Lars Kirchhoff [Web Journal]

JavaScript - Ninja Series

2010-09-29T20:40:05+00:00

Dylan, one of our web developers and hard core JavaScript Pro, has started a nice series about various JavaScript topics that are related to his current web development tasks. In these very easy to follow tutorials he gives insides into how to code common tasks without any library in native JavaScript. This might be necessary in case, in which you need full control of every aspect of a process and you are looking for best performance. I found the series very enjoyable and worthwhile reading. Below a list to the different articles on our sociomantic blog.

The JavaScript Disciplines
Discipline 1: AJAX with XHR
Discipline 2: Dynamic JS with PHP
Discipline 3: Include External JS
Discipline 4: Cookies and Variables
Discipline 5: removeNode vs. removeChild
Discipline 6: Native Javascript Ninjutsu: DOMinating iframes

Eclipse code formatting

2010-08-10T09:37:44+00:00

After reinstalling Eclipse lately I was having trouble setting up a proper code formatting for tabs. Despite setting 'Preferences | General | Editors | Text Editor | Insert Spaces for Tabs' I still got tabs in my code. You can check that by enable 'Preferences | General | Editors | Text Editor | Show whitespace characters'. I really couldn't figure out why this happened and it was driving me nuts. It turns out that there is another setting in the code formatter options that overrides this setting. The Descent (D programming language plugin) default code formatter setting 'Preferences | D | Code style | Formatter | Indentation | General option | Tab policy' was set to 'tabs only'. It needs to be set to 'spaces only'.

Twitterverse

2009-11-07T14:26:40+00:00

It's a long time since I posted something here, but I just came across the Twitterverse illustration from Brian Solis and Jess3. I didn't pay much attention to Twitter since my first signup. I randomly posted some tweets, integrated it into my facebook profile, but thats it. Then I saw this illustration. I was amazed about the number of different applications that have been spawned through the availability of the Twitter API.

Installing Tokyo Tyrant in custom directory

2009-06-19T11:28:15+00:00

In the process of testing Tokyo Cabinet and Tokyo Tyrant I just came across some small difficulties setting both up. Although the installation and configuration is almost straigth forward I stumbled about some small issues. The documentation on Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant is not very comprehensive so far apart from the extensive API documentation. Installation and operations information are rare at the moment. There I've just written down my path to a running and manageable installation, which can easily deployed to several linux servers (OpenSuSE).

Key/value database storage engines

2009-06-18T16:07:42+00:00

I recently dived into the world of distributed Key/Value database stores. Although key/value storage engines are nothing particular new, distributed implementation seem to gather some attention lately due to high scalability demands of current online services. Below are interesting reads about this topic together with some links to project I found particular interesting.

Articles

A very good overview article about different storage engines has been written by Richard Jones from Last.fm, in which he compares the different engines with the needs of last.fm in mind.

http://www.metabrew.com/article/anti-rdbms-a-list-of-distributed-key-value-stores/

The following articles are more about specific implementation of a certain storage engine, but interesting to get to understand the whole principles more deeply.

Bob Ippolito gave a very comprehensive talk at PyCon 2009 on "Drop ACID and think about data", where he summarizes his experiences with different storage engines while implementing the service at Mochi Media. He presents the different storage engines and shows how their are being used for different purposes:

http://blip.tv/file/1949416/

Shark Angels conservation video

2009-04-24T09:03:36+00:00

Eric Cheng just posted a new video from the Shark Angels, a shark protection activist group. The video shows with impressiv footage the threats that sharks face today.

.

Perfect Dev Environment now with VirtualBox 2.2.0

2009-04-15T07:43:50+00:00

VirtualBox 2.2.0 was released a week ago with a neat feature, that I really missed although I really like woking with VirtualBox. Now VirtualBox comes with a virtual Host interface called host-only interface, that enables the communication between the host and the guest even when no physical cable is connected to the machine, which happens a lot when you are on the road and would like to do some development.

