One of the two half-day tutorials I attended was on building visualizations for the web. It was billed as something of a hand-on tutorial on Processing but ended up just being a talk, which was kind of disappointing. Here’s what I took home:

• The “show everything” principle: dump in all the data right away and allow users to winnow down, not up
• “If you can count it, you can color it”: map values to colors, there are algorithms to do this nicely (e.g. ColorBrewer)
• For non-numeric data, take an MD5 hash of a unique identifier and assign that to a color, to make colors unique (IBM History Flow)
• “Scented widgets”: sliders that show previews of the data (c.f. Bleep, which has scrubbing sliders to visually represent the song)
• Size metrics for visualization: technology vs. number of data points

1. JavaScript/HTML: 1,000
2. Flash: 10,000
3. Java: 100,000+

…but download size becomes an issue after 10,000 data points.

• Ideally visualizations can be bookmarkable and shareable on sites like Digg
• Visualization libraries for Java and Flex: Prefuse

Someone asked the most important question (to me, anyway), which is: Processing is great and all, but what can we do about the fact that Java applets suck? The speaker admitted it’s a problem and that his firm mostly ended up using Flash for client-facing applications. This is a real drag. Processing is great and I already know Java. I don’t want to learn Flash, and I wouldn’t trust an open source applet implementation after dealing with gcj.

I have an idea for my next experiment with Processing and it would end up producing a static image. That might be all that can feasibly done with it for now outside of kiosk or downloaded applications. Bummer.

This book, by one of the main developers of Processing, did come recommended and I’m going to pick it up.

(The first post is mostly pictures because I’m too tired to type.)

I had a fantastic time at this year’s Emerging Technology Conference. A lot had to do with the personal and social angle, especially being a part of the Commodore’s entourage, but the talks were overall really excellent.

The Commodore

Photo by James Duncan Davidson

San Diego

One of the few photos I took, waking up at East-Coast-o’clock in the Commodore Suite:

Here I am partying Disney-style

Photo by John Adams

I look like I’m wearing a parka in this picture because the Marriott air-conditioning was extremely enthusiastic.

The Disney party was awesome in that it approached an almost surreal level of corporate self-parody. They ejected the O’Reilly photographer for “stepping on a Disney executive’s toes” (literally) and also booted an in-character member of Austrian art collective Monochrom for walking around in a faux Soviet uniform with a video crew. Good times.

Here I am partying Facebook-style. Facebook didn’t eject anybody.

Proposals for talks are now being accepted for Web 2.0 Expo NYC. The proposal deadline is March 31, and the conference is September 17 – 19, 2008.

I’ll be reviewing proposals on the design/UI and technology front, so you totally have a in. Plus I bet we can get into all the good parties.

Details and the submittal form are here.

I’ve been playing with the Java-based visualization language Processing a bit. Since a client had casually mentioned the idea of some kind of iTunes-like image viewer, I made that my first project.

It’s not perfect by far (it would be nice if it rotated both directions) but I got about as far with it as I could with my limited patience. Still, my first 3D program! My 10-year-old BASIC programming self would be so proud.

This uses seven random photos from my Flickr account:

Apropos of this I’m looking forward to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference again this year (thanks Brady!), where I’ll be attending this tutorial on web-based visualizations, focusing on Processing. Honestly, though, I’ll probably have more fun at Food Hacking.

This was crazy and awesome.  Brady and Nat are awesome for making it possible for me to attend.

Other awesome things:

1. Drinking whisky with African linguists who tried to plan my wedding
2. Convincing Ben Bangert I did not know as much about his web framework as he thought
3. The bicycle designer who insisted if I’m going to ride a fixie I might as well be riding a unicycle
4. Fifty containers of french fries dumped on the table full of E. coli samples (the fries were delicious!)
5. Attractive founders of social networking sites
6. Erin McKean’s stand-up lexicography schtick
7. Not sleeping in a goddamned tent

Improbably enough, I am in Sebastopol, CA for O’Reilly’s Foo Camp 2007. With me I brought Clive, my Garmin Nuvi GPS. Clive is a British male text-to-speech implementation. Last week in Oxford I noted that a male taxi driver had selected a female voice for his GPS. I’m sure someone at Foo has written a white paper on this topic already.

I like Clive because his voice and manner are soothing and authoritative. I want to believe that my navigational system knows where it’s going. Like a man, it should never ask for directions. So far, I trust my GPS. It has not let me down before. Thus I was a little surprised upon leaving SFO this morning when it went, as Clive would say, a little daft.

I wanted to stay on 101 North but Clive wanted me to turn left onto a different highway. Normally I will bow to the reassuring tone of Received Pronunciation and do what he says, but he wasn’t inspiring confidence:

“IN 500 FEET TURN LEFT ONTO ROUTE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY. TURN LEFT ONTO ROUTE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY. APPROACHING LEFT TURN ONTO ROUTE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY. IN 500 FEET TURN LEFT ONTO ROUTE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY. IN 500 FEET TURN LEFT ONTO ROUTE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY.”

And so on. I yanked out Clive’s power, got on 101, and drove for a few minutes while letting him, I dunno, settle down. When I plugged him back in he was prim and respectable again. At that moment, traffic on the eight-lane highway ground to a halt.

Welcome to California.

Coming soon in the Short Cuts series from O’Reilly Media: Next-Generation Web Frameworks in Python, by me.

To answer the most important question in advance, I don’t know if I get to pick my animal.

I just wrote an application for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in which you must guess the holiday themes connecting various people. The people are revealed day-by-day as an advent calendar.

OUP deliberately didn’t give me the answers so I could figure it out myself (but obviously I did have access to all the identities at once). So beat my score:

1. Competition 1 (red): Got it after 4 people
2. Competition 2 (green): Got the trick in 2, the answer in 4
3. Competition 3 (blue): Tried for 30 minutes to get it in 2, eventually got it in 4

So, three or better, people. You’ll just have to keep checking the page.

(For the curious, this is a single JSP page which loads an XML data file and some XSLT. Java tells XSLT whether today is before, during or after December, because XSLT 1.0 has no date handling and my EXSLT implementation was limited. This way the XSLT only needs to worry about the day value in December, which it can treat as a plain integer, and compute which doors are open accordingly.)

I’m swapping hosts, which means soon I will disable my old site and and automatically redirect to the new host, at http://chile.galangal.org/. If you are subscribed via an RSS reader you should go over to the new site and re-subscribe from there.

Livejournal users need to do nothing; I had the syndication feed moved. Sorry everyone got all the old posts again, but I had no control over that.

Note that commenting in the Livejournal feed instead of clicking through and commenting in the post is a drag, because I don’t get notified about new comments, your bon mots eventually expire, and to the casual visitor of my site it looks like no one reads it. The latter is the most important, as I am an only child and need to feel loved. Thank you.

This article, about an early release of the first graphical web browser, is totally awesome.

The age of a global information network arrived some time ago, but few noticed, because there was no easy way to navigate through the nearly 10 terabytes of information–about 10,000 times more data than is found on a typical PC hard disk–that is publicly available on the Internet computer network.

[...]

“Mosaic is turning hypermedia into a medium that can be practically used,” says Marc Andreessen, NCSA programmer of the X Window System version of Mosaic. “It’s kind of like a ’90s NCSA Telnet.”

The next time one of my clients asks for documentation I will remind them that “one rarely needs to know more than ‘click on the colored text‘ to effectively use the software.”