This post is post 1500. Not bad for four year’s worth of work. While I’m not huge into analysis, I’m pretty confident I’ve avoided padding this blog with a lot of personal fluff, status updates, and echo chambering. Despite that (and no comments), I’m still pretty high up on ego searches for my name and media hack.

And finally I completed my first full month with my new employer, Lockheed Martin Corporation (cf Sayonara, Evanston). I work in a small, Arlington, VA based divison of Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs. The gig involves much less basic science than a faculty position, a much bigger business development focus, and more time to concentrate on hacking up proof of concept technologies. And of course a tilt towards the military and intelligence communities. I’m having a lot of fun!!

Northwestern’s been kind enough to provide me a courtesy adjunct appointment, which will expire in August, so you may see some winding down of this blog, and a slow migration to personal hosting, probably with a reduced technical focus. Then again I’ve said that before and not followed through. We’ll see.

Ciao!!

• Echoing my same complaint about swivel, data without task is a hard sell job. Maybe they need a curator who authors interesting data exploration contests.

• Having a viz distribution mechanism, ala YouTube video players, would be a major feature upgrade.
• While discussion near a viz is great, a groundbreaking capability would be an elegant naming mechanism so you could point people to particular points in a visualization. A radical road to follow would take each viz as it’s own little REST space, read only, from which URLs could be passed around. Other than the snapshot capability, there’s really no good way to say, “Look at the viz here!”.
• Betcha there’s prefuse inside.

Just thinking out loud.

[Via Brian Carnell]

Werner Vogels reports that Jim Gray went sailing recently and hasn’t been heard from. I only had a micro-moment with Gray, but I’m with Vogels praying for his safe return.

Mosquito Lisp is a network-oriented and compact Lisp with strong influence from Scheme. It is available as part of the Mosquito Remote Execution Framework distribution, and there is a Reference Manual.

A quick scan leaves a distinctly Erlangish flavor. Distributed security hacking in Scheme sounds entertaining.

Enterprising German hackers Sören Auer, Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak, Jens Lehmann, and Georgi Kobilarov have put together dbpedia:

dbpedia.org is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. dbpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

Basically they’ve extracted a couple of decent sized datasets of well structured information nodes from Wikipedia, e.g. music albums, city entries, and put Semantic Web search on top. You get some pretty powerful query capabilities out of this.

I don’t hang with this crowd, but seems to me that Wikipedia snapshots would make great grist for web mining and text mining folks.

A key component is the adjustable/slidable window, which is reminiscent of Oliver Steele’s expialidocio.us. Wonder where Oliver wandered off too?

[Via infoesthetics]

simplejson is a simple, fast, complete, correct and extensible JSON encoder/decoder for Python 2.3+. It is pure Python code with no dependencies. simplejson 1.5 is a major update that provides better Python 2.5 and Windows compatibility, and two new features that control encoding (indent for pretty-printing, and separators for generating optimally compact JSON)

Good to have in the toolbox!