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Knowledge Forum 4.8 update

This week marks my return to full-time work on Knowledge Forum 4.8. I have made a flurry of check-ins to the code to make the communications protocol far more robust. I have been unable to resist checking in several additional changes to improve the look, feel, and feature set.

The focus of the newer communications protocol is twofold: improved behaviour across firewalls, which have been the bane of our existence for a very long time, and improved performance across slow or otherwise poor network connections.

Parties who are interested in helping out by offering test sites should contact me directly.

On being cited

A couple of months ago I received email from Angelique Dimitracopoulou asking to use a couple of images from an article of mine from the CSCL 2007 proceedings in a forthcoming journal article of hers. Of course it's possible to use citation indices to see who's citing your stuff, but it's somehow more rewarding to hear from the author herself. Of course I make no pretense about the fact that I was contacted only for high-res versions of the images, but it's still pretty cool.

From Tork to Vis in 4 Steps

Via an RSS feed from Nathan Torkington's blog:

http://nathan.torkington.com/blog/2008/10/12/cybernetics-quotes/

to

http://www.well.com/user/abs/curriculum.html

then by URL shortening to

http://www.well.com/user/abs

to

http://aero.mindtel.com/~mindtel/Alan1/2004_NetworkViz/Experiments.html

Plurk: microblogging meets visualization

At a recent meeting of the Brett/Hewitt research group, Joan Touzet mentioned Plurk. I'm starting to get the notion that when Joan mentions a new technology it's best to perk up and take note. I like Plurk because it offers a new twist on microblogging: adding a timeline as an organizational or visualization tool.

Find me on Plurk here.

Literacy done right

DrEff and I went for a long walk today. It seems that good eats feature prominently on our Toronto Bucket List. We found ourselves on Baldwin St. where we had some delicious 2-bite snacks at Yung Sing Pastry Shop.



During our walk we happened -- quite unexpectedly -- upon Toronto's Word on the Street festival. As evidenced by this photo, this event seems to have a positive impact on literacy:

Signs

About two years ago Bob McLean, a dear friend and colleague, was in London and shot this photo. I liked the photo as soon as I saw it and have been looking for an opportunity to use it ever since. There have been many significant changes in my life over the past few months, and this photo sums up things quite well. The three signs in the photo are equally applicable. Some of you who know me know that I have set a deadline of December 31st, 2008 for completing a draft of my thesis. That's 14 weeks away. I'm working to a tight deadline based on a detailed outline but I keep losing time to diversions (some unavoidable). The new year holds promise of great opportunities and I must finish. Tempus fugit.

(How Not To Use) Multi-touch in Education

Whereas I would normally applaud the use of such technology in education, I cannot help but ask "What's wrong with this picture?"



See the full story at Engadget.

ICLS 2008 Photos

I have finally gotten around to uploading a few photos from the ICLS 2008 conference held in Utrecht this past June. The highlights included the workshop on Interaction Analysis.

Knowledge Forum API

I had the pleasure of meeting Stian Håklev yesterday who asked me about APIs for Knowledge Forum. We have a little-known site called Knowledge Forum Coders that documents the APIs, such as they are.

The Ubiquity of Command Lines

As many of my colleagues know I'm a big fan of the command line. I find it somewhat ironic that I work with information visualizations, and yet I have a penchant for just getting in there with plain old text commands to actually accomplish things. I even prefer command-line statistical analysis packages (or, perhaps more accurately, the command-line interface to statistical packages). It probably comes as little surprise that I really like the new Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. I suspect Quicksilver users will love this. I know I do.

PwnageTool and My iPhone

This morning, in a wild attempt to actually complete something, I decided to upgrade my 1st-generation iPhone to a more up-to-date version of the firmware. I grabbed the PwnageTool. All went well, thanks to the various instructions available around the web. My only regret: deciding at the final step to "set up phone as new" rather than "restore from backup". I was concerned about having problems with Mail, per some of the reports, but didn't clue in that I would lose the photos on the iPhone as a result. There was only one photo that I really regretted losing: a quirky sign on the doors of the library at work warning users about "unstable computers". Oh well.

Potential collaboration: complex network theory

Today I had the honour of being visited by Jun and Ritsuko Oshima, a pair of researchers from Shizuoka University. We had a great chat about some work that Jun has been doing over the past couple of years. After a year of missing each other we finally managed to work out a plan for moving forward on complex network theory and socio-semantic network analysis.

Affordances

I was tracking down the definition (and etymology) of the term "affordance" for a presentation I'm working on. For some reason, my Mac's built-in dictionary doesn't know about the term and I wanted to ensure that is wasn't a neologism that had erroneously crept into my vocabulary.