Integration of Simile Timeplot into ScientificCommons

2008-10-22T21:01:00+00:00

Simile Timeplot and Simile Timeline from MIT SIMILE project Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments are handy libraries to visualize time depending data.
ScientificCommons.org gathers now for more than 2 years data from several hundred repositories worldwide. That means that there is plenty of data for time series visualization. I just started to add graphs for the publication activity of each repository on the repository summary page. Here are some example pages:

James Nachtwey on XDRTB:

2008-10-07T06:35:00+00:00

Reknowed photojournalist James Nachtwey did a journey to document a rather unknown disease and returned with a documentary that is alarming. He has been working on the project on the thanks of a TED grant. Watch the trailer:

"XDRTB.org is an extraordinary effort to tell the story of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) and TB through powerful photographs taken by James Nachtwey. XDR-TB, or extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, is a new and deadly mutation of tuberculosis. Similar in creation to multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) but more extreme in its manifestation, it arises when common tuberculosis goes untreated or standard TB drugs are misused. James’ photographs represent these varying strains. Learn more about TB, MDR-TB and XDR-TB, and learn how you can take action to stop this deadly disease."

Foresighting Color Photography

2008-07-31T14:58:00+00:00

In an remarkable effort the russian photographer Prokudin-Gorskii build a camera that was able to capture three black and white images on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system [right] involving the same three filters.
The images are now being digitalized by the library of congress for the exhibition "The empire that was Russia". For the digital process, the original tri-part glass negative is scanned with an overhead digital camera in grayscale mode. Image-editing software converts the scan of the entire plate from negative to positive form. The entire plate is then reduced to 8-bit grayscale mode. Under magnification, the quality of each image on the plate is reviewed for contrast, degree of color separation, extent of damage to the emulsion, and any other details that might affect the final color composite.
The resulting images look amazing...

BMW kinetic structure from ARTCOM

2008-07-18T09:45:01+00:00

After the beautiful GINA study from BMW I found another interesting project from BMW. The Kinetic Sculpture made up of 714 metal balls translates a virtual design process into the space around it. The sculpture is part of the installations at the new BMW Museum in Munich. Seemingly weightless and guided solely by the power of the mind, the sculpture moves through a cycle of free abstractions and typical BMW vehicle forms.

Happy Flu

2008-07-17T07:52:00+00:00

Happy Flu is an interesting experiment to track information diffusion within the web. Below you see a flash application that shows the spread of the flash code on the different websites. Each node is a website that embeds the flash code. The size of the nodes is depending on the number of hits of the web page containing the flash code. The edges are the path from where the flash codes travelled.

Visionary Car Design

2008-06-26T11:41:01+00:00

BMW introduced a new concept car, that major aim is to be as flexible as possible. The engineers completely rethought the car body and replaced it with a skin of a new high tech textile fabric, that's pulled taut around a frame of metal and carbon fiber wires. The skeleton of the car is controlled by electro-hydraulic devices and can actually move and change shape beneath the fabric skin. The car is called GINA, which stands for "Geometry and Functions in 'N' Adaptations". View the videos here (I was really impressed):

Design

Premiere

And don't forget to visit the bmw channel website for more information.

Zanox Campus

2008-06-13T13:32:01+00:00

My former colleague here at the University St. Gallen - Thomas Nicolai - is now working for the Zanox AG and responsible for their web services strategy and operation. As part of his job he is involved in the Zanox Campus. With the Campus Zanox tries to leverage and promote it's own web services. The Campus is a place, where Zanox tries to foster new ideas and new business models, that use the web services and which help monetize the web. Therefore Zanox has started an 1'000'000 EUR Web Services contest. Individuals and startups are welcome to create a business model that uses the Zanox web services. At the end of October the top ten candidates will be given the chance to present their business model to a jury in a short presentation. The contest is supported by a series of events like the recent TechCrunch Meetup in Berlin event and the coming Israel Innovation Day: Media on June 16th and the runner-up Israel Berlin Entrepreneurs Night @ zanox GAP CAMPUS.

Photography Addiction

2008-06-13T07:26:00+00:00

very funny, but true..

