Brain Lint

A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune of sitting in on lecture of a scientific visualization class* at Tufts at which Ben Fry, creator of many great works of visualizations that can even be called information art as well as the visualization toolkit, Processing, was guest speaking. The talk was great, spanning lots of work and interesting commentary.

Some notes:

• Ben showed quite a bit of his previous work - some of it would be familiar to readers of his book, Visualizing Data.
• Showed off some of his work that has appeared in movies, highlighting the fact that he is asked to add rows of standard grey computer buttons to his work because it doesn’t look “real” otherwise.
• Talked about some experience teaching classes, particularly the challenges of classes with mixtures of cs students and artists. Making CS students do projects more artsy and artists do more interactive, technical work can be interesting. He showed off some examples of student work. (One cool student project asked a set of Nobel laureates what type of pets they had. Quite a few found time to respond and the results are here.)

• The coolest demos were of some of the work he’d done for Oblong Industries (Not a lot of information online now- here’s one cnet article)- they have a working Minority Report-style gesture interface that allows one to control a computer with hand movements. Paired with the right interface, this looks to make light work of navigating through vast amounts of multidimensional data. Ben showed some videos, along with a demo (running on his macbook pro w/o the fancy hardware it was still really cool).

* I’d been asking for a class like this to be offered several times while I as still working on my degree at Tufts, but to no avail. Of course it’s offered right after I graduate!

I went to the third installment of Ignite Boston this evening. It’s a series of five-minute lightning talks on various technical talks, along with a couple of upsized keynotes. My (partial) recap:

• The most illuminating talk for me was by Jonathan Zdziarski on security on the iPhone ecosystem. Turns out using the iPhone is a huge security risk because people are actively hacking on the iPhone but not disclosing their hacks because Apple will fix them. This makes it really easy to get data off a stolen iPhone. Scarier still is that if your iPhone breaks, and you turn it in for a new one under warranty, then the person who buys your old one refurbished has a pretty good chance of recovering your data. Pretty scary stuff, and downright outrageous that Apple doesn’t do a better job of wiping the memory under those circumstances. See Jonathon’s site for more information.
• Jesse Vincent had a good rant on the parallel between sharecropping and Web 2.0 sites. Its your data and your time, but their property, tools and profit…
• Juhan Sonin talked about design tenets for beautiful design. Is putting together an online collection of them on wikia somewhere, but I don’t have the url handy. There’s an earlier draft of the presentation on flickr.
• Alexander Wissner-Gross presented co2stats.com which aims to (precisely) calculate the co2 emissions of a web site based on its location and the location of its users (eg, having lots of browsers from West Virginia = lots of coal burning). They’ll “automatically” buy carbon offsets for you so you can advertise your site as green, but I’m still not convinced carbon offsets mean anything. Lots of money pouring in there, but not a lot of proof what works and what doesn’t and for how long.

I had the pleasure of seeing Lawrence Lessig unveil the next phase of the Change-congress movement last Friday at the Berkman center at Harvard. Lessig gives phenomenal presentations and could probably be compelling talking about just about any topic. The topic this time was the distorting (rather than corrupting) influence money has on politics and I thought it was eye opening and informative.

Lessig mentioned a study showing people stop reading or tune out of news as soon as political donations are mentioned as part of a story, so even without real corruption most of the time, the appearance of influence is enough to make large numbers of people disengage from the political process.

I wish I could link to the talk, but as far as I can tell its not yet online despite being webcase live. Check out the event’s page, hopefully a link to the video will appear there one day.

Update: theres a video posted on the change congress blog

I noticed this morning that google finance has a new stock screener feature that lets you choose stocks with features in a certain range by way of an interactive sparkline. These are miniature graphs that go inline with text. In this case the graph is a histogram that indicates how much of the stock market falls into each part of the range - this will give one a quick preview how inclusive their search parameters are.

There’s a local group of entrepreneurs and developers that meets every couple of months in Cambridge. I was curious about this month’s presenters’ choices of development platform, so I took at look at their headers and here’s what I found.