I managed to track down Don Norman's essay on Affordance and Design in which he explains how, in The Psychology of Everyday Things, he appropriated the term from James Gibson's earlier work. (Wikipedia tells much the same story, but without Norman's flare.)

A bit more poking reveals that Norman will be talking in mid-October at the Franklin Institute in Phildelphia. Interesting.

Research celebration

Lots of people and interest on the visualization work I presented. All
in all a pretty good time.

Blammo!

It was a glorious day for a ride: 10 degrees Celcius, no wind, sunny. I only had time for a super-fast short ride. On the way back, though, my rear tire blew out. Luckily, I had my new iPhone with me: a quick call for a ride got me out of being stranded (and I also managed to snap a couple of photos while waiting). Hopefully tomorrow will be better -- although I now have a clunker of a replacement tire on the back.

Lightroom, CouchDB, and Amazon SimpleDB

As I was looking for resources about Lightroom, I wanted to quickly find Tim Bray's entries on the software so I Googled "lightroom bray" and came up with some unexpected results. Unexpected only because I didn't think that a reference to Tim's log would rank higher than the original. In any case, the read was interesting, but then I noticed the author's recent blog entries:

CouchDB
Amazon SimpleDB

I followed the link to What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB that led me to the Amazon SimpleDB Home Page, which is more accessible than the Developer's guide.

Tab sweep

“Welcome to dork talk” by Stephen Fry
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 Server - the look of machines to come?
Impact of social data visualization: Fernanda Viégas blogging at Infovis'07
Skim - a great PDF viewer
Scratch - worth looking at again
Publications from the Visual Communication Lab
GUESS - The Graph Exploration System
Bernie Hogan Ph.D. student, Netlab (Barry Wellman) Egotistics

New office

Today I moved into my new office (same job, just a new office), which has a swank view:

Better GWT-Tomcat-Eclipse tips

See Xebia's blog entry (reproduced here, in case it goes away):


Using Google Web Toolkit with Eclipse WTP
Posted by Marco Mulder in the late afternoon: August 17, 2006

I am writing a GWT application and want to test this application both in the GWT shell and in Tomcat. The application uses different Eclipse projects for the GWT UI and for the business service layer.

I found out that this can easily be done if you use an Eclipse WTP dynamic web project instead of the standard Java project that is created by the GWT projectCreator.

Using a dynamic web project has the following advantages:

* It is possible to use external jars and other Eclipse projects from services that are implemented with the RemoteServiceServlet.
* It is easy to test the 'compiled' JavaScript version in tomcat without having to create and deploy a war file.
* It is easy to export a war file that can be deployed in any application server.

There is an Eclipse plugin for using GWT with WTP: Googlipse . However, this plugin does not (yet) support launching the 'compiled' JavaScript application. I will outline the steps that allow you to launch the JavaScript version of a GWT application in WTP.

How to create a GWT application in a dynamic web project

The recipe to create a GWT application in a dynamic web project is as follows:

* Create a dynamic Web project MyProject in Eclipse WTP
* Use GWT projectCreator without overwriting the .project and .classpath files:projectCreator.cmd -ignore -eclipse MyProject
* Use GWT applicationCreator to create a GWT application:applicationCreator.cmd -eclipse MyProject com.mycompany.client.MyApplication
* Add gwt-user.jar and junit.jar to the .classpath file:


* Search and replace "www" to "WebContent" in MyApplication.launch, MyApplication-compile.cmd and MyApplication-shell.cmd
* Copy gwt-servlet.jar to WebContent/WEB-INF/lib

Testing the application

You can use the generated launch configuration to test the application from the GWT shell. The WTP tooling ensures that libraries that are used by the web project will be on the classpath.

To test the 'compiled' JavaScript application:

* Compile Java source into JavaScript using MyApplication-compile.cmd
* Select "Run as --> Run on Server" from the context menu of MyProject
* Open a browser on the URL of the application:
http://localhost:8080/MyProject/com.mycompany.MyApplication/MyApplication.html

Implementing and invoking a service

To invoke a service in a way that works both in the GWT shell and in the ‘compiled’ JavaScript application, you have to use GWT.getModuleBaseURL() when setting the endpoint.

For example, if you implement a service “myservice” in package com.mycompany.server.MyServiceImpl:

* Use GWT.getModuleBaseURL() in the serviceEntryPoint:endpoint.setServiceEntryPoint(GWT.getModuleBaseURL() + "myservice");
* Specify the full path in MyApplication.gwt.xml:
/com.mycompany.MyApplication/myservice" class="com.mycompany.server.MyServiceImpl">
* Specify the path also in WebContent/WEB-INF/web.xml:


MyService
com.mycompany.server.MyServiceImpl


MyService
/com.mycompany.MyApplication/myservice