Entries Tagged 'happy' ↓

Most of my readers are by now probably already aware of Wordle, Java applet, that allows neat visualization tags. Given that Zemanta released early alpha API preview recently, I was looking for a fun project to showcase some of it.

So for this experiment I’m going to try to visualize some of the popular classic books, using text files of Gutenberg project. Technical details at the bottom of the post.

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice as through words and tags

Pride and Prejudice through words

Pride and Prejudice as tags

Herman Melville - Moby-Dick

Moby Dick through words

Moby Dick through tags

George Orwell - 1984

1984 through words

1984 through tags

Technical details

The whole process is done using a simple python script. The script reads in the text file, breaks it into chunks of 360 words, as is roughly one A5 page and then sends it to Zemanta API. It repeats this process for first 30 thousand words of the book. The limit is arbitrary, I just didn’t want to run the script for too long.

Afterward, the text was manually pasted into Wordle and I played with random function and details until I started to like the image. You can also take a look at my full Wordle gallery.

Lessons learned

I’m especially happy how 1984 turned out. For this kind of visualization it’s important to choose source carefuly, so you can get more powerful results that way. I’ll probably continue experimenting with this on 1984 text.

Playing at night with marten or a story why Twitter is so great.

People often ask me what is the value of constantly checking status of other people and updating mine. After doing this for a while in a group of friends you start getting completely new experience that makes the whole effort more than worth it.

Today it started with twit from @klemenrobnik at about midnight, with a short message that he is playing with his marten:

This turned out to be much more exciting as it seems at first. This marten is just a few months old and pretty wild. This was actually her nightly exercise in the wild. In a few weeks it’s going to a farm where it’s going to live in nature.

It actually proved quite challenging taking pictures of her with only Blackberry as it could not match the speed and interest of the general world. This is one of the rare times that built-in flash turned to be actually useful.

Last week I had a chance to visit a workshop on creating Graffitis with Lasers, also called Laser Tags, organized by Luka Frelih @ Ljudmila.

The idea itself is “simple” enough. Take the laser with its motor out of CD-ROM and build a connector for its motor so you can connect it to Arduino.

Afterwards you need to build a casing for the motor, and put a mirror on top of it, so your motor can move it. At that point you take a normal laser pointer and shine it towards the little mirror. Reflecting surface is being moved by the Arduino mini-board computer, so you can run the whole thing off some batteries and don’t need a computer.

And that is it. Some more pictures of how the final Laser Graffiti looks like. More hacking continues after the holidays.

After successful presentation at the Investors day, we had a nice evening out in the city. One of the venues we visited was the “Absolut Ice Bar London“. The idea is very simple, have a bar that is whole under ice and serve some nice cocktails to visitors, even though it sounded a bit more sensible in the context of Kiruna , one of the coldest places in Sweden.

Experience itself is not bad, even though the place is a bit small in the end, and you’re not allowed to be in there more than half an hour. You also get some cool penguin like coat to keep you warm. Sadly though, the toilets were not part of the ice covered area, so nothing really innovative in this field.

In general it is a nice experience to try as part of the night out in the city with a group of friends to have fun of the glasses made of ice and each other in funny coat.

(images blurred to protect the innocent, and because my mobile phone doesn’t take good photos)

One of the perks of living in such a big city as London are all the interesting events a Web developer/entrepreneur can easily visit. Even if you do not live there, it is still worth timing your visit so you can visit them.

MiniBar occurs monthly where a number of startups pitch their ideas to the visiting public, with general theme towards Web entrepreneurs. Every presenting company gets asked the hardest question: how do you make money?

Event is free, but registration is required at their homepage. 

Wiki Wednesdays are also monthly event, this time, as you might have guessed, oriented towards people who use and are passionate about Wiki’s. Even though a lot of participants are involved with Wikipedia, there is also a lot of buzz around usage of wikis in corporations and in other projects.
Event is free, but registration is required in their wiki, that can be found through their portal.

London OpenCoffee Meetup, is a weekly event for anyone more interested in entrepreneurial side of Online and Web business. There are all kinds of visitors there, from VC’s to developers or just people who are interested in breaking into this field or looking for someone to help them. Drinking coffee on top of Waterstones, Londons biggest book store and chatting with like minded people is also a great way to start a Thursday morning.
Event is free, with no registration required. They also have a homepage and a general page of OpenCoffee Club movement.

Dorkbot London is a monthly meeting of people who do interesting things with electricity, but more precisely electronic. It involves artists, engineers, designers and just about everyone who is passionate about all things electric.
Event is free, but sometimes registration is required, so check their dorkbot wiki.

Mashup* event is a monthly, a bit more commercially oriented event where startups once again present their creations to interested public. Since it is not free, there is a bit smaller crowd there so it might be easier to actually discuss your big idea.
Entry is 35£, with required registration at the event homepage.