Fall Recap

October 18th, 2005

I could give a thousand excuses, but I'm not entirely sure if they'd mean anything. September and October have been an incredibly busy time for me, school, moving, sickness, work - it's just piled on top of each other. Although, this doesn't mean that I've been slacking - I just haven't had time to make blog posts. Amusingly, according to my stats, there are now over 900 of you reading this weblog via RSS - which is pretty slick.

Here's a quick recap of some of the things that happened these past two months:

Today I won the Quirksmode addEvent re-coding contest. This particular contest was to write an implementation of addEvent and removeEvent that was completely cross-browser and usable. I like my submission, simply due to its brevity, and so did the judges.

Some of my past research, into Instant Messaging, was mentioned in the RIT Reporter (my school newspaper). It's kind of light and 'fluffy', but a good starter piece. If you're interested in this sort of thing, contact me, or check out the project page.

I was mentioned, in passing, in The Economist, concerning the recent trend in mash-up applications, specificially concerning the Yahoo Traffic RSS feed. I think the article is no longer accessible - but may be if you get a login.

Finally, one of my Google Maps projects went live - it was for a newspaper in Florida, the Herald Tribune, concerning the Save Our Homes initiative. My particular application allowed users to browse through their homes and see how their tax rates compared to their neighbors. From everything that I've heard, it's been quite successful. It makes me happy to bring cool technology (Google Maps) to people who wouldn't have used/seen it otherwise.

I'm going to be releasing a full-blown product within the next week, or so - it's very simple, but exciting, nonetheless. I hope people will get a kick out of it.

Tags: maps, google, news, im, javascript, rss, magazine

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New IM Status Visualization

April 13th, 2005

Mulit-User Composite View (IMSCAN),
originally uploaded by John Resig.

I wrote a new visualization for IM user data today. The following image shows a two-week composite view of a user and its buddies. To acheive this, I essentially took a 24 hour view from a user, added an opacity, and layered each day on top of each other. The result is this interesting composite view that's really informative. (The darker the area, the more active the user is during that time period) I later added in the ability to drag-and-drop users, to make it easier to compare one user to another. We will probably be launching this service very soon - I'll be sure to let everyone know when that is.

Tags: visualization, imscan, images, projects, im

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