Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for June 6th through June 8th:

• Latin motto generator: make your own catchy slogans! – Create your own life mottos and slogans in Latin! (Learning Latin not required, some vague idea for a desired motto a plus)
• A Map Of Social (Network) Dominance – Using Alexa and Google Trend data, Cosenza color-coded the map based on which social network is the most popular in each country. All of the light green countries belong to Facebook. But there are still pockets of resistance in Russia (where V Kontakte rules), China (QQ), Brazil and India (Orkut), Central America, Peru, Mongolia, and Thailand (hi5), South Korea (Cyworld), Japan (Mixi), the Middle East (Maktoob), and the Philippines (Friendster).
• Microsoft Releases Bing API – With No Usage Quotas – Updated search API, with no quotas and some improvements.
  * Developers can now request data in JSON and XML formats. The SOAP interface that the Live Search API required has also been retained.
  * Requested data can be narrowed to one of the following source types: web, news, images, phonebook, spell-checker, related queries, and Encarta instant answer.
  * It is now possible to send requests in OpenSearch-compliant RSS format for web, news, image and phonebook queries.
  * Client applications will be able to combine any number of different data source types into a single request with a single query string.
• Twitter Limits Getting Ridiculous! « Verwon’s Blog – Anecdotal reports of Twitter users running into problems with rate limiting, either API or max posts/tweets/follows/directs.
• flot – Google Code – Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side. The focus is on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming and mouse tracking. The plugin is known to work with Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2.x+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Konqueror 4.x+. If you find a problem, please report it. Drawing is done with the canvas tag introduced by Safari and now available on all major browsers, except Internet Explorer where the excanvas Javascript emulation helper is used.

These are my links for June 1st through June 2nd:

• jqPlot – Pure Javascript Plotting – jqPlot is a plotting plugin for the jQuery Javascript framework. jqPlot produces beautiful line and bar charts with many features including: Numerous chart style options. Date axes with customizable formatting. Rotated axis text. Automatic trend line computation. Tooltips and data point highlighting. Sensible defaults for ease of use.
• New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets – Conversation Starter – HarvardBusiness.org – "Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. This "follower split" suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships. This is intriguing, especially given that females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%."
• Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality – 2003 article on popularity / traffic on blogs, which was then the latest emerging social media format. "Once a power law distribution exists, it can take on a certain amount of homeostasis, the tendency of a system to retain its form even against external pressures. Is the weblog world such a system? Are there people who are as talented or deserving as the current stars, but who are not getting anything like the traffic? Doubtless. Will this problem get worse in the future? Yes. "
• well-formed.eigenfactor.org : Visualizing information flow in science – Some nice visualization ideas using hierarchical clustering to explore patterns in citation networks.
• Bing API, Version 2.0 – Updated API documentation for Microsoft Bing (formerly Live Search) web services.

These are my links for May 30th through May 31st:

• Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster | High Scalability – Collection of links to presentations and interviews regarding Twitter's architecture, implementation plans, and performance issues, from spring 2009.
• The Last Psychiatrist: The Difference Between An Amateur, A Scientist, And A Genius – An amateur is full of wonder and speculation, tinkering towards the truth but suffering from a lack of knowledge and idleness; he's not even sure if someone else has already made these discoveries. "Is this a worthwhile pursuit?"

  A scientist performs experiments to confirm or disprove a hypothesis, and in that way he grinds out the truth.

  A genius has three abilities, which are actually the union of amateur and scientist: 1. to know the state of the art, what is known and what is not known. 2. To be able to think "out of the box". 3. To be disciplined enough to concentrate on the tedium of a formal investigation of his wondrous speculations.

• PatchMatch: A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing – Research paper on sort of "super healing brush" for manipulating digital images, allows splicing together different sections of the image and automatically selecting similar textures to make the seam transitions work better.
• Light Blue Touchpaper » Blog Archive » Attack of the Zombie Photos – Social networking and sharing sites have challenges implementing and managing access control policies at large scale, and content delivery networks add another wrinkle.
• Map of all Google data center locations | Royal Pingdom – Where in the world is your search being served from? An attempt to assemble a list of known Google data centers worldwide.

These are my links for April 24th through April 27th:

• Gallery: Flickr users make accidental maps – tech – 27 April 2009 – New Scientist – Building map visualizations using geotagged photos from Flickr.
• Does Hewlett-Packard Need a Dose of Anarchy? – NYTimes.com – When your organization is built on lean, predictable operating excellence (cost cutting, procurement, scale), where do speculative, high risk, growth opportunities come from?
• JavaScript for hackers – Opera Developer Community – On Javascript parser and some eval examples that lead to XSS vulnerabilities
• Processing.js – Javascript port of Processing graphics library, requires Canvas.
• Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition – Face recognition technology startup from CMU, with a demo of tagging faces in video of all episodes of Star Trek (the original series).

