| Is Tableau the Next Google?
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25 Sep 04 |
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example graphs
Will this company be successful and become another Google?
First, graphical data mining has never been a big hit. And second,
there are lots of competitors in the business intelligence sector,
including at least Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion and MicroStrategy.
So make your bets and wait for the next multibillion-dollar IPO.
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| Executive Dashboard
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25 Sep 04 |
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Thanks to Sven C. Koehler. He pointed out me to Edward Tufte’s
interesting forum.
There are some interesting answeres in the thread, esp. the graphic about
the patient. Isn’t every company a patient? :-)
I'm developing an executive dashboard, and I haven't been satisfied
with the business graphics that are widely available
(e.g. gauges, dials, stoplights). I decided to make a "Zen" version
of a KPI status indicator, using as little color as possible,
and incorporating E.T's innovative "Spark Line" metaphor for display
of trends. The graphic below shows the proposed KPI display across
the top of a browser screen with a descriptive example in the middle.
Any feedback would be wonderful!
Comments: Because of complex KPI names (e.g. This Week versus Last Week
Sales (All Divisions), KPIs were labeled with Roman numerals.
Balloon help could display the KPI name when the cursor brushes the
KPI indicator.
link
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| Knowledge Management from personal content management tools
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25 Sep 04 |
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I shamelessly copy this blog-entry from here
Below is a quote from Dave Pollard, the former Chief Knowledge Officer from
Ernst & Young. It is a great paragraph because is is truly representive of
why enterprise knowledge managment solutions failed. He is talking about the
fact that knowledge managment systems have to be personal content management systems first.
Quote:
I believe personal content management tools are the place to start, because
since the earliest days of business, the principal way of sharing information
has been peer-to-peer, the most valued 'repositories' of business information
have been personal filing cabinets, and the principal schema for organizing
work has been the personal desktop. It makes sense, therefore, that tools
that facilitate and reflect these well-established 'knowledge processes',
information sources and networks should be much more successful than the complex,
centralized, hierarchical knowledge management tools and repositories that have
been foisted on users for the past decade.
End Quote:
It is a great quote because how is it possible that anyone could believe that
a centralied hierarchical tool could work when it was in no way related to how
people did and have done knowledge work since the beginning.
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| How Org Charts Lie
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25 Sep 04 |
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(source: Harvard Business School) In an excerpt from Harvard Business
School Press Hidden Power of Social Networks, learn how "social
network analysis" reveals problems your org chart ignores. link
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| Del.icio.us and Bit Torrent: Google in Reverse
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25 Sep 04 |
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why has put that interesting posting on his blog
Inside my head, I sometimes refer to Del.icio.us as the Google In Reverse.
Google has amassed a solid mound of ranked and twined web sites. The
standings shift about with caution, the behemoths are tough to dethrone.
And if I ask for Ruby, the answers in place may hold through the end of
the year.
...
Del.icio.us is perfect! The activity bred by competitive linking would
be enhanced by the sharing of richer media.
...
Better client software is needed to make this happen.
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| Samizdat - 0.5.2 is out
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25 Sep 04 |
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Samizdat is a generic RDF-based engine for building collaboration and open
publishing Web sites. It will let everyone publish, view, comment, edit,
and aggregate text and multimedia resources, vote on ratings and
classifications, filter resources by flexible sets of criteria, and
cooperate and coordinate on all kinds of activities. It intends to promote
values of freedom, openness, equality, and cooperation.
Samizdat homepage
Slides Dmitry Borodaenko presented about Samizdat ath the Euruko 2003
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| RubyX
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25 Sep 04 |
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I just now came across the rubyx website
and noticed the logo. Nice!
Rubyx is a Linux-distribution similar to Gentoo, but all based on one ruby
script :-).
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| I need my daily dose of vim .. even in Mozilla
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25 Sep 04 |
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mozex.mozdev.org/
Mozex is an extension which allows the user to use external programs for
these actions:
- view page source
- edit content of textareas (possibly utilizing a spell-checker in the text
editor)
- handle mailto, news, telnet and FTP links
- download files
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| Knoppix remastering mini-howto
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: Daniel Stirnimann) This mini howto shows how you can easily make
on your own customized knoppix build. Apart from that, there are a few
working methods described which make doing changes conveniently. The howto
is intended for people who work occasionaly on their builds.
link
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| New Russian bestseller :-)
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25 Sep 04 |
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A big thanks to Leftenant Berezka for the pics :-).
Been coding hard now on SW and CFaR. I would really need some good vodka
now before getting up early tomorrow morning to catch the train.
Hope you all had a good weekend, -A.
This vodka bottle reminds me that I am way behind on Futurometer. We will
kick ass there soonish!
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| screen -x for remote pairprogramming
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25 Sep 04 |
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This tiny tool is great to have 2 people look and type into the same shell
window. Works great with vim :-)
- Both ssh or telnet into the same (remote) Unix machine and account.
- One enters screen, [space], vim, then the other enters screen -x.
- ctrl-d to exit screen)
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| Wine-Migration
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25 Sep 04 |
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At Linuxtag in Karlsruhe I met during lunch one of the authors of ganymede. I am the last person in the
world to promote the use of the Win32-API, but it can come in handy, when
you have to use some legacy software on Linux and do not want to pay
license fees for the usual suspects like vmware. Having to maintain only
one code-base is sexy, too.
