03.31.09
Little red riding hood – an infographic tale
Infographics – an underrated art form.
Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.
03.26.09
Inteview with an artist
I conducted an interview with Sam Shakes, a local artist in London for the IA association Greater London West.
03.25.09
Gait aid
Back in 2006 after my first op on my leg, I started having pain and felt that I was walking unevenly. As a result, I decided to conduct an experiment to highlight the pressure points on my feet as I walk.
I found some Clarks shoes that have grip pattern consisting of numerous pimples. After wearing the shoes for a month, I counted the worn pimples and assigned a colour based on the extent of wear Blue(normal), red(worn), white(worn through the soul). That made it possible to visualise the extent of my asymmetrical gait.
As you can see: The left foot assumed dominance (my right leg having been broken), showing significantly more wear towards the heel. Overall both shoes show a weight distribution shifted towards the left, and the wear line running down the top medial right shoe perhaps indicates a slight dragging of the right foot.
Word tips
Search for style, replace with markup
Here is something I wouldn’t expect to be able to do, but it saved me an awful lot of time.
I had a large word document that I needed to paste into a wiki. The original file had C++ identifiers formatted in courier in the middle of English sentences.
imagine something like
“The class
RConnectionconnects to stuff, except when it doesn’t”
I wanted to be able to mark up such identifiers with the code tag before pasting them into the wiki.
Use Word’s Find an replace feature to Find text of format “font:courier” and replace it with the text it found (use ^& in the replace field) sandwiched between your mark-up. As in the diagram below:
Once you have the identifiers delineated, it’s then easy to then change code to a styled span or whatever fits the bill.
Saving images that are embedded in word
Method 1 (Older versions of word):
saving the word document as a “web page” by default generates pretty low resolution images.
However, you can enable PNG export for web and set the screen resolution really high and that seems to produce good results. See the options monsta dialog and then the “web options” button.
Method 2 (Word 2007):
Save pages as DOCX format (word 2007), you can drag the DOC into winzip and access all the images in the media folder (DOCX is just a zip container like a JAR file).
Method 3
Copy and paste the word picture/viso drawing etc into Powerpoint, right click and “save as picture”. You can export it in a number of formats.
03.19.09
Google street voyeur
After setting up view outside my house like a creepy stalker, the Google street view of London is a wee bit unsettling. Still I didn’t stop me spending lunchtime ‘driving’ around looking for people I know.
The face bluring algorithm made me chuckle. It doesn’t seem to work that well on profiles/through glass but managed to scrub all instances of Mike Myers’ the Love guru logo. See picture below for a pretty clear photo of the passenger.
Shudder….
03.14.09
Tosser
I recently attended a lunchtime lecture with the Gresham College. If you are in london, you may be interested in their work friendly 1pm and 6pm lectures.
The title of this one was “How to be a Winner: The maths of race fixing and money laundering” by Professor John D Barrow FRS.
There are a couple of interesting topics covered in the talk, including the obligatory monty hall problem (covered on my blog a while back).
One which I like is the ‘how to deal with a weighted coin’ scenario.
If you suspect that a coin is throwing up head or tails too often, then it’s still possible to use it as a fair coin (so long as you are willing to throw away some throws).
Basically, rather than throwing a coin once – you throw it in pairs (discarding throws where the coins are both heads or both tails).
To generate a “heads or tails” decision you read the value of the first throw of the pairs.
- if you throw HT – then you record an outcome of heads
- if you throw TH – then you record an outcome of tails.
- But if it’s HH or TT, then you throw again until you get one of the above.
To model this using probabilities. Imagine you have a coin with has 0.4 probability of throwing a heads and 0.6 bias in favour of tails.
The following probabilities exits:
p(H) = 0.40
P(T) = 0.60
P(HH) = 0.4*0.4 = 0.16
P(TT) = 0.6*0.6 = 0.36
P(HT) = 0.4*0.6 = 0.24
P(TH) = 0.6*0.4 =0.24
You can use the fact that P(HT) and P(TH) are equally likely (regardless of the bias) to make a weighted coin act fair.
More generally:
p(H) = p
P(T) = 1-p
P(HH) = p^2
P(TT) = (1-p)^2 = 1-2p+p^2
P(HT) = p(1-p) = p – p^2
P(TH) = (1-p)p =p – p^2
Or modelling the problem in Python that would be:
def tossWeightedCoin(): if(random.random()<0.40): return HEAD else: return TAIL def tossFairFromWeighted(): toss1 = HEAD toss2 = HEAD while(toss1 == toss2): toss1 = tossWeightedCoin() toss2 = tossWeightedCoin() if(toss1==HEAD): return HEAD; else: return TAIL;
Another bubble burst
Ok, so it took a long time – but I always thought that Mavis Beacon (of teaches typing fame) was a real person, and an exemplar of the American dream. Her photo, -which adorned the software box- always had the confidence of a professional who had worked hard to crash the glass ceiling of prejudice in a white male dominated industry, going on to set up her own business. (Ok I was only 10 years old when it was first released).
From Wikipedia:
“Mavis Beacon” is not a real person. The original photo of Mavis Beacon was of a retired Caribbean-born fashion model named Renee Lesperance who was discovered in 1985 by Les Crane, the former talk-show host, while he shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. Crane, who was then a partner in Software Toolworks, invented the name. Her first name was taken from Mavis Staples, lead vocalist for the Staple Singers, and from beacon, as in a light to guide the way.
*sigh*
Image source : theblacksentinel.wordpress.com
03.03.09
Flash mulitselect
Hurrah. Gmail at last support uploading more than one file at a time (and a upload progress bar to boot).
The lack of support for multiple file upload has really affected the usability of many web based applications. Applications such as Wordpress have solved the problem by introducing a “Flash” upload page which support a file browser with multi select. Others such as Facebook chose a more heavyweight Java implementation (which seems to freeze my computer for a few seconds on launch).
One of the peculiarities of AJAX is how unfit for purpose the original web standards were to application development. Flash has stepped in more than once as a fall back for thing were simply not possible in HTML/Javascript. So now we have a Gmail page which is rendered in HTML but has just a couple of/hidden or discrete embedded flash SWF. One gives you a better uploader, and the other one plays notification sounds.
Using Flash like this It is a bit like using an X-Box as a paper weight. But then again, as a user it really doesn’t matter. It’s quite nice to log in to a service and then spot small incremental changes that make the product better. Gmail has been very consistent and restrained in evolving small features over time and provides a good example of how a live application can changed in situ (ignoring the recent outage)
Of course, there are other less visible things that are updated behind the scenes including better performance, security, bug fixes and interoperability – all this ready for when you log on next.
Although I don’t like being forced into an upgrade (especially when I’m happy with the stability of a product), the web app experience is vastly better to the situation on my PC where on booting my machine, I’m faced with chain reaction of “checking for updates” dialogs etc. Some of which cause me to install a Yahoo! tool bar if I’m not paying attention.
I suppose this interplay between the slow moving democratised web standards, and the new opportunities raised by proprietary extensions makes the web a better place. The thing I like about the Flash way is that it doesn’t involve inventing new HTML markup tags (as opposed to e.g the Canvas tag), and so there is a clear demarcation of standards and proprietary.