Moodstream

2008-06-11T17:21:00+00:00

Gettyimages has just lauched a new novel tool to access their image, audio and video collection based “brainstorming tool” called Moodstream. Moodstream is a nice visual interface, where you can set various sliders, which define the tone of the mood including the following pairs: happy-sad, calm-lively, humorous-serious, nostalgic-contemporal and warm-cold. It's a fresh idea to find some inspirations. You can bookmark the shown media and of course the stored media in the moodboard are linked to the getty store, where you can purchase them. Moodstream is created by the thebarbariangroup.

20 Magazines for free

2008-06-11T09:40:00+00:00

Apple's iPhone user's have access to more content due to a partnership of Apple and Zinio. The trick is that those digital magazines are only made available to iPhone users by checking the User Agent of the browser. All you need to do is to change the User Agent in your browser to the Phone that is used by the iPhone and then access the magazine, which include Technology Review, Macworld, Lonely Planet and ... Playboy and Penthouse.
Firefox users can install the User Agent Switcher add-on and configure it with the following User Agent:


Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

If you have done this, just visit the Zinio iPhone page: http://imgs.zinio.com/iphone/

The europeans and the ball

2008-06-09T18:35:00+00:00

It's all about balls these days. A friend of mine is creating a casual game for the open handheld game console Pandora. Above you see a screenshot of the game. As there is a major sport event here in Switzerland, in which balls play a crucial role ;), he quickly designed some levels that fit to this major sport event. There is one level for each country. The game is still in beta, but I will report about it when it's finished :).

Some pitfalls while switching from PHP to D

2008-06-06T18:56:01+00:00

Generally writing D code is straight forward, but at certain points I found myself banging my head on the table. Some things are just not working as I am used to it from PHP. That begins with typing. Everything needs to be typed and conversion between types need to be made explicitly. I'm just not used to it. Getting a char[] converted into an integer seems such an easy tasks, but when it comes to the point where you actually need it, it becomes very unusual for a PHP developer. In this short article I will report about some of the pitfalls I had to solve for my first little D project. I do not claim that it is beautiful code or even if it is free from errors and possible misconceptions, but it worked for me so far.

D resources

2008-06-05T13:27:01+00:00

While reading through the web for some helpful comments and howto I came across some very useful resources for D programming. For my own organization I will post the interesting resources in this post. This page will be updated from time to time...

D MySQL performance

2008-05-27T12:46:00+00:00

After setting up the D develop environment and compiling the first small programs, I got interested in the mysql performance of D, which basically uses the C library provided by mysql. Therefore I didn't expect to much performance here as PHP uses the same library to connect and query the mysql database. As D is natively compiled there it is slightly faster in the user space.
For the test I used a table with 1.124 million records and selected only the id from the first 100'000 datasets. I run the test 10 times and put the data in the charts below. The database is on the same server as the installation of PHP and D. The PHP version is 5.2.1. For D I used DDBI and Tango.

A kickstart with D

2008-05-26T12:06:00+00:00

For a long time I used PHP for most of my projects and programming needs. This included web based application like content management systems, custom database frontends and various small fun projects to gather some information from the web. I even programmed daemons with PHP 5, which run on the unix shell. I started with PHP in 1998 while studying computer science. Since then I feel and felt quite comfortable with PHP. It well suited my programming needs and skills. The capabilities of PHP grew over the last 10 years and make it a very stable and productive programming/scripting language.

But for a recent project I need to process large amounts of data and therefore I was on the search for an alternative to PHP, which I could pick up very easily and which performance better. I took a look at D, a new programming language which is a strongly typed, natively compiled computer language. It has a syntax similar to C, C++ and Java and at the same time combines the high performance from natively compiled languages with the rapid developement capabilities of scripting languages like Perl, Python or PHP. After studying the D website and a couple other D web pages I decided to give it a try.

I will document the steps I've run into as a PHP developer trying to get started with D. The first in the series is how to install the compiler and builder environment to start with some basic programming tasks.

Steve Jobs as product portfolio

2008-03-31T07:23:00+00:00

This is a very nice idea. Using the products to generate a portait..

