Anselm Bradford

Speaking Trees – visualizing written text

Ans — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 19:17:01 +0000

Several months ago I created an interactive visualization experiment that took typed input and grew tree-like forms from what was typed. The frequency of words and letters typed affected the shape. The project was installed on an interactive screen (more info) in central Auckland, New Zealand, during the month of March, 2011. I finally got around to creating a video documenting the project:

Click here to view the embedded video.

June 2011 Auckland Web Meetup

Ans — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:44:41 +0000

It’s been many months since there was a formal web meetup, but about 180 web enthusiasts gathered at the new Telecom building for three presentations yesterday evening.

John Lennard talked about Luumin, a task management software that will be opening into private beta in 6-8 weeks. John talked about the reasons that the Yahoo! YUI Library was chosen for development (it’s built for applications) and mentioned that Cassandra is used for the datastore.

Next, Darren Wood presented on frontend optimization, running through a list of tips for markup, CSS, Images and JavaScript. The presentation is available online, so I’ll just repost the list of tools mentioned:

Minification

YSlow

YUI compressor

HTML5 Boilerplate

Image Compression

PunyPNG

Smush.it

JPEGTran

OptiPNG

PNGGauntlet – Windows GUI

ImageOptim – Mac GUI

PNG8 Creation

Fireworks

pngquant

Manfred – Windows GUI

ImageAlpha – Mac GUI

Other useful bits

JSLint

CSSLint

Cross-browser CSS Gradient Generator

CSS generation from sprites

Last up was Mozilla Foundation programmer, Robert O’Callahan, who discussed the state of work happening at Mozilla on Firefox as well as the web more generally. Highlights include:

Demo of the HTML5 game Pirates Love Daisies, an almost demo of Angry Birds (network issues prevented the full demo), and the Quake 3 WebGL demo.
Rob enthusiastically spoke of a pure JavaScript MP3 audio decoder (jmad I assume)

and said Mozilla will implement MP3 support the day after the MP3 patents expire, as that’s all that’s holding them back from being implemented.

Advanced audio is a pressing issue that needs to be handled, and there is a proposal for a Web Audio API, which Chrome is currently ahead on.
Mozilla is working on a pure JavaScript PDF reader, which renders into the canvas tag (pdf.js, read more at Andreas Gal’s blog).
Also mentioned was Gordon, an open source Flash runtime.
The W3C’s Touch Events specification, which provides an API for, you guessed it, user touch (it does not cover gestures, as Apple has patents that cover these).
Mozilla’s Fullscreen API should be implemented in the next year.
In talking about in-browser realtime communication, the Opus audio codec was mentioned, which is designed for interactive speech and audio transmission over the Internet.

Incorrect value in Microsoft Excel LOOKUP function

Ans — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 04:11:52 +0000

While developing a spreadsheet that used the LOOKUP function I discovered what appears to be a bug (possibly a rounding error) in Excel. Also, as I have not checked on Windows, this is a Mac OSX issue (Snow Leopard at least). Below I present the error and the solution:

The Error

The LOOKUP function will not recognize the value in a cell in a reference column that was calculated by the product of some value and 0.55, for example 200 * 0.55.

The Solution

Adjust the calculation to not include a fraction and it works fine. For example if 200 * 0.55 was used, (200 / 100) * 55 could be used instead.

Explanation

The LOOKUP function can be used to retrieve a value from a column of values based on a supplied numerical value. For example, think of a grade sheet for a class where numerical values are converted to letter grades (this is what I was using it for). A column on one part of the spreadsheet contains the letter grades: A+, A, A-, B+, B, … etc., with numbers in an adjacent column that indicate the minimum numerical grade needed to obtain a particular letter grade. Suppose you want to dynamically update the table based on the total marks for a particular assignment, so for example, if the assignment was out of 100 points, with a passing grade being the 50% mark, 50 points would be needed for a C-. 55 points would be needed for a C, etc. The values in the lookup table may have a calculation for these two columns that looked like:

100 * .50	C-
100 * .55	C

Obviously, 50 and 55 could be entered directly, but replace “100″ with a reference to another cell that had the total points for the assignment and the sheet could be updated to reflect different assignment totals without needing to re-enter the values in the grade table. Unfortunately, when a value of 55 is looked up in the table, it will return a C- instead of a C! As described above, removing the decimal value in the calculation will solve this, so (100/100) * 55 can be used instead (which in this example does not make much sense, since 100/100 is 1, but imagine one of those values references another cell with the assignment marks total).

The following image shows two lookup tables that map the first letters of the alphabet to numerical values. The entry above the tables (above the space) are looking up a letter based on the value 55 in the table below. The left table uses a decimal value in it’s numerical calculation and the right table uses whole numbers. Notice that a value of 55 returns the correct letter on the right side (B) and the incorrect letter on the left side (A), which is actually the value above the one that is needed (to avoid confusion, this example is not a table of grades).

