File Under: things to read: Data Visualization Blog

Fell In Love With Data.  I've gotten interested in all sorts of different data visualizations lately, but haven't really figured out how to get started.  Maybe this blog is just the thing.  The proposed outline looks promising:

Here is a tentative list of topics I am planning to cover in the series (subject to changes):

1. Books and Other Resources
2. Programming Languages and Tools
3. Sources of Good Examples
4. Research Papers
5. University Courses

Andy Kirk over at Visualizing Data is planning on offering 1 day training courses in the US hopefully in 2012. 

Cool gadget

Better than nerd cufflinks, a kinetic ring:

File Under: things to buy

An SD HC card that has an integrated USB connector.  Useful for those times when you don't have a USB cable for your camera.

SanDisk has a similar product: Sandisk Ducati

Packet Analysis in the Cloud

So, aside from resisting anything with 'cloud' in the title, I've avoided "cloud" based packet analysis tools because they didn't make sense to me.  Packet capture an analysis is very much a local thing.  Usually, you need to be attached to a device to capture packets.  Even with technologies like RSPAN and ERSPAN, packets always end up on a machine, are analyzed, and then forgotten.

Its the forgotten part that is the problem.  For a long time I've wanted to created a shared library for reference packet captures- a view of what things should look like when they're working.  It appears someone not only had that idea, but the ability to create a product around it: CloudShark.  Software or hardware appliance that stores packet captures for sharing and annotation.

There is also pcapr which seems to provide many of the same features, and even more, though I haven't done a full comparison of the two.

When bad things happen to good fiber

VP from Level3 recounts strange things that have happened to its fiber over the years.

Toward copyright sanity (in the UK)

Ars Technica has an article about copyright reform in the UK.  From the article:

The British government today pledged (PDF) to enact significant changes to copyright law, including orphan works reforms and the introduction of new copyright exceptions. And the tone of the comments was surprising: the government agrees that "copyright currently over-regulates to the detriment of the UK." CD (and perhaps DVD) ripping for personal use should become legal at last—and the government is even keen to see that the consumer rights granted by law can't simply be taken away by contract (such as a "EULA" sticker on a CD demanding that a disk not be ripped).

You Are My Sunshine

A great version of a classic song.

Internet Topology Zoo

The University of Adelaide has an interesting site: The Internet Topology Zoo.  Its a collection of visualizations, tools, and data sets for visualizing internet service providers.  These visualizations have been all gussied up- by properly placing nodes on maps, but other data sets used in tools such as Cytoscape or Gephi will not only visualize but analyze large networks.

I would love to recreate the snapshot of the internet created by M. Newman in May 2006 with current data to determine such metrics as closeness or betweeness of GW's autonomous system.

Wireless with lights

There are a couple of initiatives to provide local wireless data connectivity with lighting.  Here is one example.

Ultrafine positioning

Technology Review reports on a new Australian company, Locata, developing a new augmentation to GPS for ultrafine positioning.

By deploying earth based transmitters that work along side the GPS signal, ultrafine positioning can be obtained.  There are very few details on how this works, such as number of transmitters, frequency, power, etc.  How does this compare with other GPS helpers such as WAAS or dGPS?

A while back there was a proposal to use television frequencies (which have  much better propagation properties) to provide indoor positioning.  I can no longer find any references to this project.  I believe it was envisioned by a guy name Rosen, who was involved with the original GPS system.