Adobe Photoshop Express released

2008-03-27T10:12:01+00:00

Adobe announced a new version of Photoshop, but this time as a web application. Photoshop Express is a Flash - Flex application that allows basic editing options. It is not intended for professional users, but for the easy manipulation of images for mainstream consumers. It can directly access images on Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa and upload and manipulate images on these services, which makes the beta very appealing for users of these platforms. You can now easily upload images to facebook and edit them online without ever needing any other software. It's only 17 features, which are mainly filters intended for tuning and effects, but I think they are suitable for quick and dirty manipulations. Additionally to upload the images to other services Photoshop Express itself offers 2 GB online storage, where images can be uploaded and shared with others as albums and slideshows. An interesting side note is, that the platform is intended as a show case for Adobe's Flash/Flex framework, which Adobe is heavily trying to push out.

Visualisation of Information Quantity

2008-03-25T13:10:01+00:00

The current issue of Wired features a portfolio of different artistic visualizations of quantitative information of a text. The thirteen different projects range from virtually created sculptures derived from blog text over the visualization of US census data into abstract colorful walls to the visualization of logs from last.fm. The projects are inspiring design and visualization approaches. One of my favorites is Textour from Tim Walter, which visualizes different quantitative aspects of a given text.

Autodesk TED BigViz

2008-03-20T16:31:01+00:00

I'm a big fan of TED conference talks. In most cases the presenter are very smart people, which know how to tell a story and make inspiring presentations. My favourit talks include Hans Rosling talk about "Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen, Golan Levin about "The truly soft side of software", Joshua Prince-Ramus about "Designing the Seattle Central Library", Seth Godin about "Sliced bread and other marketing delights", John Maeda about "Simplicity patterns" or Jonathan Harris on "The Web's secret stories".
In this years TED conference AutoDesk made a technology experiment called BigViz. The experiment is an exploration in the visualization of the Big Ideas presented on the TED conference. David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, two visual cartographers, captured more than 700 sketches highlighting memorable quotes, great questions and unexpected connections. All this was done on wacom tablets and transfered simultaneously to the Autodesk BigViz system for later exploration. The BigViz system is an interactive system that allows to record scratches and work on them in a visual collaborative environment, which can be used intuitively. Combined with a multitouch display, the system demonstrates how future collaboration could look like. The visualizations are also available as 200 pages pdf download.

Skews and Blews

2008-03-19T07:55:01+00:00

Microsoft Research will present another interesting research project at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2008 (ICWSM). Blews (blogs and news) is a another tool to visualize blog topics in the political part of the blogosphere. Therefore it categorizes and visualizes blog topics according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps. The data is aggregated in real time from Live Microsoft Labs Social Media platform and consist of a link analysis and text analysis of political blog posts.
I am very interested to read how the authors of the paper define the emotional charge of a discussion.

How to grow your own company

2008-03-19T07:52:00+00:00

The presentation got my attention on two different levels. First I always liked the presentation style of Nancy Duarte and her Design Company Duarte Design. This presentation is another example of her professional skills to enhance her presentation with visuals that support her talk. The presentation is smooth and doesn't distract you with to many facts from the actual talk, while still providing some more information than the pure talk.
On the other hand I found it very interesting to see how she explained the growth of her company. The problems she struggled with and how she solved it. I really enjoyed watching the talk. But this is just the beginning of the full talk she is giving on the changes shes is experiencing in the business of presentation professionals. She carefully selected recent trends and present insightful thoughts on how different changes affect the presentation style and methods. The shifts she is explaining are:

Global Economy
Prolific Devices
Social Networking
Technology Advances
Virtual Tradeshows
Hollywood

Click read more to see the whole presentation.

Microsoft Research Report on IM usage

2008-03-18T13:16:00+00:00

Microsoft Research just released a very interesting research report "Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network" on the usage of Instant Messenger Usage. The anonymized study analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million people, from which a communication graph with 130 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges has been constructed. The data for the analyzed dataset was gathered within 30 days in June 2006 and includes three main data sets:

user demographic information
time and user stamped events describing the presence of a particular user
communication session logs

which have been used to conduct the analysis.

How about voiceless communication?

2008-03-16T09:15:00+00:00

This is mind freaking cool! At the moment only 150 different words and phrases are recognized. But what I found more interesting is the vision from Michael Callahan presented at the end of the talk. He wants together the voiceless speech recogization with a internet search, where someone on the road just "thinks" something he/she would need and got the answer from a search engine.