Welcome
Welcome to the website and blog of Sam Millar. A software engineer from England.
Latest Blog Posts
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Dance Music Tracker
I’d like to introduce an interesting side project that’s been keeping me busy for a couple of months. It uses the Twitter Streaming API to see which dance music artists are popular right now and at any given time since tracking began – a couple of weeks ago. The site also enables drilling down to see which content caused spikes in popularity.
Update: This project is currently offline but will be resurfacing in the future.
The tracker currently handles about 120,000 (re)tweets a day. While I expect to see this figure increase during festivals, and other live events, experiments with higher volume Twitter users has demonstrated support for rates in excess of five million per day.
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Most Common Colours in RMagick
I’m currently working on a photography website project. Something I wanted to explore was how much data it is possible to extract from a simple set of photos, with the potential to later use this data for various visualizations.
Dribble — a website for designers to post views of their latest works — displays a colour palette of the most common colours for each image. These images can then be used as a tag for users to browse images by color.
This seems like a very useful piece of data to maintain for images and it’s possible with RMagick.