Four conferences, two hackathons, and a lot of meet-ups: Analyzing what I’ve gotten from technical gatherings outside of work this year Part 1 – The Premise Over the last year, I’ve been lucky to attend more than my usual number of conferences, meetups, and hackathons. Some of the events Read more…
This week I presented on the last 40 years of digital data visualization tools at Johnson Space Center Data Science Day. The event was held just off site this year, so it could be opened up to the public. The talk was a condensed, and I think improved, version of a Read more…
Sometimes I get to combine geology nerdiness with technology nerdiness. This post definitely falls into that category. Earlier this year, I contributed to a kickstarter campaign by Ángel Rodríguez that raised $99,258 to bring into existence an inexpensive short period seismometer produced by OSAP. It consists of programs running on the Raspberry Pi, a small board Read more…
“THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF DATA VISUALIZATION TOOLS IN LARGE ORGANIZATIONS” I recently gave a talk at the Houston Data Visualization meet-up. In addition to being a good excuse for putting time on my calendar to research the evolution of data visualization tools over the past 40 years, the talk allowed me Read more…
User interface add-ons to make a better parallel sets visualizations: (skip to the data visualization here.) Parallel sets is a data visualization type that shows how attributes of different types are distributed across a large number of instances. Common examples include datasets of the characteristics of passengers on the Titanic disaster and nutrition Read more…
I did some research on different tools for creating flow charts today. Originally, I started down this path trying to figure out what open-source project I might be able to hack on and produce a project that would generate XKCD style flow charts, similar to how bokeh (python library) has XCKD Read more…
Today I got to play with hardware at an International Nodebot Day event put on by NodeJS Houston. It was a lot of fun, and I was surprised by how much got accomplished in less than a day. I used a Tessel2 board from Sparkfun, which comes with linux and Node.js Read more…
At work, I put projects I complete into our group’s gallery of data-visualization work. It is good internal marketing for what our group can deliver. Unfortunately, even behind a NASA firewall, there are some things I can’t put in the gallery. Examples have included data visualizations of human resource data and Read more…
ISS = International Space Station Earlier this week someone came into my office at work and asked to borrow three of our beanbags, so they could have recently returned astronauts sit in them while doing a facebook live-stream event. Apparently, it has become tradition. That prompted me to google ISS Read more…
A Post-Conference Review of Space City JS I just got back from Space City JS, a JavaScript conference in Houston, Texas. Ideally, I’d write an intelligent piece of prose after long reflection. My schedule doesn’t allow for that, so here are some bullet points. The coffee was strong! and more Read more…