Franchu’s Lair

Once more I had the chance to visit Vigo, a city in the north west of Spain. This time I was there for work, so not much time for sightseeing, but I think knowing where to stay and where to eat might be useful for someone. So there we go…

Hotels

The group was split in two hotels. They are not exactly the same quality, but both were ok and quite close to each other.

• Hotel América – I didn’t get to see the rooms, but the people who stayed there said they were ok for a three star hotel.
• Hotel Princesa – I stayed in this one, and even if the rooms are quite small they are clean. The people at the reception desk (Nestor) are really friendly, although they don’t speak english very well. You can check their website for pricing information.

Eating and party

As it is usual in Spain, there are many places where you can eat on a budget and the quality is good. If you like fish and sea food in general this is a great place to go to. Just walk around the center and try one of the many places that you will find.

If you want to play it safe though, we found a very nice place called “El Cortijo” on the street Rosalia de Castro 59. Pili, the waitress, took really good care of us. Ask her for help to know how much food to order and what are the best choices to cover the wide variety of regional specialities. She gave us some discounts for drinks at Marmara, a music pub on the same street walking towards the center. The average age was a bit high, but it was a fun place to finish the workshop.

After posting yesterday the R script that generates the averaged temperatures files, you can find in my GitHub page the Processing script I used to generate the video in the post. Downloading the whole folder should be all you need to be able to reproduce the animation in your computer and with higher quality than what you see online as it got very degraded due to the compression.

I am aware that the code is not very good nor clean, but given that it was my first shoot at doing something with Processing and I was in a trial and error mode I think it is quite normal. I also don’t feel like spending time improving this code as there are other visualisations that I want to work on and where I will have the opportunity of correcting the mistakes I am already aware of.

I just wanted to mention a couple of things:

• Processing does not support the declaration of enums inside a pde project. If you declare them in an external Java file you can use them in the pde. That is why the code looks weird passing String to define the type of dataset, and having all those cascading if-elseif statements.
• The code could benefit from a more OO approach and use polymorphism to avoid some repetitions. I promise I will do better next time

As usual, feedback and new ideas are very welcome

As promised, I want to share with you the R code I used to generate all the beautiful charts of the United Kingdom’s Met Office dataset preliminary analysis post.

First of all, you need to download the dataset. I don’t want to hotlink directly the MySQL dump file that this guy produced, so just go over to his site and download it from there. In the meantime you can also see the perl script he wrote to convert the original dataset to the MySQL dump that we will be using.

Once you have downloaded the MySQL dump, uncompress it and import it into your MySQL database. In my case I created a database called “ClimateChange” and granted all rights on that database to a user called “ClimateChange” and without password.

Once you have your data in the database, you can start using R with this script available on GitHub.