Visualization
Information Visualization
Despite what execs at Microsoft think, Windows 7 is NOT a tablet OS. Just because you can install some software (or OS) on a device, doesn't mean that device is meant to run that software. This seems to be the step that the non-engineer execs at Microsoft have seem to not understood. In order to seamlessly work with a device, the software needs to be designed with that device in mind. That has been the problem with the Windows PDA platform, the Windows Mobil platform, and now with trying to force ......
I've been playing with Microsoft Live Labs Pivot to create a hierarchy of collections all linked together to allow someone to explore a hierarchy of data visually. The problem has been the generation time of the entire hierarchy. I end up creating 500 - 600 collections total and it takes hours and hours using the CollectionCreator class that comes with the DeepZoomTools. So digging around I found a way to make the actual DeepZoom collection creation wicked fast. Dont use the CollectionCreator! Turns ......
Learning how to programmatically make collections for Microsoft Live Labs Pivot has been a pretty interesting ride. There are very few examples out there, and the folks at MS Live Labs are often slow on any feedback. But that is what Reflector is for, right? Well, I was creating these InfoCard images (similar to the Car images in the "New Cars" sample collection that that MS created for Pivot), and wanted to put a Tag Cloud into the info card. The problem was the size of the tag cloud might vary ......
I've spent the past 3 weeks working a lot with Pivot from Microsoft Live Labs (http://getpivot.com/). Pivot is a tool that allows you to visually explore data. Its an interesting take on visual data mining. Anyway, I've been writing a lot of code that creates a hierarchy of Pivot collections, where one item in the collection drills down into an entirly new collection. The dev community around Pivot is still very young, so there isnt much tribal knowledge built up yet. I've spent a lot of time trying ......
I've spent the past 7 years focused primarily on code and database performance. It's an area that I have a passion for, as well as a propensity. But what I've found is that its very hard to change the culture of a development environment. You can teach performance, you can encourage performance, you might see slight shift in how devs think about performance. But without full management backing and support you wont get long lasting changes in the development culture. And in the end, you are back to ......