Posts

In the previous post, I shared a video of David McCandless giving a talk about information visualisation. One phrase caught my attention and a bit of research lead to a very good discovery. The phrase and context is (emphasis is mine): We need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture, and then that can lead to us changing our perspective. As Hans Rosling, the master, my master, said, " Let the dataset change your mindset". And if it can do that, maybe it can also change your behavior. ...

Tonight, I realised that David McCandless was behind informationisbeautiful.net, a blog dedicated to information visualisation which I often mentionned before on this blog. Last month, David McCandless gave a talk at TED, a NGO “devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading”. And it was very interesting to hear him, to put a living face on a blog and to apprehend the amount of work to make such great infographics simple to understand. Here is the video (thanks to the license: CC-by-nc-nd - on this page, there is a link to download the high quality video): ...

A colleague of mine is always hammering home the message of bringing facts and data to a discussion rather than rumors, hearsays and daily newspaper articles. Since a few days (because H1N1 is not a pandemic anymore?), newspapers are coming with another “Superbug” or " Germinator", wrongly named " NDM-1". So, before spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, please read the scientific litterature or, at least, read quality newspapers ( articles from The Guardian are quite fair and balanced). ...

Namechk.com ( Check Username Availability at Multiple Social Networking Sites) bookmarked on delicious.com by Philippe " one possible use of the Facebook profile information: generating a good dictionary from fabebook-names-original.txt to brute-force password" seen on Twitter.com/adulau Now use Namechk to find all combinations of >= 2 letters used on more than 1 service. I guess there is a high probability that two identical username strings on two different services belong to the same physical person. Look at their profile/activities/pages/whatever on the various websites, you have now a wonderfull network of knowledge about these people. I also guess that if a flaw is discovered in one of these services that allows to recover users passwords, you could use the same password on all the other services for the same username. ...

We are back from Scotland and it was really amazing. “Awesome!” (as they would say in another part of the world). You can’t imagine how beautiful is the landscape, how rich is the biodiversity (although we were in the West, where they said “God had no earth left when he created Scottish Highlands”) and how kind are people. We spent lovely nights at the Rowantree Cottage in Arrochar. It was the first time Neel called someone “The Gentleman” (Bill Thompson) and “The Lady” (Irene Thompson), our lovely hosts. And Charlie the cat was also very kind and patient with Neel. ...

First evening after first day of work after holidays, we decided to keep the dinner simple: rice and sandwiches (“bread” for The Little One). As usual, he couldn’t easily find sleep (but finds every possible excuses not to sleep). When it’s my turn to go and comfort him, he finally decides he’ll go to sleep with Bow-bow, his plush dog … Dad - Good night, Neel Son - Good night, papa ...

Dear wife, I agree to have the decoration you want everywhere in our new home. You can have all the furniture and appliances you want in the kitchen. I’m OK if all the shelves with my computer books are in the basement. OK too if you don’t want to see the file server in the living room. Agreed: I’ll put back Windows on your laptop. But … But I absolutely want one wall painted like these: ...

I just watched a video from Larry Gadea working at Twitter: Twitter - Murder Bittorrent Deploy System (speaking at CUSEC 2010). Briefly, the problem Twitter was facing was the deployment of updates to thousands of servers in a short amount of time and dealing with errors (broken servers, e.g.). A nice, simple, cool and free way of solving this issue was to use the Bittorrent protocol (via Python and a stack of other free software) to actually deploy updates. In summary, you go from a unique repository facing thousands requests approximately at the same time: ...

In the 300-and-more RSS items in my aggregator this week, there are 2 great ones from Information is Beautiful, a blog gathering (and publishing its own) nice ways to visualise data. The first one is based on a talk by Clay Shirky who, in turn, was referencing his book Cognitive Surplus. In Cognitive Surplus visualized, David McCandless just represented one of Shirky’s ideas: 200 billion hours are spent each year by US adults just watching TV whereas only 100 million hours were necessary to create Wikipedia (I guess the platform + the content) … ...

One of the differences between university lectures in Belgium and in the United States of America is that, in the US, most of the students are carefully “listening” to the lecture while having their laptop on and connected to the internet. I didn’t departed from this custom :-) Yesterday, I was trying to download a Linux DVD (that’s what university networks are for, isn’t it?) and observed an interesting pattern in the network speed during the lecture. If I assume that the total bandwidth available remains constant, the one available to me was drastically reduced as the lecture was going on. ...