About the author

Map, Programming

We learned and utilized many new technologies in this project. Unlike the Adversity index map where we didn’t have proper server-side tool to handle big data set and we had to use hacks, this project uses a brand new server-side tool to do the heavy lifting.

We built the server-side code using Django framework. This is the first time we are using this framework and it is awesome. It makes my life as a web developer much easier, especially when I was completely new to it.

For this project, we built a framework in AS3 that allows flash to communicate with the server and to make requests in real time. The framework makes it easy to parse responses from the server and deliver them to different parts of the application. With that, we are able to support deep linking, back button and breadcrumb.

If you have not read this book yet, then you need to order it now. I was skeptical about the book because I thought it tries to cover too many topics, thus not going in depth about any of them. I was wrong.

Far from being a boring theoretical book on web development, this book contains a vast amount of useful information with easy-to-understand examples. The book covers the algorithms behind search rankings, online matchmaking, product recommendations and social bookmarking. The author walks you through the theory behind each algorithm and provides examples of how you can write one yourself. You don’t have to be an experienced programmer to understand this book.

The examples in the book are written in Python programming language. You don’t need to know Python before reading this book because the author will teach you. Python is a beautiful and easy-to-learn language. In fact after reading this book, I decided to dump PHP and learn Python instead.

Nice, we will finally have a standard way to track stats in flash.

Here is more information from the original post.
“This feature is a translation of the current Google Analytics tracking code into the ActionScript 3 programming language that dramatically simplifies the ability to track Flash, Flex and AS3 content. This new Flash tracking code provides all the rich features of the current JavaScript-based version, including campaign, pageview and event tracking and can be used to track Flash content such as embedded videos, branded microsites and distributed widgets, such as online games.”

I have seen a few Web sites that show these kind of visualizations, but I particularly like this one because you can choose different initial conditions. The option allows you to see that some sorting algorithms are faster with certain initial conditions than the others.

Here is the link to the site.

Design, Map, Programming

You can find details about this project here. The article was also featured on infosthetic.com.

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Programming

This map is the first version of a more ambitious project that I am working on. Right now, it works like a tool for editors to map interesting news and events. An editor can create a collection in Virtual Earth and use the rss feed generated from the collection to feed the map. The tool is interesting in a way, because it gives editors control over what they want to display. They do not have to come to us, the producers, to make changes on the map.

The editors used the tool in a few projects and they seemed to like it. At one point, we had 3 or 4 projects using this tool from various sections on the site.

I have to thank Phil Zepeda, a fellow producer from msnbc, for helping me with this project. We had only about 3 days to build this out from scratch. The project’s original intention was to accompany our bigger hurricane tracker map to cover the Hurricane Ike. It was supposed to be a one time interactive that is created to show the aftermath of the Hurricane Ike.

Design, Programming

Compensation and accumulated wealth of 200 chief executives for large public companies that filed proxies for last year by March 28.

It is kind of depressing to see that some of these guys make more a year than what I can make in my whole life. :)

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Design, Programming

Compare local real estate markets to the national median.

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Programming

An interactive feature that show super bowl ads categorized by industry for more than two decades.

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