Data visualization

Some resources:

• Tableau Software
• Smart Data Collective
• ITO World
• Protovis

An interesting experiment

And worth reading... if I can find the time.

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

AIR and Google Health

Recently I've been tinkering with AIR and Google Health (GH). It's been surprisingly easy, if one can overlook the endless stream of XML returned by GH - but there is no other way, HL7 would be just as nasty looking. I don't know yet how it returns the file/image data that can be attached to the GH account.

AIR seems an ideal environment to build a desktop client to front a GH cloud-based application: it's lightweight, Javascript-compatible, and portable across platforms.



Speaking of, it seems that AIR will be ported to mobiles as well. I would argue that the paragraph above (and not just the stronger OO features found in Flash and available to AIR) is a strong reason to do this port, although I am not sure how easy is to develop and maintain AIR applications, and also I am not sure how well do these applications perform given the several layers of virtual environments they have to execute in.

Will write more thoughts as soon as I finish the small scale project I am working on right now, 4-5 forms of reduced complexity (but with a significant amount of functionality built in; the underpinnings of this relatively simple project are amazingly complex and would have been hard to imagine only a few years ago).

I haven't looked at Google Tables yet, but read some things about YQL and can see a scenario where medical (and other) personal information (e.g. reverse phone lookups, credit history, white and yellow pages) is queriable over the web via a SQL-type of language with the right security in place. In fact, the infrastructure already exists! So it would be just a mater of connecting the pipes.

And, I haven't even started to look at HealthVault's API (if it has one).

A map of where I've been

LinkedIn widget

My LinkedIn Profile.

Donkey Kong

I never really played this game in the 80's - it seemed to be available only on computers I did not own, such as the C64. I can, finally - will someone make a Sentinel widgety game available please?



Whatever one thinks of video games, I find it amazing that today you can run what was once a significant programming effort in a 'virtual' OS through several layers of interpreted code (widget > flash > browser > OS process > ...). I wonder how similar is the machine code ultimately generated on the OS to the machine code of the original program :)

About me....

Or rather, about embedded Google presentations:

Flight Stats widget

Flight Status

By Flight or Route

examples: CX 709 or JFK to LHR
Don't Know the Code?

BBC World Music Widget

Who knew that the BBC was so cool?

Eno & Byrne

Widgets ecosystem

Allright, widgets are the new rage. Here are your options:

• Mac Dashboard Widgets: the OG of widgets; Google has a few too
• ...copied by MS in Vista: Windows Sidebar Gadgets
• Google Gadgets: desktop or web
• Yahoo Widgets: desktop, within the yahoo RT
• Opera has its own which work on the desktop, mobile phone, or Tv (have to see this one!)

Then there are the 'social sites' plug-in widgets (eg for Facebook: Washington Post's collection of widgets). Also, offerings such as this one that provide the backdrop for widgets to work. Or, for a really useful collection of widgets, look here.

Finally, there are aggregator sites such as these: WidgetBox and SexyWidget.

A cool company that authors widgets.