Barcamp Auckland 4 Recap

Ans — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 11:25:56 +0000

The excellent Barcamp Auckland 4 event happened today, organized by Ludwig Wendzich and team. 190 attendees came together to discuss topics around web development, design, UX, UI, mobile, and business. Here are a few notes from a selection of talks:

Nigel Parker, from Microsoft (a sponsor), showed some deep zooming examples using Silverlight (from Seadragon technology, a company MS acquired in 2006), such as the Te Papa pounamu wall and the MSN Fashion Shows 2009. Also demoed was a World Cup Pivot, a data visualization piece using MS Pivot technology. Also mentioned was the preview of IE 9, which is available to be test driven.
Ludwig Wendzich and Vicky Teinaki gave a talk about natural user interfaces (touchless gesture-based interactions). Despite some technical difficulties while attempting to demo a natural gesture interaction on the webzine he curates, WeeklyRetrospect.com (which, by the way, has an interface worth checking out!), the idea of touchless interactions was conveyed. This was followed by an engaging talk on the future of interface interactions. Mentioned were Adam Greenfield’s book Everyware, Eric Zimmerman, and the Wired magazine’s iPad app. As was often the case over the course of the event, Apple was discussed, and how the Apple model of design was “deceptively” simple, in that it is superficially simple, but (at least in the case of the computer OS) scales to become more complex the further the user digs.
Rob Coup and Glen Barnes showed a number of open data related resources in NZ, such as open.org.nz, openstreetmap.org, and the upcoming fixmystreet.org.nz.
Mike Dickison provided the link Wikiteach.info during his talk on the benefits and issues of using wikipedia in academia. Mike also humored the whole event during his reading from 24 Unplugged, about student responses to going 24 hours without being connected to digital communications.
Lastly, Phonegap – “PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript”

CHINZ 2010

Ans — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:13:46 +0000

The 11th Annual ACM SIGCHI NZ Conference on Computer-Human Interaction was held on July 8 at Massey University. This was a great opportunity to see some of the work academics outside of AUT were doing. In particular, the University of Auckland had a showing.

Two things that may be of note for a Flash developer are the Auckland Interface Model, a universal table widget, and Johnny Chung Lee’s Wii projects, which demonstrate methods of using the wiimote to achieve various types of motion tracking. Check out of the video for head tracking, for instance.

Following the conference, I attended the Northshore .Net User Group meeting that happened to be happening after the conference. Keith Patton gave a great presentation on the upcoming Windows 7 Phone platform. He presented an overview of the platform advantages and limitations and gave a live demo of an app in the phone emulator. And winning Windows 7 Ultimate at the end wasn’t bad either, thanks guys! Visit the MS Windows Phone developer site for more information and the developer tools.

Emerging Researcher Workshop 2010 – research funding, scholarships, awards

Ans — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:04:12 +0000

University of Auckland had an interesting workshop this week for PhD students and Postdocs. The workshop had sessions covering securing funding, communicating research, networking, career advice and related information. The following are some research funding, scholarships, and awards links from the event:

COS (Community of Science) Funding Opportunities – Provides a database of worldwide funding opportunities.
New Zealand Funding Information Service – includes a link to BreakOut, which is—according to their site—”New Zealand’s primary source of funding information for students, researchers, sports people, artists and those wanting professional development.”
New Zealand Vice-Chancellor’ Committee Scholarships page – Convenient portal to scholarship pages of New Zealand Universities.
Rutherford Discovery Fellowship – supports early and mid-career researchers with five-year terms of funding. Ten awards given annually.
Royal Society of New Zealand Awards page – Provides a list of awards for science or technology in New Zealand. These are for recognition of past achievements, as opposed to grants that would fund future projects. Includes a link to the The Prime Minister’s Science Prizes.

July 2010 Auckland Flash Platform User Group Recap

Ans — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:03:56 +0000

This is old news now, but as per my personal tradition I wanted to post a short recap of the Flash Platform User Group meetup that happened July 1.

First to present was Michael Andrew, who demoed FlexPMD, an auditing tool for ActionScript/Flex projects. Essentially the tool provides a set of recommendations of how your code could be improved/cleaned up. According to the Adobe Open Source page (linked above), the tool can be invoked from a number of different environments:

The command line
Maven
Ant
Automator on Mac OS X
Eclipse
TextMate
FlashDevelop

Oddly Flash is not listed, but perhaps Flash is beyond hope as a quality code IDE!

