daniel's blog

Yesterday, the ever-hilarious xkcd featured a comic which was very much a visualization. It was a chart showing the interactions between characters from a handful of movies. The comic was the kick I needed to do a quick experiment with timeline-based graph visualizations.

Here's the result.

I had no idea what to get my good friend for her birthday but I knew she was a fan of the Alien series with Sigourney Weaver. Remembering the baby Alien chestburster scene (YouTube), I was inspired to bake this cake and have the little bugger pop out of it.

I just finished up a graph visualization for your Twitter network. It's a dynamic, interactive application that tracks the number of times you mentioned other users or hashtags.

I learned a lot about Google Website Optimizer in a presentation at Net Tuesday Vancouver earlier this week. I also have a write-up on Adsense from the same event, if you're interested.

Among the recent updates to this powered-by-Drupal blog is a switch to having Disqus manage comments. The standard comment module has a few shortcomings which are solved by Disqus. However, Disqus isn't without its own problems and the absent "import comments from Drupal" functionality is one of them.

I checked out the Net Tuesday meetup last night. If you're not familiar with the group, they're bring together social change organizations and social/web media types. Last month's meetup showcased some exciting projects going on in Vancouver so I was looking forward to my second time at Net Tuesday.

I started the process of upgrading to Drupal 6. Turned out, I had terrible timing and was suddenly swamped with work so the website has been down for several days now. Happy to say it's back up and running.

Downside is, I still don't have time to properly complete the upgrade so there's going to be a lot of quirky behaviour. If you find broken or strangely-behaving pages, you can help me out by giving me a heads up.

Cheers!

I just got setup with OpenFrameworks which is sort of the C++ version of the popular Processing engine. OpenFrameworks launched fairly recently so I had a few kinks getting up and running. Hopefully this helps.

I'm using Code::Blocks as my editor, and OpenFrameworks prerelease v0.06 on Windows XP. At the end of the tutorial you'll have compiled and run an OpenFrameworks application that does nothing. Fortunately, it doesn't die spewing errors either. (-;

From Information is Beautiful

My name is Daniel and I'm a polling addict. Anyone who works on a computer connected to the internet knows what I'm talking about. It's those compulsive visits to the likes of Craigslist, eBay, and even services like Google Analytics to see if there's been any change. We're waiting for new job postings or new bids or a slew of new visits from a referring website. Each of these tools definitely has its use but we polling addicts check on them with pointless frequency.

I attended the Net Tuesday Meetup last night and got to see a variety of people talk about the cool projects they're undertaking in Vancouver. Turns out there's a lot going on, but there was one presentation in particular that struck a chord with me.