May 17, 2008

Tutorial : Thematic mapping with the Google Maps Flash API

chloropleth

Google has recently released a Flash version of the Google Maps API. The goal is to give developers and designers more freedom in the presentation and graphical effects of their maps. Google is certainly not the first provider of a Flash mapping API (see the Yahoo! Maps AS3 API for example) but as one of the original proponents of Ajax web mapping tools, it marks an interesting change of direction (although the original Google Maps API is probably not going away anytime soon). One interesting aspect of using Flash is also a boost in vector graphics rendering speed, which I am going to demonstrate here, with a tutorial showing how to display a chloropleth map with this new API. Here is a link to the final application. It has to be noted that I am definitely not a Flex/ActionScript guru (just a few evenings of experience) so there are probably better ways of doing things than what I am showing here.

May 1, 2008

Compiling Palo on Mac OS X

I am currently in the process of evaluating Palo for a personal project. The Palo server is an opensource (GPL) in-memory multidimensional database management system, well suited for OLAP. Jedox, the German makers of Palo, market it as a data store for Excel, but it should work well outside this specific usage scenario. They offer pre-compiled binaries for Windows and Linux but not for Mac OS X, so I set out to make one, which was not very hard. I outline the steps here. A downloadable package for Leopard is at the end of the post.

April 27, 2008

Outrunners

Check out the video of French band The Outrunners. Love the 80’s vibe, very Miami Vice-like.

April 20, 2008

Ruby Tutorial: Scraping Muxtape for mp3 + iTunes playlist creation

Muxtape is a website that lets users share mixtapes online, which is pretty cool, as is their minimalistic design. This Ruby tutorial will show how to use Mechanize (together with Hpricot) and rb-appscript to scrape the site, download the mp3’s and add them automatically to an iTunes playlist. The last part will only work on Mac OS X (because of rb-appscript).

April 1, 2008

Chicago

I was in Chicago on Saturday. What a great town! It was just a day trip so I just walked around for a few hours, but I really liked the feel of the city.

Update: More photos of Chicago on my Flickr page.

February 25, 2008

Slapped in the face by the 90's

Whiskey

Recently I listened to something I haven’t heard in quite a few years, namely the album “Whiskey”, by Swedish crooner Jay-Jay Johanson. I remember I listened to it all the time when it was released some time in the mid 90’s. It was then described as a trip-hop Scott Walker. I was surprised I still enjoyed the music as much. Have I changed that little?

So tell the girls that I am back in town - Jay-Jay Johanson

Over - Alpha

Over - Portishead

February 10, 2008

Vinicius de Moraes

Vinicius

A few songs by Vinicius :

Chorando pra Pixinguinha

Berimbau

February 6, 2008

Generative music

February 5, 2008

Reactable

This is so cool it made my head explode :

The Reactable was made by Spanish researchers and is currently used by Björk in her live performances.

January 31, 2008

Lille

I was in Lille today. It was cold, rainy and very windy. I didn’t do much sightseeing : only the 2 railway stations and the mall between them, and even then, only in passing. Did I miss much? I’ll probably never know.