This is not a really technical question but is required for a system I am building. I am after a UK suburb/postcode database. I haven't been able to find this anywhere and wonder if it is available (freely). I know in Australia is is freely downloadable from Australia Post. Also a US suburb/zip database is required as a secondary concern.
Might be worth looking at Where can I get postal codes for all countries?
Accepted answer there was http://www.geonames.org/, but some other options listed too.
To get the US Postal System's database tools go here:
US Postal System Database tools
UK-specific:
You can purchase the information from Royal Mail. The database is known as the P.A.F. details here It's ridiculously expensive, and you have to pay yearly. A total mugging in my opinion, but there it is.
Alternatively you can use a 3rd party distributor, not much cheaper really, but offer better APIs. We use Postcode Anywhere, who have nasty stringent licenses, but very nice APIs for embedding the search in applications/websites etc.
The Royal mail PAf data is less than affordable, but if you request the sample data from the royal mail they include the complete localities table, along with the postcode sector that locality appears in (So, for example, "East Bergholt" in "CO6 7"). It also includes flags to show if the locality is required for postal sorting, in case the postcode is not legible.
In addition, as eluded to in this other post, the lat/longs for every UK postcode have been leaked.
Related
We were having a beer talk and have something to clear out.
Is the following conclusion correct:
When I put a facebook-like-button-box on my page, does facebook know
every time I'm on that page, even if i'm not logged in.
basically the same as google analytics
if this nis correct, it should be possible to sandbox, the like-button until someone will use it. Then facebook gets only informations when the user actively confirms that.
cheers endo
No, they can't directly track you if you are not logged in and you view an external "like" button. They can, however, set a tracking cookie that identifies you when you sign in, which would allow them to match the tracking data in the current session to you.
One of Facebook's primary revenue streams comes from the analysis and sale of market trend information. They can analyse the likes and comment keywords of certain user clusters (e.g. middle-aged American females, teenagers in college, etc) and use these to produce statistics about market patterns and trends. They can also use keyword analysis to tell a company how many people are talking about something, e.g. "how many people have mentioned my latest blockbuster film?"
You could simply move the image and JavaScript code away from the Facebook servers and host it locally to avoid them from tracking your users.
In pre-emption of the "FACEBOOK = EVIL" arguments:
In the end, though, is it really a big issue? Some people see Facebook as this massive life-infringing uncaring supercorporation, but in reality they're just making a buck through completely anonymous statistics. No human being (or sentient robot) views your preferences, browser tracking data, or personal information. Everything is anonymised and turned into a bunch of numbers relating to a group. Sure, they could screw everyone over and be evil, but why bother when you already make that much money legitimately?
I am looking for a geocoding service where I can make a request with an address or intersection, not necessarily separated into separate fields (street, city, state, etc.) and get the latitude and longitude, along with suggestions and corrections for misspelled or ambiguous queries.
I really like the Google Geocoding API, but the terms of use say that I am not allowed to store the responses or use the service for any purpose other than showing the result on one of their maps. I am planning to use it for a lightweight, mobile-friendly website that may have the option of displaying results with text only, so this would not work, assuming I am interpreting their terms correctly.
The Yahoo PlaceFinder API looks nice but it comes with similar restrictions.
I am trying to decide what would be a good choice. The Bing API looks good. I don't see any sort of restriction in their terms but am I missing something?
Does anyone know what would be a good choice? I have very limited funding, so I would prefer something that is free or cheap, at least for the near future.
You could try Nominatim, it's a tool to search OpenStreetMap data by name and address.
MapQuest provide a free API as long as you give the appropriate credit
I'm not sure how well it handles misspellings or ambiguous queries though!
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I have an application which needs to get intraday stock quotes on several assets (indices, commodities etc').
I want to be able to query the data in HTTP and get it as CSV/XML format.
Now, I'd like to be able to ask the data provider for example what was the last bid/ask/price on GE (General Electric) at 4:00PM, and ask it in let's say 4:05PM on that day, for further processing.
Similar services to what I'm looking for:
Reuter's DataLink service can give me this data on the last trade of the day.
I need it to flow through all day long - intraday.
Yahoo Finance (the query formay within it) is a great service which does what I want in terms of data delivery yet I'm unsure regarding its reliability/timing since it's free.
Also, I couldn't find any information regarding the delay of the data they provide relatively from the real world timing (like many websites give this data in delay of ~20min).