These are my links for February 28th through March 1st:

• Community Data – Swivel – User contributed datasets, for visualization and graphs with Swivel
• Obamameter – Map visualization of economic stimulus outlays. "Keep tabs on the the US economy, the global economy and the stimulus through our dashboard for the economy."
• recovery.gov.pdf – Slide presentation on data sources and construction of initial Recover.gov site in Jan 2009, from talk at Transparency Camp.
• Virtual Hoff : DoxPara Research – Slides from Dan Kaminsky's talk at CloudCamp Seattle on network and application security issues in cloud and virtualized computing environments.
• Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. – from Paul Graham – "If you could get startups to stick to your town for a million apiece, then for a billion dollars you could bring in a thousand startups. That probably wouldn't push you past Silicon Valley itself, but it might get you second place. For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world."
• Berkshire Hathaway 2008 shareholders letter (PDF) – Warren Buffet reviews the state of the financial markets, his worst year ever, and the outlook for 2009.
• White House 2: Where YOU set the nation’s priorities – Not the actual White House, but an interesting experiment in collaborative input for setting government agenda.
• Python for Lisp Programmers – Peter Norvig examines Python. "(Although it wasn't my intent, Python programers have told me this page has helped them learn Lisp.) Basically, Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with "traditional" syntax (what Lisp people call "infix" or "m-lisp" syntax). One message on comp.lang.python said "I never understood why LISP was a good idea until I started playing with python." Python supports all of Lisp's essential features except macros, and you don't miss macros all that much because it does have eval, and operator overloading, and regular expression parsing, so you can create custom languages that way. "

During the initial planning and survey phase of the Kuppam project a few years ago, I discovered it was nearly impossible to obtain high resolution topographic maps (or any other sort) for rural India. The government-operated Survey of India has high quality data, but it hasn’t generally made its way into the equivalent of US Geological Survey 15-minute quadrangles on paper or the DTM / DEM data sets. The best I was able to come up with was some old Soviet military maps from the 1950s.

Hadn’t thought about it for a while, but I see someone else has found out about these:

Paul sez, “Soviets mapped the entire world at various scales between 1940 and 1990.In some areas the Russian maps are still the best available maps. Amazingly, none of the maps are copyright.

BoingBoing, Soviet Military Maps of Britain

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)

Map My Run is a new Google Maps-based application for plotting and measuring your runs. I just tried plotting one of my usual loops around the Stanford campus and it’s pretty close to what I get with my GPS running watch.

You can plot routes by clicking points on the map, or upload a GPS tracklog (didn’t try this, though). These sorts of applications are great for estimating your mileage when you don’t actually have a GPS or some way to measure the course. Unfortunately, Google’s map coverage is still somewhat limited outside the US, so it works great for plotting runs around London’s Hyde Park but not so good for loops around the Vidhana Soudha or Cubbon Park in Bangalore, although if you know your way around you can use the satellite view to make a rough guesstimate.

As an aside, it’s remarkably hard to find a good online map of Bangalore, given the huge number of technology-related business travellers that visit there. Maps of India has a reasonable city overview, but if you want street-level detail, try this one from Superseva (only seems to work on Internet Explorer). It’s an interactive scanned image of a paper map(!).

See also: Gmaps Pedometer, Favorite Run, Walk Jog Run, Motion Based

via Google Maps Mania

Yahoo has a major update to Yahoo Maps this evening, bringing it back on par with Google Maps, and with a full set of web APIs for building mapping applications.

From the Yahoo Maps API overview:

Building Block Components

Several Yahoo! APIs help you create a powerful and useful Yahoo! Maps mashups. Use these together with the Yahoo! Maps APIs to enhance the user experience.

• Geocoding API – Pass in location data by address and receive geocoded (encoded with latitude-longitude) responses.
• Map Image API – Stitch map images together to build your own maps for usage in custom applications, including mobile and offline use.
• Traffic APIs – Build applications that take dynamic traffic report data to help you plan optimal routes and keep on top of your commute using either our REST API or Dynamic RSS Feed.
• Local Search APIs – Query against the Yahoo! Local service, which now returns longitude-latitude with every search result for easy plotting on a map. Also new is the inclusion of ratings from Yahoo! users for each establishment to give added context.

They also spell out their free service restrictions:

Rate Limit

The Simple API that displays your map data on the Yahoo! Maps site has no rate limit, thought it is limited to non-commercial use. The Yahoo! Maps Embeddedable APIs (the Flash and AJAX APIs are limited to 50,000 queries per IP per day and to non-commercial use. See the specific terms attached to each API for that API’s rate limit. See information on rate limiting.

