2022-05-24.01

Picture [Im]Perfect Tables; [Fuzzy] Space Age seD; Static Visualizations

May 24, 2022

I'm making today "Twitter Tuesday" (a.k.a. light commentary with links to tweets or threads) since I have a boatload of onboarding left at Day 2 of my new job at GreynNoise Intelligence and zonked kind of early last night.

Picture [Im]Perfect Tables

Yesterday, the Financial Times' Alan Smith (@theboysmithy) posted a tweet on the madness of the World Health Organization (WHO) publishing data tables in png's:

Alan Smith @theboysmithy

Yep, we've been through a pandemic, and @WHO still publishing tables of data as raster images...

Maarten Lambrechts (@maartenzam) — an outstanding data journalist and data visualization expert — noted that Excel (for macOS) has a prominent button (on the "Data" tab) that will extract data from a picture (from a file or the clipboard). I try not to use Excel for anything, but had to see how well this worked:

The tool gives you an opportunity to review and modify the extracted data before importing:

Excel preserved the tabular nature of the data, but, as usual, is still quite lonely since it treated the 1-5's (et al.) as a date.

I don't have to deal with data from pictures too much (and use the built-in AI-driven copy-text-from-picture that macOS has on Apple Silicon), but I'll likely try this first when I do.

[Fuzzy] Space Age seD

Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) posted a tweet:

Kieran Healy @kjhealy

Today in Command line Fun for Some Values of Fun™, combine `fzf` and `sad` to switch out your venerable but somewhat perilous sed or perl one-liner that recursively finds & replaces texts in files with a thing with a diff viewer that lets you preview what’s going to happen.

with a short gifcast about two command-line tools I hadn't heard of before:

Space Age seD (sad): CLI search and replace made with Rust
FuZzy Finder (fzf): A general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder made with golang.

The gifcast shows them in action. I usually use the (very old) Perl one-liner Kieran mentioned:

perl -i -p -e "s/foo/bar/g" *.txt

and, do not have much cause for mass search/replace, but sad looks solid and fzf has a great feature set and plugs into a cadre of environments beyond just the command line.

Static Visualizations

This thread, by Alastair Otter (@alastairotter | homepage), regarding static visualizations resonated well with me, so I won’t steal any thunder from Alastair’s posits, so consider the expository the thread itself: