Monday Blues Cure

Slightly longer cheer up this morning (25 Min's), but its well worth a look IMHO. Its a video of the making of the London underground map, (or diagram if you prefer). The chap who did it, Harry Beck, perhaps has not had the recognition he deserves. This video provides that recognition . The map (or diagram) is a wonderful example of usability and design, thinking about the people who would use it rather than the data itself.

BTW do have a look a Smashing Telly, an excellent example of a web service, proving access to a well defined set of videos from various sources (YouTube, Veoh etc), with commentary.

(h/t: David Thompson)

Visualisation of Software Projects

Now heres an interesting idea. Take the commits to the project, either for files or modules etc and visualise the process of the commits from developers and watch code develop as developers commit. Michael Ogawa at UC Davis has done with with CodeSwarm.

He has created a number of videos for various projects, including Eclipse, Python, PostgreSQL and Apache. Interesting to try and interpret what is exactly happening with code using the visualisation.

CodeSwarm. is an open source project, and you can download it from Google Code and use it. Perhaps I'll try one day!

Generating Art from Analogue Computers

Nice bit of computing History this! Desmond Paul Henry (1921 to 2004) built a number of analogue bombsite computers , to create art. The art he created this way has its own symmetrical beauty. More about this fascinating man can be found here.

(h/t Ian Logan)

Smart Resizing

This is a very interesting piece of research.

I'm particularly intrested in this for a number of reasons, including the display of images when conducting image retrieval. Another application is the display of map images when doing geographical information retrieval on mobile devices. It has in my view a number of important applications in IR.

(Hat Tip: David Thompson)