Going back through some old files, I found a few images of my old Social Network Spider and Visualization System (SNS-VS) that I thought I'd post here. This is the Java-based spider interface (the SNS part of the system) circa 2005. I've started building a MUCH more advanced version based on Webkit and Qt 4.3. When it's done it will be WAY more powerful, fast, and reliable that the older spider, but for now it's nice to look back on the end-to-end system I build a few years ago.

It was multi-threaded and handled distributed spidering across an arbitrary number of heterogenous machines -- some pretty cool capabilities as far as spiders go (if I do say so myself).

These images are from another old project of mine (from 2005) where I built a little app that takes any image and converts it to a true 3D mesh based on the pixel intensity (essentially). Although I never integrated this into my final dissertation software system, I always found it really fun to play with. Once the image was converted it was fully navigable as a "terrain." The texture for the mesh could either be a fractal colored terrain based on the height of each pixel, OR a pixel from the original image. This required some clever texture sampling -- and the coolest part was that the app could export to .obj format so the whole thing was editable/viewable in your favorite 3D modelling package (like Maya or 3D Studio Max).

I'm not sure where I found this image, but I suspect it is from something I read while in grad school. I just ran across it on an old hard drive and had to post it.

How great would it be to have a home computer like THAT!

Must be something super-top-secret from Microsoft...

I'm still salvaging photos and other files from my recent hard drive failure....

Literally the day the latest war in Iraq began, my friend Jason Gallo and I arrived in Paris for a week-long trip with a group from the School of Communication at Northwestern. It was a trip I'll not soon forget: lots of protests, meetings with publishers of various major papers at the height of one of the biggest stories in years, and lots and lots of conversation over beer.

This is a fully scriptable node-graph editor I built recently using Qt 4.3 and QSA. I have extended the DiagramItem example (ships with Qt 4.x sourcecode) to allow the user to draw the shapes (like in visio), as well as style the stroke, fill, and double-click to add labels to each node.

I then integrated the QSA engine so that you can use ECMA script to extend the interface. At the moment, you can procedurally change the formatting, size, etc. of each node or link; as well as topology checking. This means that you can write custom event handlers in the script editor (right-hand drawer in screencap) to change the color of node based on how you have linked them up. This is extremely useful for things like checking for circular, ping-pong, or other types of invalid references.

It can also read in an XML file and convert it to a nodegraph (based on a standard format). Eventually I will make it so it can also write to XML.

Many of the gestures and the overall design gestalt are drawn from OmniGraffle -- one of my absolutely favorite apps ever.

I will eventually be open sourcing this, but it'll take me a bit more time to clean it up -- especially with my job and dissertation work taking priority ;)

Emily and I went to Peru last summer for our belated honeymoon. This is one of a handful of Alpacas hanging out at Machu Picchu.

Sadly, the place was overrun with tourists, and we weren't even there during "high season." I left with a weird mix of happiness that I'd seen it, and also anxiety at how rapidly it is deteriorating under the strain of so many visitors. It was definitely an incredible place. It's a shame that the Peruvian government isn't taking better care of one of their most important and impressive historic sites.

No good reason. Just threw it together one night a few years ago because I found all these hat model images. I had thought I would make it into some sort of abstract play, but decided I had better things to do.

Still, there's something about it....

[part of my hard drive file recovery]

I recently stumbled upon an interesting blog post at Information Aesthetics about a new visualization of the French Political Blogosphere.

Really impressive and provocative research app.

A few years back I wrote a similar system as part of a research project with Jason Gallo and Eszter Hargittai at Northwestern University.

click the picture to see the demo...

I just updated my portfolio with a spiffy new Flex 3 / AS3 interface. Click on the picture to check it out.....