this cool diagram on what happens when MyEtherWallet sends transactions after insomniasexx tweeted two flipover drawings of the process. Making an infographic rarely goes easy, yet I knocked this one out in no time:

I've been trying to get better at web development, so after drawing that I thought it might be cool to have a mini website that checks how full the pool is for you. Turns out that creating a simple input-dependent bar chart with d3 and jQuery isn't as easy as I hoped it would be. So far I have the text working. The 'pool' is only a single line consisting of all the ticks I want to use for my y-axis. But I am learning a ton. I now understand hex values and selectors, for one thing.