Tag: Python

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Amazon Announces General Availability of AWS CLI

We are pleased to announce the General Availability (GA) release of the AWS Command Line Interface, a unified tool to manage your AWS services. With just one tool to download and configure, you can control multiple AWS services from the command line and automate them through scripts. The GA release supports 23 services and includes new file commands for Amazon S3. Using a file system command syntax, you can easily list the contents of online buckets, upload a folder full of files, and synchronize local files with objects stored in Amazon S3.

To get started with the AWS CLI, see the User Guide.

via Announcing AWS Command Line Interface – General Availability.

For all you fans of the command line, now you can get some real work done. Bonus: the AWS-CLI is written in Python and is open source so you can follow along on GitHub

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CourtListener.com – US Fed Appellate Court Alerts and Yet Another Legal Search Engine

A mention in the BeSpecific blog tipped me off to an interesting project called CourtListener.com. From the about page:

The goal of the site is to create a free and competitive real time alert tool for the U.S. judicial system.

At present, the site has daily information regarding all precedential opinions issued by the 13 federal circuit courts and the Supreme Court of the United States. Each day, we also have the non-precedential opinions from all of the Circuit courts except the D.C. Circuit. This means that by 5:10pm PST, the database will be updated with the opinions of the day, with custom alerts going out shortly thereafter.

The site was created by Michael Lissner as a Masters thesis project at UC Berkley School of Information.

A quick perusal of the site and its associated documents tells us that Michael is using a scraping technique to visit court websites looking for recently released opinions. Once found, the opinions are retrieved, converted from PDF to text, indexed, and stored. Atom RSS feeds are then generated to provide current alerts.

The site is powered by Python using the Django web framework and is open source, so you can download the code. The backend database is MySQL and search is handled by Sphinx. The conversion from PDF appears to be plain text. If you register on the site you can create custom alerts based on saved searches.

All in all CourtListener.com provides another good source for current Federal appellate court opinions. Be sure to check the coverage page to see how far back the site goes for each court. Perhaps the future will bring an expansion to more courts and jurisdictions.