D3 & FRB: A case study in binding and editable DataViz

We wanted something that could handle a connected graph of thousands of objects in the DOM and not explode with extra calculations. Our solution was to use D3, combined with Montage Collections and  FRB. In this talk I'll demo the results of our investigation (an editable interactive visualization of  nodes in a connected graph).

Code on GitHub

`

Day -6

I decided to search for kartveli rather than Georgian on YouTube, found a behind the scenes video for a boy named Georgi auditioning for Georgia Talent, which lead me to a talk show. I watched it a few times, it had a singer who sang in Russian and whose music I had already heard (we often listen to Russian pop music in the office). After about 4 repititions I found some discourse particles for backchanneling, correcting another person's question and clarifying one's previous utterance. It seemed promising so i used keepvid to download it, and ffmpeg to extract the audio and import it into Praat. Which lead me to a YouTube channel full of reasonably natural Georgian, profiling famous Georgians so the vocabulary will be reasonably similar. https://www.youtube.com/user/ProfiliR2

Day -24

I found some more natural videos in Turkish, and moved my stuff into the basement between  a few more layers of plaster.

Day -25

I bought my ticket and started plastering the cieling to with the sound of Piece Corps Georgia introduction to Geogian, playing in the background.

Cycling in Tbilisi

I'll have my citizenship soon, which means I've been researching where to go for field work next. At the moment the contenders are Turkey, Georgia, and Korea (agglutinative languages).

Naturally biking in Turkey is pretty much not in my plans, and in Korea there are usually pretty good paths but most people wear masks to prevent breathing in the pollution. The unknown is Georgia. A quick google result for Tblisi cycling safety confirms my expectation, it would be roughly equivalent to biking in a Romanian city. I also ran across this video of two dudes on a cycling demonstration of how to freak out cars in Tblisi. Not exactly my style...





I also found Derek's post about commuting in Tblisi, which was far more informative.

... drivers in Tbilisi are widely acknowledged to be crazy--Georgian machismo combined with lax traffic enforcement leads to dangerous speeding, aggressive tailing, games of Chicken, and lots of accidents. In six months in Georgia, I've personally witnessed two rear-end collisions, had the city bus I was riding in scrape the side of a taxi, and driven or walked past three multi-vehicle high-speed accidents. Not the biggest sample size, of course, but I'm pretty sure the statistics support me on this one.

Despite this, I actually feel pretty safe riding my bike around Tbilisi, for a few reasons.

The first reason is simply experience: I've ridden thousands of total miles on dense, high-traffic streets in Chicago, and while Chicago is a very bike-friendly city by American standards, it has its fair share of crazy drivers. Knowing how traffic flows, and how to position yourself in the road is a key part of safe city cycling ...Pursued by a Bear: Bicycle commuting in Georgia

As for biking outside the city, it looks like a pretty intense version of my trip in the mountains around Lake Champlain, with some crazy views and hikes thrown in, and maybe not solo with full camping equipment. My cassette was pretty much scrap after climbing 22,000 feet with 15kg of camping gear. I bet a 6 day trip in the Caucuses would be far more than triple that.


Of course, I've never seen a bike rental shop which had any bikes that were actually big enough for me. In Germany I bought a bike, and sold it once I got to the Czech Republic at no loss.  So, do I bring my bike, or do I play it by ear when I get to my destination...

Automation

Up and running with Android

This week I'll be giving a workshop:

Up and Running with Android

In this workshop we will go from installing Eclipse to making your Android read to you, listen to what you say, and then take action on what you say.

The tutorial is based on our Cloud Robotics hackaton project to command our Roogle bot to move around.

Github codebase:

https://github.com/AndroidMontreal/UpAndRunningWithAndroid/tree/master/Tutorial

To step through the tutorial, start off with #1 in the issue tracker:

• 
  

  Make it Understand!
  

  #9 opened on Feb 26, 2013 by cesine  Up and Running
• 
  

  Make it Listen!
  

  #7 opened on Feb 26, 2013 by cesine  Up and Running
• 
  

  Make it Talk!
  

  #5 opened on Feb 26, 2013 by cesine  Up and Running
• 
  

  Modify the package name of the sample code
  

  #4 opened on Feb 26, 2013 by cesine  Up and Running
• 
  

  What buttons do you want in your app?
  

  #3 opened on Feb 26, 2013 by cesine  Up and Running
• 
  

  Take a look at the sample source code
  

  #2 opened on Feb 26, 2013 by cesine  Up and Running
• 
  

  Install Eclipse, the ADT Plugin and the most recent Android SDK
  

  #1 opened on Feb 26, 2013 by cesine  Up and Running