Second to present was Greg Dove, who live-coded a simple touch screen demo on a Dell SX2210T, an inexpensive touch screen display with two touch points capability. Greg also mentioned the best display he’d seen, the 3M M2256PW, which is capable of a whooping 20 simulations touch inputs (view a demo on engadget). Greg’s demo created a group of colored stars that could be resized and zoomed—both as a group and individually. The specific event Greg demoed was the recently added AS3 TransformGestureEvent

June 2010 Auckland Flash Platform User Group Recap

Ans — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:24:17 +0000

This month’s Auckland Flash Platform User Group Meetup began with a show-and-tell by the group’s usual host, VisFleet. CTO Aisha Fenton explained the business-side of VisFleet’s vWork software, a web-based task management application that allows a dispatcher to disseminate jobs to remote workers, who can log in via an iPhone app. Aisha provided an overview and demonstration of the software. Rasheed Abdul-Aziz then delved into the technology behind the application, which utilizes Robotlegs and the Flex framework. Rasheed mentioned Hudson CI for continuous integration, GitHub for source control and collaborative development, and Charles Web Proxy, a tool for analyzing HTTP data. Charles has some local fame, as it is developed by Auckland-based Cactus Labs.

After pizza Jove Lam, of TVNZ, demoed a Flash application he helped create for the Sony PS3 in-game browser to view on-demand content. Called TVNZ OnDemand the application featured an intuitive columnar layout for browsing content in different categories. On first impression it was not apparent that the application was essentially a full-screen Flash website. In his presentation, Jove mentioned the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF).

Auckland Adobe CS5 Roadshow

Ans — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:09:59 +0000

Under the slogan of design without boundaries, work faster, and streamline critical processes, the CS5 Roadshow kicked off at Skycity Convention Centre in Auckland today. The hosts for the day were Michael “Stod” Stoddart, Mike McHugh, and Paul Burnett. The event covered a broad-range of tips, tricks, and new features of CS5. Questions could be asked in real-time by sending twitter questions to The Question Room”.

Some highlights:

Production Premium

Utilizing 64 bit processing, Adobe Premiere and After Effects have greatly increased performance compared to previous versions.
The rotobrush feature in After Effects looks like a great time saver when rotoscoping video elements (cutting them out from the background).

InDesign (feature tour)

Much smoother workflow when moving an object inside of its frame. There is now a “donut” area that when clicked allows the internal object to be moved. Also an “autosize” checkbox has been added to allow an object to resize to its frame when the frame is resized.
A caption text field can be created that will pull metadata out of an image when it is near to it. Great concept!
There is a new tool called the “Gap tool” that allows the gutter (gap) between elements to be easily resized and moved.
InDesign CS5 can produce simple interactive presentations that can be exported as a SWF or FLA.

Illustrator (feature tour)

There are three new tools: the Perspective Grid tool, the Perspective Selection tool, and the Width tool. The first two provide guides for creating artwork along a 3-dimensional perspective, while the last tool—the Width tool—always the manipulation of the width of a stroke along its length.
There are two new drawing modes: draw behind and draw inside. These, as might be expected, streamline drawing behind and inside shapes respectively.
The dashed line feature has been to improved to ensure a part of the dash appears on corner points. This eliminates the ugly problem, for example, of having the points on a star disappear when using a dashed stroke.
Joining two paths has been improved, allowing paths to join by their nearest points.

Photoshop (feature tour)

The much hyped Content Area Fill is present in many forms throughout the fill and brush tools in Photoshop CS5.
There is a new sharpening and noise reduction engine that can be utilized in the RAW photo dialog box.
There are new HDR features, such as a new HDR Toning menu under Adjustments.
Settings in the effects menu now have a “make default” button, allowing the setting of user-defined defaults.
The old extract filter for extracting hair has returned in the form of the Refine Edge option of a selection. This is a great time-saver for cutting out hair from a background.
The new Puppet Warp feature allows for the creation of a mesh that overlays a image that then can be distorted along a set of points.
Color mixing brush, which allows colors to be blended together (at first glance it appears similar to the Smudge tool).

Of particular interest in this release is the heavy integration of the Flash platform among the Adobe products. Brand new in CS5, Adobe Catalyst is integrated with InDesign and Illustrator, each of which can be used to create Catalyst layouts. Catalyst allows the creation of simple interfaces and interactions without the use of any code.

Not all products were shown that I’m aware of (although I missed about an hour of the event during midday) such as Flash Builder and Sound Booth.

April 2010 Auckland Flash Platform User Group Recap

Ans — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:51:01 +0000

Last Thursday’s April meeting of the Auckland Flash Platform UG (once again held in the VisFleet offices) kicked off with UG manager Campbell Anderson demonstrating the new features of Flash Builder / Flex 4. Of particular note was Campbell’s demonstration of SourceMate, a Flash Builder companion that adds various code generation, refactoring, and metadata features.

Following pizza Vijay Anto from Rad3 showed some examples of skinning the new Flash Builder component set, named Spark.