So I'm not completely hopeless after all... ;) Hanging out with uber-geeks at events such as the International Game Developers Association social last night has made me feel really non-technical, but a full day of good hacking's made me feel okay again. I finally got the hang of the prefuse visualization library for Java. It didn't have documentation and it doesn't have much of a Google footprint, but I used my mad source-reading skills to piece things together, cobbling together pieces from different demos and diving through the API for things I know should be there.

Java was, as usual, a pain to deal with, cross-platform - version incompatibilities with my browser plugin at the beginning! - but after a lot of searching, I finally got that all sorted out. I was very happy to get the visualizations to work, and a couple of people in the Cambridge lab had fun with it too.

It's good that I've found something for drawing polished, interactive visualizations. =) All I need to do now is learn graphviz so that I can also be an ubercool researcher. ;)

On Technorati: geek, visualization

Random Japanese sentence: 猫は驚いて飛び上がった。 The cat jumped in surprise.

Would I fit into a large company? I really, really love doing technology evangelism. An internal technology adoption role or a new-products development role might give me that mix of technical and social challenges that I so enjoy. I love what I'm doing as part of my research, and I wonder if it's at all possible to get away with doing that for serious...

On Technorati: career, purpose