I haven’t posted in a while due to my schedule. But I have also clearly lost my mind as evidenced by the fact that I managed to write and perform half of a rap battle without once thinking to myself, “This is clearly an insane idea.”
Jason Alderman and I wrote and performed a rap battle for an Ignite presentation at Ignite Salt Lake. Jason took the side that developing web applications for mobile phones is the best way to go and I took the side that native applications are more appropriate for mobile development. The slides can be found here.
Geeky? In the extreme. But I enjoyed it.
And if you don’t like to hear people laughing over the laughable lyrics:
Sorry for my prolonged absence. My world has been taken over somewhat due to my recent moonlighting as an information visualization guy. Take note that I’m not by any means an “expert”… I’m more of an “enthusiast”, but that was apparently enough to get me on CNN.
I’ll post more videos as I create them for CNN. I’m also working on a chapter for an O’Reilly book called “Beautiful Visualization” that will be out next year.
All of this to say that I’m trying to get back into the WPF/Silverlight blogging as soon as I can, but I need to clear my plate a little first.
I gave a presentation on data visualization at Ignite Salt Lake last night, and I thought it went pretty well. (I wasn’t hiding my face and sneaking out of the theater afterward.)
Slide 13 (Location Visualization Example): Map of flights in the US in a 24 hour period. This actually uses color to indicate altitude (darker is higher, lighter is lower, but I didn’t have time to go into that in my talk.
Amazon Web Services Data Sets – Including the human genome, DNA sequences, chemical databases, census information, DOT databases on transportation (aviation, highway, bike, maritime, etc)
New York Times developer site: the NYT has easy APIs for articles, best sellers, campaign finance, user comments, congress, movie reviews, and the New York State Legislature
Yahoo Developer Network – APIs for finance, traffic, weather, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and many others
I will have no time to write real blog posts (I’m actually writing this during Robby Ingebretsen’s fantastic session: “Design Fundamentals for Developers”), but I will be updating on Twitter like a maniac. You can see my twitter feed here.
I’ll try to tweet something from every session I attend.
When are we going to get rid of Daylight Savings Time? It makes no sense at all.
Besides, then I’ll be able to sound like Grandpa Simpson when I’m older. “When I was your age, we had these great American traditions. We changed the time around just cause we wanted to and we put people with no dramatic experience on TV and called it ‘reality’. Oh, yeah, and we had TV… it was like a computer except you couldn’t really do anything except choose between the four things that were on at that exact moment. And the world didn’t revolve around you… if you missed the beginning of the show, tough beans!”
It now supports WPF and Silverlight conversions in addition to making the files smaller by getting rid of unneccessary precision. I tagged it with delicious, but this is important enough to earn its own post.