Good data

And completely powered by holmz.org. In fact, we highly recommend power users go through and poke through the holmz database to see how these two sites tie together.

holmz was such a great help in getting WattzOn right.  Not only does it allow us to store user contributed data next to real data, not only does it handle hierarchical data which allows us to model the real world more accurately, but it handles units natively.  I can’t express how much easier that has made our life, and how it will continue to as we get ready to deploy “unit-ification” on WattzOn — through that, every place you see a number or have to enter a number, you will be able to choose what units you want to see it in.

We haven’t officially released (or, more importantly, documented) how to access data programatically from holmz — but, as you can see on our front page, we’re starting to drop massive hints on how to get data out of holmz and onto other places on the web.  We’re working on lots of different methods to do it, but the most stable way right now is to make use of our holmz.bluff.min.js Javascript library which allows you to query holmz and then visualize that data using Bluff.

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While we’re in our rapid iteration state, we’re changing things like mad on holmz.org.  To help us all internally follow along, note that the version number is now on the top right hand portion of every page — for example, right now, holmz.org is running v10.07, meaning its running a build deployed on October 7th.  Have fun guessing what changes we make with each new build!

We’re gearing ourselves up, quite literally, with holmz.org apparel from Zazzle (we love our t-shirts over at Synthesis).  Its nothing fancy yet, and we’ll probably have others up when we (finally) take a break from holmz development.  Feel free to get yourself a T!

Again, following from both my Ignite! talk, and from my post on driving from Boston to NYC, we’ve put together a front page for holmz’s Fuelly spider that shows off what holmz has learned from Fuelly users ever since we’ve turned it on.

In case you’re wondering how homlz figures out how many “average US homes” that amount of power is, we grabbed our data from the US Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy site.  Since we turned on the spider, Fuelly users have used the amount of power a small villlage of US homes would use.

For the more technically minded, we’re starting to publish the Javadoc of holmz’s Java API; whenever we push a significant update to www.holmz.org, we’ll notate a change log here on Sherlock’s Reasonings, and we’ll also place Javadoc of the Java API up on javadoc.holmz.org.  I would start with getDefaultServiceProvider to get yourself a ServiceProvider object, grab a Service, then grab a Session, then have a hey-day.

(What about the implementation, you may ask?  That’s all in Scala, and we’ll get around to that in a future blog post.)

I got a lot of questions on that number from the end of my Ignite! talk.  As far as holmz is concerned, that number is close…  Let’s walk it through.

Let’s get our data straight:

• Vroom gets about 32 MPG;
• one gallon of gasoline comprises 1.3E8 joules; and
• its a 215 mile drive from Boston to NYC.

From that, if we use holmz’s calculator, then we can just run the formula “((215 [mi] / 32 [mpg]) * 1.3e8 [J/gal]) @ [kWh]” and the result is 242.6 kWh.

And now - to compare that against a 60 W power adapter for my MacBook.  If we go back to the calculator and evaluate “(last / 60 [W]) @ [day]” that gives me a result of 168.5 days. What’s a few days between friends?

I gave an Ignite! presentation on holmz at Ignite NYC II last night!  For those of you who don’t know, Ignite! presentations comprise 20 slides that are automatically advanced every 15 seconds - my slides conspicuously are absent of text, but I stuck them up on Slideshare anyway.

Once the video is posted, I’ll put a link up to that too.