Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for April 30th through May 2nd:

• FusionCharts Free – Animated Flash Charts and Graphs for ASP, PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, RoR and other web applications – Flash charting component that can be used to render data-driven & animated charts for your web applications and presentations. It is a cross-browser and cross-platform solution that can be used with PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, ColdFusion, simple HTML pages or even PowerPoint Presentations to deliver interactive and powerful flash charts. You do NOT need to know anything about Flash to use FusionCharts. All you need to know is the language you're programming in.
• Raphaël—JavaScript Library – Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library. Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.
• A Really Gentle Introduction to Data Mining | Regular Geek – List of data mining blogs and related resources.
• BlackBerry SSH Tutorial: Connect to Unix Server using MidpSSH for Mobile Devices – Notes on using MidpSSH on Blackberry for remote access to servers. Seems to work, although big network lag on my BlackBerry Bold / AT&T.
• Country Reports on Terrorism 2008 – U.S. law requires the Secretary of State to provide Congress, by April 30 of each year, a full and complete report on terrorism with regard to those countries and groups meeting criteria set forth in the legislation. This annual report is entitled Country Reports on Terrorism. Beginning with the report for 2004, it replaced the previously published Patterns of Global Terrorism.
• DIY: How To Find Authoritative Twitter Users Plus 100 To Get You Started | Ignite Social Media – Some comments on recommendation metrics for Twitter, trying to use "favorites" mark as an indicator.
• SIGUSR2 > The Power That is GNU Emacs – "If you've never been convinced before that Emacs is the text editor in which dreams are made from, or that inside Emacs there are unicorns manipulating your text, don't expect me to convince you."

Tagnautica is a fun and interesting Flash user interface for exploring and navigating among tags, in this case on Flickr. After keying in an initial tag, related tags are displayed in a circle, with a sample image from each tag category displayed in a representative size.

When you move the cursor over a tag bubble, it temporarily becomes larger so you can get a look at it. The other bubbles keep resizing as well, giving the interface a very fluid appearance. When you find something you like, you can click on the Tagnautica bubble to view the tag page over at Flickr.

I always enjoy these sorts of user interfaces for semi-random exploration. I’ve noticed that I don’t really use any of the cool visualization tools when I actually want to find something, though. Not sure if that’s because they don’t represent a useful set of questions as implemented yet, or simply because my brain doesn’t work that way.

I find I experience these interfaces more as pleasant interactive art than as useful data navigation tools. One of these days I’m sure something is going to click, though.

Just when I’d started getting a little bored with Google-based pincushion maps du jour, I come across something surprising built on the new Yahoo Maps API:
from Justin’s Rich Media Blog:

With the power of Flash 8, you can customize the Yahoo! Maps on your site to actually blend with the surrounding design of the site or application. Forget about a rectangular maps and default colors of the map tiles. Use ActionScript, or the IDE to add runtime filters to the map tiles themselves.

The radar “scan” is animated to rotate around, while the pirate map telescope also serves as the zoom level slider.

I’ve seen so many Google Maps applications in the past few months that the sheer novelty and utility value of new ways to access data and maps has started to wear off. These demos made me stop to take a look simply because they look so much better than what we’ve gotten used to lately, and are likely to precipitate a wave of interesting new ideas.

I’m ambivalent about requiring Flash as a client technology. It’s really neat, and is deployed on a lot (but not all) browsers. It’s also somewhat opaque, and chews up a lot of system resources. I can usually tell when I’ve landed on a web page with Flash content somewhere because the fan in my T42 usually starts spinning up after a few seconds instead of running dead silent.

But in the meantime, this made my day.

(via PhotoMatt)

Revealicious (via Social Software Weblog):

Revealicious is a set of graphic visualisations for your del.icio.us account that allow you to browse, search and select tags, as well as viewing posts matching them.

There are three different visualization modes, SpaceNav, TagsCloud, and Grouper, which depict the relationship of tag use and frequency among your del.icio.us bookmark collection.

The Revealicious page also has links to a previous project by one of the authors, DeliciousSoup, and a post elsewhere with an extensive list of del.icio.us tools.

Del.icio.us is interesting / frustrating in that it has almost no user interface, but exposes enough of an API for 3rd parties to try building their own applications on top of the data.

I don’t find these visualizations particularly useful on my own bookmarks, but they point toward interesting ways of exploring large sets of tags and other link relationships. Plus they look cool.

It’s Friday, and I’ve come across a brilliantly funny pair of Harry Potter flash animations. Not quite G rated, but generally work safe. You’ll need the sound turned on, though. (link, link)

Quotes: “Let’s bother Snape!”, “Botherbotherbother”, “Naked Time!”, and “Ronicus Explodicus!”

The Potter Puppet Pals present
“Bothering Snape”
animated by Neil Cicierega

and the sequel,

“Trouble at Hogwarts”
animated by Neil Cicierega
with help from Alora Lanzillotta and Emmy Cicierega

The second animation has a hidden bonus feature which should not be missed. To view it, use the button at the lower left corner to pause when Snape gets zapped, and move step by step until you see the green star, which you can click to view the bonus animation.

You may also like PotterPotterPotter.

Update 09-24-2005 21:52 PDT: People seem to be finding this post lately, looking for Potter Puppet Pals 3. There isn’t one yet, as far as I know. In the meantime, you may enjoy Snape’s rendition of I’m Too Sexy (Flash). The Potter Puppet Pals site is frequently out of bandwidth quota, but the content is mirrored here.

There’s also a do-it-yourself Potter Puppet Pals scene maker (in Flash) there, which lets you drag and drop the puppet parts onto the scene and put a text caption on it.

A silly Flash movie on the eve of the 6th Harry Potter book. (via Fredshouse)

update 2005-07-16 23:32 : Here’s the original BadgerBadgerBadger Flash movie (badgerbadgerbadgerbadger, mushroom, snake)

update 2005-07-17 09:07:26: after reading this post, a friend reminded me about the hamster dance. (Original, new version, and history).

update 2005-08-06 21:19: You may also enjoy the Potter Puppet Pals

update 2005-09-24 22:08 PDT: You might be interested in Snape singing I’m Too Sexy, or the Potter Puppet Pals Scene Maker, see the update on the Potter Puppet Pals post.