QuoteRSS gives this for free as well, it let's me pick a ticket and get its data, yet once again I'm unsure regarding its reliability, as well as its timing, which I have doubt if this is "realtime" or close to that.
Finally this blog post by google "At long last, real-time stock quotes are here" claims to offer free data on certain stocks, but in Google Finance's pages I can't find anything about it, nor at their API pages, and again, who knows what delay I get from the realtime data.
In addition to the concern with the above mentioned services (Yahoo, QuoteRSS & Google) I'm not sure how/if they provide an intraday information regarding the stocks, something which I need.
Worth mentioning is that many websites which deal with Forex claim to be getting their data feed from Reuters/Bloomberg.
Didn't find such a solution on both's sites. I even went online with a sales rep. at Reuters to ask about it and his answer, after a decent discussion, was that "he's afraid he cannot offer me anything better than their service DataLink". How odd!!
So to summarize my question;
1) Where do I get such data feed, in which I select several tickets from several markets, and get a closer-than-20min information regarding these tickets, in concise format (CSV/XML)?
2) If Reuters/Bloomberg offer it (I'll probably also call them later) - where is it being offered, at their websites? I'd like to get the data from a "big name" such as these guys, for reliability reasons.
3) Regarding "realtime" or not, it depends on the cost. What costs should I prepare to? I'm assuming that realtime feed costs a LOT, so, is there an option between realtime and the 20min delayed feed? Something like 2-5min delay?
4) Please mention how, or if, I can query for stocks' data in a timely manner, like "what was the price of GOOG at 4:00PM?".
Note #1:
Please keep in mind, when answering, that I need the quotes intraday and not "by the end of the day".
Note #2:
If google/yahoo do actually offer this kind of service for free, how do I find it? Directly. I don't mind starting with these "freewares" for testing and such, especially if I can query for data in a timely manner as mentioned above ("what was the price of GOOG at 4:00PM?").
Note #3:
In terms of licensing, I do not intend to resell this information. Simply as that.
Before they closed shop, I used opentick. My blog post about opentick shutting down got quite a bit of traffic, so I decided to write another post that examined some potential opentick alternatives. Take a look at the companies in the post and comments. Hopefully one of them will work for you.
I have used IQFeed for some time. It is not HTTP or a CSV but it is a streaming push of ticks from their servers to you. The client is a bit kludgy but overall I find it to be acceptable for the price. This type of feed would be considered "realtime" by most people and since you are talking about minutes I assume that you are someone who is not worried about a couple seconds of latency here or there.
I have experience with Reuters (Thomson) feeds. They are expensive since we are now talking about TotalView/OpenBook data. This would be used to calculate the history of the order book and could be used for analyzing things like the liquidity of an equity at different price levels. I had a good experience with them at another job. 24/7 Engineering support, fixes, decent security db. The reality is that there is a wide variety of ways to get these feeds mostly from brokerages. I don't think this is what you are looking for since you mentioned things that were free.
There are "mid tier" providers like CQG although I have no experience with them.
In general no matter who you are using you need to be willing to implement their protocol and format. I have found this to be true no matter which feed I use. The good news is that all you need to do is make a parser.
What was the price of Google at 4:00PM? Who can say. Which part of 4PM? Would the price at 4PM would be something like the final print to the tape of the closing auction? Is it the auction midpoint? The price is what you can transact at which can be very different then what you see printed. ;-P
A final note: If you are building a trading system of some sort pay for your data. It should be cleaner than trying to assemble it. The exchanges charge for data and there is no real way around it. If you can't afford a couple of hundred bucks a month for some data then you probably don't have enough capital to be trading.
Concerning Bloomberg, I just called them & they said that they only provide market data for personal use. So you cannot show it on your site, but you can do whatever you want with it as long as you don't publish it.
Does anybody know which domains to search for (other than ".mil") to look for military addresses posting to a web form?
Clarification: we're offering a discount to our customers, and we really only have time to cough up an email address regex which can fit into our existing system.
This is on LAMP.
It would more than likely depend on the command that the person is associated with. .mil for pure military email addresses, .gov for sometype of goverment entitiy that they're associated with, or even .edu as someone else mentioned for educational instutions. It's also quite possible that people could have .com, .org or even .net addresses.
Unless you know for sure that a person will be posting to your webform with a military address, I think you might find it somewhat difficult to determine the authenticity of an indivdual just through an email address' domain.