Of 7 presenters the platform stats fall out thusly:
2 Ruby on Rails (plus one suspected, but not confirmed)
2 PHP
1 Asp.net
1 Python (cherry py)

By way of contrast, a quick and dirty survey of jobs in boston/cambridge/brookline on craig’s list turned up the following stats
232 jobs containing Java
113 jobs containing ASP.net
164 jobs containing PHP
46 jobs containing Python
34 jobs containing Ruby

Presumably the difference is because of lots of folks in the area are working at medium sized companies on older, established (i won’t say “legacy”) systems?

I saw on the Globe’s website that the founder of ZipCar has started a new company, goloco.com, which aims to promote ride sharing by splitting up the costs of a trip, handling payments to the driver, and taking a 10% cut of the proceeds. I don’t know why, but I happened to skim the terms of service which were all pretty standard stuff, until i found this:

13. Carbon Credits

You agree to assign the rights to any Carbon Credits resulting from any trips arranged using our service to GoLoco.

Pretty crafty - if they do well, and if we ever get some kind of cap and trade system for carbon (which is a lot of ifs) they could stand to make more money selling carbon credits than on their users’ tithe.

Thomas Friedman wrote a phenomenal article on green power in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine. The gist of it is that America leads the world in developing technology to conserve and cleanly generate in the few markets where the US government has acted in the past to mandate strict emissions restrictions, as in the example of diesel locomotives, and creating well-paying domestic jobs to boot. He argues that the free market can’t work properly without the government creating regulations that can provide guidance on future costs of emissions and fuel. People can’t and won’t invest hundreds of millions of dollars if they can be wiped out the next time oil prices drop. It needs to cost money to burn fossil fuels or no alternatives will be developed.
I’ve heard this before at Technical Review’s emerging tech conference last fall - hopefully with Friedman articulating the case for pro enviroment so well and in a manner that should make sense for lots of society, not just the “tree-huggers” we can finally make some real progress on meaningful environmental legislation.

I saw (via basement.org) that Adobe Apollo is available at adobe labs. It remains to be seen if the whole I need to install tens of targeted rich clients thing will take off (java web start, anyone?), but if it does, this looks like a great tool to be using.

When I was working at Lotus on Workplace Client, I often wondered if Java on the Eclipse platform was really the best way to deploy rich client applications. The only compelling things it had to offer over browser-based applications was an offline experience and desktop integration. (plus some hand waving about leveraging existing Java skills). Now that flex has a more traditional programming model around the flash runtime, and apollo provides desktop integration and offline support (with synchronization) as well as update/provisioning, the advantages of using the Eclipse platform with layers of overpriced IBM code piled on top are evaporating. One could still make a case for the lipstick on a legacy-code pig project (see Hanover/notes 8 ) building on the Java/eclipse stack, but I can’t see any reason why a company would invest in something like Lotus Expeditor for green-field development.

I saw a great paper on wireless net neutrality referenced on boing boing a day or two ago. It has a good outline of how the current state of the wireless industry mirrors the wired industry circa 1950s when it was all firmly under the thumb AT&T.

By being greedy (demanding HALF of mobile revenue) and controlling (censoring and stifling information) the industry is getting a big slice of a small pie, but surely if they let up, they could get a small slice of a much bigger pie as the mobile information market expands and new, unexpected uses of their mobile infrastructure.

Given that wired net neutrality isn’t even a sure thing, I don’t think anyone can hold their breath on wireless net neutrality. Then again, the wireless carriers are using public radio spectrum to deliver their half assed service, so perhaps there is more leverage there than over wired carriers?

Clearly the US is lagging further and further behind Europe and Asia on the wireless front. If that remains the case surely the google or yahoo of mobile won’t spring up in silicon valley…

I’ve been waiting months for Cingular to release the Nokia N75; it is a bit annoying checking their product page over and over again so I’ve been thinking about creating an RSS feed for their offerings for some time. Now its done - and here it is: Cingular RSS Feed. There’s a yaml data file here too. Updated nightly.

Now we can easily watch as Cingular keeps adding crappy RAZRs in assorted colors instead of actually adding new phones.

I tried a number of ruby and python screen scraping utilities along the way, ultimately I’ve been quite pleased with Hpricot, so if you’re doing some scraping and can use Ruby, I’d give that a whirl.