Mindpsill - Technology

Google have added a feature to Google maps that lets you take virtual walks in a city. You can literally follow street paths on a map and have a 360' view of all your surroundings. This feature is called Street View. Click on the images for a quick preview.

From some superficial searches on the subject, the images were taken with video camera mounted on a car, going around the streets. Not all countries have this feature enabled but on August 4th it was introduced for Japan.

This is really amazing stuff! It gives a whole new dimension to travel planning. Images and news about Google Street View found via Japan Probe.

Some sites with interesting street view collections:-
Top 15 Google Street View sightings (Mashable.com)
Google Street View gallery

This is one of the first visualization research images I created. It's a composite image of the same cult network, represented in different ways. The whole network is represented as a pixel matrix. Part of the network is represented as a node-link graph diagram. Finally the graph is a detailed view of an individual node in the network.

Games Radar have a brilliant article about wikipedia stats where they compare word counts of articles on similar topics to give an idea how skewed article sizes are. There's no scientific proof of course, but it's a good laugh.

These are a summary of links posted on my twitter profile this week for the benefit of those who aren't using twitter yet.

Article about fostering innovation at Pixar

Listening to moloko but now giving a try to infected mushroom.

Just learnt about the bradley effect.

Perspective aricle by doshdosh about getting twitter followers.

Interesting Infovis videos.

Processing is an easy to use programming language designed to make creating data visualizations easier. Processing simplifies the syntax of writing programs that draw graphics and use animation. The language was designed to be easy enough to be used by designers, to abstract most of the complication of writing the same functionality in Java. Each Processing application is finally converted into Java and can be either uploaded to a website as an applet or as a standalone Java program.

John Resig, has now ported the Processing language to Javascript. Using this library now you can write processing code that gets dynamically converted into Javascript and loaded directly in the browser, without having to load a Java Applet. Resig has a long list of examples using his Processing Javascript Library.

I've decided to give Twitter another try. For those unfamiliar with the service, twitter is a website where you can post (or send) a small message to people who are interested in hearing it. For people to see your messages they have to subscribe to your posts by following you on twitter. These messages can be viewed either from the twitter website, or using special twitter clients, or even getting them on the phone by SMS.

Originally the service was intended to let your friends know what you're up to. It was something similar to setting you status in facebook, or your personal message in MSN Messenger. Now apart from it's original use, twitter is used to send all sort of messages, like for example links to interesting sites, or asking questions to people who are following you. It's a sort of cross between instant messaging, chatting and mini-blogging.

I tried twitter a couple of months ago, way before it got all the hype. I used it mainly for posting my status to friends, but since there weren't many of my friends using it yet it was pretty useless. Now I'm giving it another go, hoping to make some new friends. If you want to follow me on twitter to see what I'm up to this is my profile. I still have to figure out how to find interesting twitters though.

Now with twitter I have to decide what should get blogged and what should get twitted :) Well, for posts more than a sentence long I'll have to blog them, but I might start posting less general appealing links (like computing links) on twitter more than on the blog.

Get her one of these Roomba iRobots... Click image for video