Edward Tufte: Presenting Data and Information

March 30, 2008 – 2:13 am
I had a chance to attend an Edward Tufte class this past week and it truly was a pleasure. He has published a number of beautiful books on presentation and the visualization of data. So, it was quite a treat to sit in on a presentation by someone that teaches about giving presentations for a living. The class was engaging, full of content, and certainly left me with a sense of excitement. the class One big take away for me was that clutter and the sense of being overwhelmed by data is not an attribute of too much information, but rather a consequence of poor design. How many times have you looked at an information dashboard or a chart in a meeting only to get a headache from trying to grasp what was trying to be communicated? But yet we are capable of navigating and internalizing large amount of information if it ...

Another Amazon EC2 Beowulf Cluster Joins The Grid

March 21, 2008 – 10:21 pm
Have you ever been working with a dataset, started crunching some numbers and said to yourself, "damn, I should distribute this across the cluster," only to realize that your cluster is already saturated with your last job and will be for the next day or two? If you answered yes, then we probably share the same data-craving/slicing/mining sickness.Well the above scenario happens to me and often enough for me to pose the question to others. I could simply invest in a larger cluster --- an expensive investment, especially since the scenario often only requires bursts of compute time. This would make an on-demand cluster a perfect solution. On-Demand Beowulf I had heard some chatter about Peter Skomoroch's ElasticWulf and found myself walking through his series on creating an on-demand beowulf cluster using Amazon's EC2. You can find his very helpful posts here and here (with another on the way). ElasticWulf is ...

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FogBugz: One Hot Ride

March 19, 2008 – 11:48 pm
So, a few months ago I came across a video by Fog Creek demonstrating the latest version of their project management software FogBugz. Wow. It looked great and appeared to have many of the features I had been searching for across the project management software terrain. It was not until a couple of weeks ago that I actually set up a trial account. I signed up and began configuring FogBugz to manage a small project that would likely run its full course over three to four 2 week iterations. Let me start by saying that FogBugz has been a pleasure to work with. Simple and Intuitive The folks over at Fog Creek have done a good job minimizing the amount of clicks required to accomplish some basic tasks like creating new cases/features/bugs. Lists of bugs and features can be viewed by various characteristics through filters or by easily accessible reports. It might seem ...

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