I never really thought of myself as a Fanboy of anything...I'm too cynical perhaps.  But with the unfortunately named IPad arriving, the Flash haters have come out of the woodworks saying that Apple's continued lack of support of Flash will be the end of flash.  Their reasoning?  Something called HTML 5 and the video tag.  The nice thing about about HTML 5 is that when it finally arrives then you will theoretically be able to put a <video> tag in your HTML and the browser will just play it.  Of course, that makes light of the many varied video formats available, and Apple is really only supporting one video codec for its browser.  While I DO think HTML 5 is a great direction head, I think it is almost as mythical as the IPad was two weeks ago ("it will do this and this and that and this").  I find it annoying how quickly everyone is to criticize flash.  Some truly wonderful things have been created with flash; one only needs to search the NYTimes for interactive to see what I mean.  And, well, frankly the HTML 5 Canvas element is just a glorified Flash sprite with a javascript backend.  Is really the only advantage of HTML 5 is that the browsers will support it and you don't have to install an extra plugin?  That is, IF they support it at all, Internet Explorer doesn't yet.  You also hope that each browser will support the same specification, otherwise you are stuck in a potential AJAX hell of writing code for each browser's implementation.  That's what happened with Internet Explorer.  At least with Flash you know it will run the same in each browser.  People point to performance, but I haven't seen anyone do anything with performance and HTML 5, so who knows if it will be better.  Playing video and games is a drain on the battery regardless.  I don't deny that Flash will go away eventually, especially if HTML 5 turns out to be as good as everyone says it will be.  And, transitioning to HTML 5 and javascript won't be too painful given the similarities with Actionscript. I just don't think that people should criticize Flash, because in the end it does give us good web experiences.

Just had a heart-attack but now I'm ok.  I have a map in ArcGIS that uses several joins to link up by statistical boundaries with the data stored in a DBF file.  I realized I was using the wrong score, and needed to update it.  Rather than do all the joins and symbology over, I opened the dbf file in Excel and changed the score field...That is I opened it up in EXCEL 2007 (THE HORROR!!!).  Sure, it opens up fine, but when you try and save to a dbf, it doesn't let, or even have the option anymore.  Curses!   Luckily, the interweb had a solution for me.  Save the file out to an Excel file (xls instead of xlsx just to be on the safe side), open it up in ArcCatalog (can do this in ArcMap as well), then simply export it to a dbf file.  Everything should be the same as before.

After spending the last month in java land in a perpetual state of frustration, I needed a break, and went back to the blissful world of Flex.  I even toyed around with JavaFX.  The only reason I can see that taking off, is because of the multitude of open source Java libraries available.  Anyway, this isn't about Java.

 I needed to have a confidence booster and have a little fun, so I decided to take on a little project.  I am a big movie fan, and sometimes I like to find out if an actor (I'm using actor as a gender neutral for both men and women) as acted any movies with another actor.  There wasn't a real easy way to do this on IMDB so I thought why not create my own.  Unfortunately, IMDB does not have an API to pull movie and actor names from, but I did find the free movie database.  It's free for my purposes at least, since this was just a pet project.  To display the links and movies, I used the FLARE library's force directed layout.  I suppose one of the other layouts would also work.  Because of the ease of use of Flare and FLEX I was up and running in a day and half, and most of that half was tweaking to get the different things to work right.  I know the user interface is a bit crappy, but I was mostly interested in the back end and having something work.

Currently under "beta", and perhaps perpetually so.  Here are some quick instructions.

You can search for just one actor to see their movies by just entering the name in the first box and clicking find.  You can search for both actors and find their links and all their movies, or check the checkbox to just see the links.  Double click on the box to get more info about the movie, and double click on the actor to get more info about the actor.  Hover over the items to find the name of the movie or actor.  You can hover over the link to find out what job they had (actor, producer, etc...), but this doesn't list all the jobs, hence why this is still under beta.  Pause and Resume buttons will pause the layout from moving the whole time.

The app is available here, and the source code is available here.  You will need your own API key though.

James Fee brought the Google Visualization API and Google Fusion API to my attention, so I went and checked them out.  The video on the Google Fusion intro page is interesting.  It is all about putting the power to display information in anybody's hand.  Which I guess is a noble aim...  Then I looked the Visualization API and immediately looked at the mapping examples, here and here.  There area acouple of things wrong with these maps.  One, for a visualization of this kind, shouldn't they have used a better projection.  We are stuck, yet again, with Mercator.  In this context it is completely inappropriate, yada yada yada.  Second, they aren't really different kinds of mapping, but are just a choropleth map.  I'm not even sure what the maps are supposed to be mapping.  I presume generic information..."popularity???"  Choropleths are meant to map derived data.  So it shouldn't be popularity, but maybe popularity per 1000.  The intensity map just shows population.  It is the same problem, like if they were to map deaths.  The population and death map would theoretically look exactly the same.  Anyway, this is sort of a cost-benefit analysis.  Does the cost of putting the simplicity of creating the visualizations in the hands of everyday internet users (the ensuing creation of bad and ineffective maps) outweight the benefits of giving the power to create and visualize information?  I think that google could have provided a few fixes that do not impact the user in anyway to make their visualizations more appropriate.

You might say that the designers and journalists and whoever creates infographics for print will still (hopefully) create approrpiate visualizations.  But, a lot of people are getting their info from crap blogs like mine rather than reliable sources.  Anyway, this is just the same debate over and over again about the "cult of the amateur" and whether it is good or bad.

 There was another thing that I found interesting in Fee's post.  He described the google maps api's introduction of queries, comparing them to other GIS related queries - "Now of course this isn’t paleo-type spatial queries, just simple stuff that solve 80% of all queries you’d need to complete."  To me paleo refers to very old, or even primitive.  I find it confusing to refer to GIS techniques as paleo, when the mapping and spatial parts of the Web 2.0 (neogeography) are much simpler, and less advanced than the older stuff.  Anyway, I'm not going to debate the appropriateness of the terms paleogeography and neogeography because that would just get me stuck in the mud.  Plus I like the term Neogeography, but maybe my head is just in the cloud.  Ooops, should have put a pun warning in front of that.

 

You obviously don't come to this blog for the bleeding edge technology updates of say TechCrunch of Endgadget, so you'll forgive me for posting "old" news.

I thought this was an interesting post about mixed reality and social networks and Google Wave.

And completely unrelated...Flowing Data has posted a nice tutorial on creating an area graph using Flare.