David Jacobowitz
Policy Analyst. Hacker. Patriot.

Welcome to the most primitive web page you have probably seen in some time...

About me

I am a computer engineer who decided that there was a place for a techy mind in the world of public policy. Passionate about global climate change and renewable energy, I returned to school to obtain a Master‘s degree in Public Policy, after ten years designing computer chipss. After graduate school I worked for PG&E for a couple of years and now work at Google.

Besides dancing and hopping to entertain my son, I enjoy bicycling, jogging, hiking, rock climbing, flying single-engine aircraft, and writing computer software to solve or analyze interesting problems. That latter bit is the main reason this page exists.

I'm also a father of two, which is the main reason this page doesn't get the attention it once did.

Contact Information and CV

Email david.jacobowitz@gmail.com
Resume / CV David Jacobowitz CV

Computery Projects

Name Description
Photovoltaic System Simulator This is a home-grown standalone photovoltaic system performance simulator, written in Perl. It includes both a graphical front-end and a programmatic API. This program is released freely into the public domain, but it is based on weather data from NREL and PV module characterization from Sandia National Labs.
At-Ats This is a home grown project to create a free, open-source replacement for the popular statistics package, Stata. It doesn't do 1% of what Stata does, but it does do most of what you'll see in a basic econometrics class.
Free Software My compendium of free software (not mine) that replaces popular proprietary packages and generally does the same things better.
Craigslist Searcher This is a home-grown project to search for stuff you want to buy on Craigslist. Basically, it repeatedly performs a search for you (even when you're not on the computer) and then emails you what it finds. Think if it as the equivalent of paying someone to click reload every five minutes while you get on with your life.
Sudoku Generator Don't buy a sudoku book, use this handy-dandy sudoku generator for all your sudoku needs. Here's the code, if you're interested.
Programmy bits, some useful some not so much, some more baked than others, and none with a whole lot of documentation...
  1. xport.pm — a perl routine for reading and writing XPORT "transport" database files as output by SAS. Transport files save numbers in an ancient IBM mainframe floating point format, and that conversion is handled here. (not thouroughly tested, but seems to work fine! Pretty good POD docs are included.
  2. romandate.pm — perl routines to convert integers to and from Roman numerals, and a routine to return the date in Latin(ish)
  3. MChelp — A program to populate Excel spreadsheets with different kinds of random variates for the purpose of monte-carlo simulation. Many kinds of variates are available from a relatively high-quality RNG. The program uses an OLE connection to Excel, so you must have Excel on your PC, though it need not be open. For help, fire up the included .exe and read the help.
  4. excpy.pl — A program in perl to copy blocks of data between Excel files, but callable from the command line or from scripts. This is for people who must update Excel files but try to avoid interactive sessions in Excel if they can.
  5. exfunc.pm — like excpy above, exfunc allows access to Excel spreadsheets from Perl, but this time in the form of an object-oriented API. This is basically just sugar over the OLE API, but it is convenient sugar. POD doc is included.
  6. otp_crypt — a perl script to encrypt and decrypt data using a one-time pad, plus a little silliness on top for "extra". There is also a routine to generate such a pad, but it uses an RNG that is known to be predictable given enough output. So it's not the best encryption program, it's fun and demonstrates some basic concepts.
  7. BPM detector — Have you ever needed to automatically measure the tempo of a song? The routines here (both C and Perl) attempt to do so by running an FFT on a snippet of the song and then filtering and measuring as appropriate. The perl code can also generate little .png pictures of the snippet to see if it is "guessing" the beat pattern correctly. The C is fast, the perl is easily changeable. It really works. Expects .wav or simple PCM files as input.

Projects from Classes

Name Description
Map of all electronic bankings resources in San Francisco that accept EBT cards. This live map was created as part of a project to make recommendation to the City of San Francisco Human Services Agency with respect to converting the delivery of certain serviecs by electronic benefits transfer. Here's a link to our final report.
Residential Photovoltaic Rate Simulator This is a web-interface to an analytical tool that can be used to estiamte how much you can save on your power bill if you install a photovoltaic system. The analysis was done for the ER226 class at UC Berkeley, in preparation of this paper on photovoltaics combined with plug-in hybrids. The work we did on the analysis was too good to throw away after the paper, so I made this on-line version people can play with.

Random Hobby Stuff

Name Description
Weight and Balance Calculator This is an on-line weight and balance calculator for the aircraft for rent at the Sundance Flying Club at the Palo Alto Airport. It's a simple javascript application loaded with the actual W/B data for the aircraft listed.
Live Map of all GSPP alumni in the United States If you happen to be a GSPP student looking for a job next year, this map might be of use to you. (be patient while it loads)
GSPP Election Pool This website was used to run an election pool for my class before the 2006 mid-terms. It has a nice interface for creating your ballot and showing the allied results, etc. If you want to do this again sometime in the future, feel free to contact me to get the code.
 

Last updated May 17, 2011