This restriction is more interesting:

Sensor-Based Location Limit

You may use location data derived from GPS or other location sensing devices in connection with the Yahoo! Maps APIs, provided that such location data is not based on real-time (i.e., less than 6 hours) GPS or any other real-time location sensing device, the GPS or location sensing device that derives the location data cannot automatically (i.e. without human intervention) provide the end user’s location, and any such location data must be uploaded by an end-user (and not you) to the Yahoo! Maps APIs.

So uploading a track log after running or hiking is OK, but doing a live GPS ping from your notebook, PDA, or cell phone to show where you are isn’t? I think this is intended to exclude traffic and fleet tracking applications, but it seems to include geocoded blog maps by accident. I don’t think they’d actually mind that.

There are several sample applications to look at. The events map seems nicely done, pulling up locations, images, and events for venues within the search window.

To display appropriate images for events, local event output was sent into the Term Extraction API, then the term vector was given to the Image Search API. The results are often incredibly accurate.

I’ve been meaning to take a look at the Term Extraction service, it looks like it might be a handy tool for building some quick-and-dirty personal meme engines or other filters for wrangling down my ever growing list of feeds.

Announcement at Yahoo Search Blog

More from TechCrunch, Jeremy Zawodny, Chad Dickerson

I’ve never been to New Orleans, but this interactive map shows the area flooded by Katrina on New Orleans or the metro Boston area, which may be more familiar to some readers here.

Map at Boston.com (via Brad Feld)

The topography is obviously different in Boston, so this isn’t the pattern of flooding that could actually occur. The scale is 1:1 though, and the region is huge.

A first version of Amazon A9’s photo mapping project is open for business at maps.a9.com.

The block-by-block view is available for selected US metro areas, and provides a street-level view of storefronts, houses, parks, and whatever else happened to be in view when they drove by.

Here are a few sample locations to try:

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to bookmark a location yet, so saving a particular location requires a bit of trial and error on the street address once you come across an interesting view.

via Batelle’s Searchblog

Also, at Search Engine Watch Gary Price comments on the early coverage of Fargo, North Dakota:

So, why Fargo? A couple of weeks ago A9’s CEO, Udi Manber, told Danny:

“The reason we have Fargo is one of the engineers lives there. He took the equipment home and did the whole place in a day.”

So, I’m thinking that if you don’t have an A9 engineer living in your small town, don’t expect to see Block View imagery anytime soon. (-:

I don’t usually read Smart Money these days, but a privacy-related article popped up in My Yahoo which has some pointers to web sites that you may find yourself or someone you know listed on.

Fundrace.org got some exposure a few months back; it provides an interface for browsing and searching the US Federal Election Committee campaign contribution database from the 2004 presidential race. The site provides some interesting national and regional maps of donors by party. The problematic part for online privacy is that you can search by name, zip code, or get a map with addresses of all the donors in any neighborhood. Everyone who donated between January 1, 2003 and October 13, 2004 and over $200 (and some under $200) is listed, along with their address, title, and employer. I tried queries for various locations here in the Bay Area, L.A., and Malibu, and got listings with many recognizable names, in addition to assorted neighbors. Many of the listings are for office addresses, but a surprising (to me) number of recognizable TV and movie actors turn up on the list with home addresses. They must have good security, a lot of patience, or move frequently.

Another interesting / problematic web site is WhitePages.com, which appears to aggregate telephone directories, and provides the ability to do queries by name, reverse lookup by telephone number, or by address. I tried this on our street, and was pleased to find that neither unlisted phone numbers nor listings without a published street address turn up in the reverse address lookup for our block. This is, of course, the expected behavior for a phone number database built on the published telephone directory, but I was curious whether information might have turned up from some other public source. Cell phone numbers still don’t turn up in these directories either, which makes that a non-issue for now, unless you’re listed in Paris Hilton’s T-mobile Sidekick.

Summary — if you want to keep your address off the internet, don’t use your home address to make a political campaign contribution, and don’t publish your address in the telephone book!

Today I saw a demo of Andy Fitzhugh’s Virgil software. He is combining GPS trackpoint logs with digital photos to generate metadata which can be used to group photos together by date/time, physical proximity, and also to prepare queries to various search engines based on location.

He uses a Garmin Geko clipped to his camera bag to generate a track log, and then uses the EXIF time stamp to match photos to locations. He also has a method for tagging existing photos with a location. The mapping display is generated by queries to the Microsoft MapPoint service, which also returns a vicinity-based list of points of interest.