Good luck in your project.
As far as I know, .mil is the only on that is officially supported by the US Government, but not 100% sure.
Depending on what you want, you would have to keep an eye out for sites such as this as well - http://www.usmilitary.com/
.mil seems to be the only official military email extension, however I believe they also use .edu for their Academy email addresses.
Hi -- does anybody know which domains to search for (other than ".mil") to look for military addresses posting to a web form?
I don't understand. What you're basically asking here, is what are us military domains ? Right ?
If I understood wrongly, and you're searching for ways of parsing or matching email adresses, then several regex methods for that have already been posted on SO, so I guess finding them shouldn't prove too difficult.
What is the difference? They all are business management solutions. They do the same? Some sort of different editions? Do they use same platform?
Dynamics NAV
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 is a
comprehensive business management
solution that helps people work faster
and smarter, and gives your business
the flexibility to adapt to new
opportunities and growth.
Dynamics AX
Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 is a
comprehensive business management
solution for mid-sized and larger
organizations that works like and with
familiar Microsoft software to help
your people improve productivity.
Dynamics GP
Microsoft Dynamics GP is a richly
featured business management solution
that allows you to use familiar,
powerful software to operate and grow
your business.
Dynamics SL
Microsoft Dynamics SL is a business
management solution specialized to
help project-driven midsize
organizations obtain reports and
business analysis, while helping
increase efficiency, accuracy, and
customer satisfaction.
Generally speaking each of these products were purchased separately, and Microsoft is kind of trying to put them into a general business, but has not actually integrated them into a common ERP platform (yet anyway). For example, NAV was formerly Navision, GP was formerly Great Plains. I think AX was also part of the Navision purchase, but was a different product that Navision had themselves purchased.
Each has a separate accounting implementation that it came with, so there is a lot of overlap in the non-differentiators like accounting.
Basically they are targeted at different types of businesses. SL is for a service oriented business (like a software consulting firm). NAV would be more targeted at an inventory based operation.
I didn't investigate all of their options in depth to know all of the similarities and differences, but in a former job I had to look into NAV, AX and GP and that is what I recall it being all about.
I agree with Dave Markle, the marketing is engineered to create the maximum possible confusion. The executive suite buys these things and then marketing has to break its head to figure out how to sell and differentiate each one. As you can see, they didn't do a great job.
The marketing-ese is in full effect with the Dynamics products. All these packages were acquisitions by Microsoft, and they are making an effort to bring them to market under one brandname: Dynamics. They are aiming at the SMB market. It's not positioned to compete with SAP. Both are client-server apps.
I've worked with Dynamics SL (previously named Solomon). It's an accounting suite, with modules for Accounts Payable + Receivable, Inventory, General Ledger, Purchasing, Reporting, Cost Accounting, Purchase Orders, etc.
It's all VBA goodness. The database underlying would make your blood curdle. It's denormalized like you wouldn't believe. I guess saying 'denormalized' would indicate that it previously normalized. I got the feeling it was never normalized. Full of technical debt.
Foreign keys are an unknown entity in SL. DBAs would have trouble taking the architecture seriously (e.g. columns actually named like User1 and User2 to indicate a custom field on the User Interface).
Dynamics GP is more oriented towards payroll. I cannot comment on its inner architecture.
They all run on the same platform. Client executables connecting to SQL Server. The forms design is like the Win95 and sometimes Win3.1 paradigm. Don't let the Outlook-like main screen fool you in the screenshot; it's the only one getting the upgrade treatment.
The licensing model is a killer, and so my previous encounter with Solomon had everyone running the same EXE from the network share. It was notoriously slow, and rarely a compliment from users on its responsiveness.
Entire consultancy businesses are built around these products. Supply and demand allow those consultants to charge a substantial amount, relative to the web-app and other line-of-business consultants.
On their "How To Buy" form, there is a "Contact Us"
and I'm completely certain that if you contacted one of the sales reps, they would go into great detail and great length about the strengths and weaknesses of each product.
Keep in mind, they'll be highlighting more strengths than weaknesses, and they'll be highlighting the weaknesses of the lesser priced products. But the sales reps are guaranteed to know the products inside out.
Also, Wikipedia has little write-ups on each of them.
They are mostly similar (sometimes identical) to the blurb on the MS website, but there's also some extra information there.