open-data on S Anand

Tue, 27 May 2025 05:36:15 +0000

A property agent was discussing property price trends in Singapore. Thought I’d cross-check.

In short, yes, prices continue to rise steadily since 2020 at ~6-8% almost everywhere.

Data: https://data.gov.sg/collections/189/view
Analysis: https://chatgpt.com/share/68354e8e-97f8-800c-b15c-6e537016d38e

Long live open data!

A-Z of my browsing history

Fri, 09 May 2014 16:16:38 +0000

When you start typing in the address bar, Chrome suggests a link to visit, based on frecency. What do my recommendations look like?

A is for airtel.in/smartbyte-s/page.html – the page where you can check your bandwidth usage. I used to check it infrequently until I upgraded to a 125GB connection. Now I check it every few days and feel miserable that I’ve nowhere near used up my quota. This has coerced me to watch many Telugu movies, of which I don’t understand a word.
B is for blog.gramener.com – I blog there on data stories. The last month or so has been fairly active thanks to the elections.
C is for calendar.google.com – which has become primarily a shared calendar. It was always indispensible to manage my time. Now it helps my colleagues pick when to call me. Right now, my calendar has events booked about two months in advance.
D is for docs.google.com – for effectively one single purpose: shared spreadsheets. This is such a common and powerful use case, and I’m surprised it hasn’t become much easier to use.
E is for epaper.timesofindia.com – some of our content has been published by The Economic Times, and I keep doing ego-searches in the print edition. But close behind is eci.nic.in which I’ve been scraping a lot, and election-results.ibnlive.in.com which we created for CNN-IBN.
F is for flipkart.com – not facebook.com. I’m not often on Facebook.
G is for gramener.com. Naturally. (It’s not surprising that it’s not google.com: I search directly from the address bar.)
H is for handsontable.com – a library that I’ve been using a lot recently, followed by html5please.com that tells me which HTML5 features are ready for use.
I is for ibn.gramener.com – another property we created, but it only just beats irctc.co.in.
J is for join.me – a clean way to share your screen without the audience having to install anything (though you the sharer do have to install the software.)
K is for kraken.io – an amazingly efficient image compressor. As you might have guessed, I lead a strange life.
L is for learn.gramener.com – our Intranet. Sorry, you can’t access this one.
M is for mail.google.com. I’ll probably be moving away from gmail as a backend this weekend to Mail-in-a-box, though. Google’s pulling the plug on Google Reader has shaken my faith.
N is for news.ycombinator.com. When I’m bored and want to watch something while I have dinner, I don’t open YouTube. I open Hacker News.
O is for odc.datameet.org – the Open Data Camp. I’m quite into open data.
P is for pay.airtel.com, but if you ignore the number of bills I pay, it would be pandas.pydata.org, the home page of a remarkable data processing library.
Q is for quirksmode.org, PPK’s remarkable browser-compatibility guide
R is for reader.s-anand.net, my self-hosted RSS reader. It used to be reader.google.com, but Google let me down there.
S is for s-anand.net – this blog.
T is for twitter.com. Unlike Facebook, I don’t dislike Twitter so much.
U is for underscorejs.org. Clearly I need to get a life.
V is for visualizing.org. They have a number of interesting data visualisations.
W is for webpagetest.org – it helps measure the speed of web pages.
X is for xem.github.io. I’ve probably visited this page once, but it’s the only one in my recent history that starts with X
Y is for youtube.com. I lied. I spend an order of magnitude more time watching Telugu movies on YouTube than on Hacker News.
Z is for zoemob.com. Again, a page I visited only once, but there’s nothing else in Z at the moment.

Comments

Software I currently use | s-anand.net 9 May 2014 6:24 pm (pingback): […] course, some of my apps apps have moved online, and my earlier post on the A-Z of my browsing history covers that. But there are a few applications that I’ve hosted which I must talk about. […]
chandigarh 13 Oct 2015 7:27 pm: you can delete your web search history through link https://history.google.com/history

Mapping PIN codes

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 20:14:01 +0000

I haven’t found an open or reliable database providing the geo-location of Indian PIN codes. That’s a bother if you’re creating geographic mash-ups. The closest were commercial sources:

a PIN code directory from the Postal Training Centre for Rs. 2,000, which probably just contains a list of PIN codes, and
a PIN code map from MapMyIndia for Rs. 1,00,000, whose quality I’m not sure of. (I spoke to one of their sales representatives who mentioned that the data was gathered via companies such as Coca Cola, using their local distribution knowledge, perhaps GPSs.)

Crowd-sourcing this might help. Here’s a site where you can map the location of any PIN code you know:

pincode.datameet.org

For example, if you knew the exact location of the PIN code 110083 (which happens to be Mongolpuri in New Delhi), just go to http://pincode.datameet.org/IN/110083 and move the marker to where it should be.

I’ve initially populated the data from GeoNames. Arun has offered OpenStreetMap data. If you know of any sources that we could use, please let me know. And if you want to use the data, feel free. It’s CC licensed. You can check out the source on github too.

Comments

Arun Anantharaman 8 Mar 2011 3:14 am: Not sure if I am doing something wrong, but am unable to edit on the pincode.datameet.org page. Get an error if I click on the “go” button.
Vanaja 7 Mar 2011 5:29 am: A searchable database by Bharatiya Dak!http://www.indiapost.gov.in/pin/pinsearch.aspx
Prashanth 11 Mar 2011 7:00 am: Great initiative. Blogged about it over here - http://hellogeek.in/2011/03/crowd-sourced-pin-code-geomapping-project-lets-contribute/
Prateek 14 Oct 2012 1:57 am: great work! But for some reason I could not view the markers on map. Is this browser not supported: Chromium on Linux ?
Rakesh Patil 27 May 2014 7:57 pm: Hi All, I was wondering if there is a database dumb which will give me list of all pin codes surrounding a particular pin code, do we have any such database? if not should we start crowd sourcing?. Please let me know if I am not clear with my question. Regard Rakesh
Prabaker 10 Jun 2014 7:32 pm: Great! Check this out: http://www.gadm.org/country Any progress on the PIN code thing? I have a few questions for you. Maybe I will send them your way, once I figure out your email.
vishal kumar 15 Mar 2016 12:14 pm: the website has been removed. i’m trying to find the coordinates of pincodes, i have the list of entire pincodes but where i found there coordinates

BBC Backstage

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 12:00:00 +0000

BBC seems to be doing good work for developers at BBC Backstage. Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph are among those involved.