I asked David Guembel, one of the fathers of the software to email me a
short describtion:
On an abstract level, the idea behind our ganymede system is simple: To make
an application run under Wine (a free Win32-API layer and Windows
executable loader), it is neccessary to know what parts of the Windows API
are actually required by that particular piece of software. Software has a
modular structure - in this context, a module is a Windows executable
(.DLL, .EXE, .OCX etc.) - and every module provides (exports) certain
functionality and requires (imports) functionality from other modules.
Thus, ganymede internally creates a dependency graph of an application's
binaries. This method is static and does not require anything but a fresh
installation of the software to be analyzed.
Before x-raying a Windows application, ganymede parses and stores an
analysis of the soure code of one or more Wine versions. It automagically
determines the implementation state of the APIs provided by Wine. During a
software analysis, the functionality required by the Windows application is
compared to what Wine provides, and missing or incomplete APIs are
reported. By storing Wine versions and the dependency structure of the
analyzed applications in a database, automatic or manual re-analysis with
different Wine versions is possible. Via the API ganymede itself provides,
the collected data is accessible in several ways. One application of that
API is our tool named sysiphus, which uses ganymede and a GUI-based
approach to semi-automatically determine the best possible Wine
configuration while providing for the possibility to re-use already
licensed Windows DLLs to fill the gaps Wine still leaves.
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| How to Construct Bad Charts and Graphs |
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: Gary Klass) A short but good article in the style of Edward Tufte, the big guru when it comes to displaying data in a meaningful way.
Fundamental rule of efficient graphical design: minimize the ratio of ink-to-data
The three fundamental elements of bad graphical display are these: Data Ambiguity, Data Distortion, and Data Distraction. link
Make sure you check out these classic bibles about envisioning information by Tufte:
Envisioning Information and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
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| screen -x for remote pairprogramming
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25 Sep 04 |
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This tiny tool is great to have 2 people look and type into the same shell
window. Works great with vim :-)
- Both ssh or telnet into the same (remote) Unix machine and account.
- One enters screen, then starts vim, then the other enters screen -x.
- ctrl-d to exit screen)
Linux Gazette article about screen
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| Software for Slackers
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25 Sep 04 |
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I need this program to stop my internet addiction.
Are you a slacker? So am I. Do you browse the Web, read the news, and write
email all day in stead of working? So do I. Does it make you feel miserable
and apathetic? Do you tell yourself to stop browsing the fucking Web and
get some bloody work done? Do you have absolutely no discipline? I know
your pain.
But recent technological advancements have made it possible… There is
a cure for your disease!
Years of slacking at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology
have resulted in a brilliant 461-line Perl script (which includes 130 lines
of comments for free!) that makes it all possible! Your productivity will
dramatically increase!
Today, I present Lockout: The Self-imposed, Computer-aided Work Enforcer.
This program will help you get some work done by not allowing you to browse
the Web. It won’t allow you to do anything but work. It’s a
miracle! Your colleagues will respect you, your Ph.D. adviser will
compliment you, and your boss, if you have one, will probably not notice
the difference! It’s amazing! Scroll down! Read more!
Get the program
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| My LinuxTag 2004 photos
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25 Sep 04 |
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Some photos from LinuxTag 2004 in Karlsruhe. I especially liked the Xbox
booting Linux screenshots. pics
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| The Linux Incompatability List
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25 Sep 04 |
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Saw this on /.
"The Linux Incompatibility list is
a wiki project that attempts to document hardware that is incompatible with
Linux rather than list what is compatible. In the wiki, it is possible to
add alternitives so as to push hardware manufacturers to make good binary
drivers, publish specifications, or even better, publish open
drivers."
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| Skolelinux: V1.0 with codename Venus is out! |
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25 Sep 04 |
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Skolelinux is made as free (as in speech) software, and is an overall computer solution based on school's resources and needs. It is based on Debian and runs very well on older hardware, too.
- Skolelinux is a network architecture tailored for use in schools.
- Skolelinux is designed to be easy and cheap to maintain.
- Skolelinux gives the students their own usernames, home directories and services.
- Skolelinux includes OpenOffice.org
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| Forth Database
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25 Sep 04 |
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Richard S. Westmoreland postd this to the Forth-ML.
In years past, we have implemented some extremely complicated databases in
Forth. The first was done in the mid 1970's for the company Cybek in NJ,
and it was used in some extremely complex applications. FORTH, Inc. also
did some very complex databases for other companies, one of which was still
in use last time I checked, at www.calmuni.com. That one was a
2-dimensional database, with a huge bit matrix in the center used to
calculate overlapping bonded indebtedness. A few years ago my contact there
told me that a state agency had just spent several million $$ trying to
replicate it using modern database tools, but the result was too large and
too slow to be usable.
In the late 1980's we added class-based techniques to it, which many people
liked (although I personally preferred the earlier, simpler version).
It's hard to describe the whole approach in a newsgroup post, though. It
certainly didn't resemble SQL!
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| Forth "versus" Whatever
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25 Sep 04 |
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From comp.lang.forth
>>Which brings me to an excellent 'forthism' I once read in a
>> newsletter. It stated:
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>> "You can do anything in Forth - but you must be prepared
>> to do it yourself."
In a recent discussion in c.l.functional, about why popular languages
are popular, I summarized the relationship between Lisp and Forth
more-or-less as follows:
"From the Lisper's perspective, every other language is a cute subset
of lisp; whereas from the Forther's perspective, every other language
is a cute extension of Forth."
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