Thursday, November 27, 2008

Welcome to the world, Processing 1.0!

It only took 162 attempts (hey! It took Edison 1000 attempts to make the light bulb! shush!!!), but it's finally here: Processing 1.0!

There was even a press release for it last Monday in Cambridge and L.A., and it was well deserved. I'd explain what the project is, but Ben Fry - who is one of the authors - has already done a pretty good job...

"Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing’s growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics." - Ben Fry

You can download it free here and find beautiful examples of usage here.
Hope you enjoy this, I certainly will!

Delicious Del.iciou.us

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Talk on WPF and Silverlight

Folks, I'll be giving a talk on WPF and Silverlight development next week for the development team of Stefanini IT Solutions.
It'll be more like a crash course on the technology and what can be done with it.
It's going down at TecnoPUC next Tuesday and Thursday (11/2 & 11/4) form 6:30 PM to 8:30PM.

I'll be posting the results as well as some of the most interesting questions that might appear.
For those joining, I'll see you then!

Delicious Del.iciou.us

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Financial Crisis in a nutshell

In the current scenario, this subject could never be seen as off-topic or not related.
On the 13th, Mint released a great diagram showing the financial crisis from the start (housing overprice, or over-investment) all the way to governmental bailout.

This is as simple as it gets:


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Monday, November 24, 2008

Coming scheadule

Critical time seems to be over at the office, leaving me some spare time for blogging. Having that said, I've decided to create a post scheadule to cover the vast range of subjects of my interest.

Given that I have quite a few blog RSS signatures on Visualization and weekends are full of interesting posts and publishings around the globe, Monday-Tuesday will be the days dedicated to Visualizations. My likes and dislikes, thoughs, wishes... What have you.

Todays (and probably will repeat itself) subject: Many Eyes
Although it's no secret that I've worked with the guys in Cambridge for a brief time in 06-07 winter, there will be time for talking about the tag cloud, wordle and all the other awesome tools available in the portal. This post is about their newest back-end change: Rails!

That's right, everything is now running on Ruby on Rails. On their newest post, Jesse brings out the big guns and points out the pros and cons on the choice and makes his point very objectively. Try it out for yourself and feel the difference.

Thumbs up for the time invested, guys!

Delicious Del.iciou.us

Friday, November 21, 2008

Hiatus

After the longest hiatus in the history of blogging, I post this to let you know I'll be back in action in no time.

This week, I'll wrap up the last details from the hiatus with an informational post, continue the design patterns thread as well as start the WPF, Visualization and Talks regular threads with it's respective dates, organized so that I can follow through with the readers expectation.

See you in no time!

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