David Ehlers

The JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit that was based on 5 papers regarding different information visualization techniques. The JIT implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with theslice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based on theSpacetree, a focus+context technique to lay Hyperbolic Trees, and a radial layout of trees with advanced animations (RGraph).

Some very nifty tools here:http://blog.thejit.org/?page_id=14

In particular, check out the spacetree demo 

Also a nice bibliography.

I generally hate java, but something to watch with the Java FX from Sun.  Here is a terrible marketing description(ugh)- note the screens of your life - idiotic , ”Java FX is a powerful client technology for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs) with immersive media and content across multiple the screens of your life.”

Here is a designy, and incredibly lame UI presentation by sun here: http://javafx.com

And don’t you lust love when they have to make quicktime movies of their technology? 

I’ve been in drupal world again, which happens to use the jQuery JS libraries. Simon Willison has some great resources and links here: Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery

The latest jQuery. jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages.

This is the main issue I currently have with Amazon’s EC2: the lack of persistent storage. However, according to this press release,

“This new feature provides reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. These volumes exist independently from any Amazon EC2 instances, and will behave like raw, unformatted hard drives or block devices, which may then be formatted and configured based on the needs of your application. The volumes will be significantly more durable than the local disks within an Amazon EC2 instance. Additionally, our persistent storage feature will enable you to automatically create snapshots of your volumes and back them up to Amazon S3 for even greater reliability.”

Here’s the thread

This is kinda(no really) buggy, and not ready for primetime… but… the potential.

http://www.typesql.com/

The actual concept is weak as well - just check out the UI - angles/transitions/etc.

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, has a nifty essay on Power and it’s not Machiavellian.

Read the essay here

I’m currently evaluating this service, after using some of the other amazon services such as s3, this looks super sexy in a techy way. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.  Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios

Heck, create a drupal site on EC2 with a single line: ec2-run-instances ami-4c7b9e25 -k gsg-keypair

and for us Mac OSX users, here’s a getting started on ec2

Amazon’s Getting Started Guide

Clay Shirky’s Situated Software:

Clay says, “I teach at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where the student population is about evenly divided between technologists who care about aesthetics and artists who aren’t afraid of machines, which makes it a pretty good place to see the future.”

Handy snippet from massivecube for distributing exact amount of points on the surface of a sphere.

http://blog.massivecube.com/?p=9

My favorite tweener engine for Flash - in both AS2 and 3. Simple, clean and fast.

Docs are here:

http://hosted.zeh.com.br/tweener/docs/en-us/