vA3C Hacker R1: A Possible Solution To A Personal Dilemma?

I have been having a lot of fun with vA3C Viewer. It's now up to R7 and it now has a lot of cool features. But I have been having less and less fun with each release. As the script gets bigger and bigger, adding a new feature takes more and more time. Lately it has taken several days to get just to get a thing or two going.

Taking time to add features is normal but it has a dreadful unintended consequence. Coding features over multiple days just about completely annihilates the possibility of writing a post. Your brain is fixated on completing the task. Thinking about a post is a distraction that gets in the way of completing the feature. Most likely the next post will be about the feature you are working on, so it might be easy to just cobble together some thoughts about the current work and get the post out of the way. But you end up coding until bed time and so no post.

One idea would be to write small apps only - apps that get finished in under a day. But that prevents anything of any great power from being accomplished. Any app of any significance has a lot of code - tens of thousands of lines of code.

Well, for the last few days, I have been working on an app that may help solve some of these issues

vA3C Hacker is a breakaway from vA3C viewer in both thought process and coding style.

The HTML home page is 47 lines. All it does is load whatever script it is asked to load. If you don't tell it to load anything, then it just loads a page that informs you of scripts it could load for you.

What I have been doing is writing scripts that 'feed the beast'. Most are just a few dozen lines at most. Projects that were completed in a few hours. It sort of reminds me of the the early versions of WordPress. Then, if you went to login.php or page.php you came upon virtually everything to do with that particular function. You needed to go nowhere else to see or understand what that script did.

This made WordPress very easy to lean and to feel comfortable with. And it's the feeling I am getting with Hacker. Today I added two more features: the ability to drag and drop files into the app and the ability to drag 3D objects around in the 3D space. Both are totally standalone. You could quite easily look at the code of either and add one to your app without the other.

The process I am inventing for myself has probably been invented many times before. I just don't know its name and don't know how to search for it. But eventually I will find these out and, hopefully, report back with even greater understanding and more detail.

The other interesting aspect - and difference with vA3C Viewer - is the intent to stand on the shoulders of giants even more. The Viewer does a very nice job of giving access to a wide variety of content - from dozens of algebraic visualizations to dozens of models of aircraft, Hacker should continue doing this and as well begins to give access to a wide variety of code. Of course, the basis WebGL and Three.js - just like Viewer. But, for example, instead of trying to create a geometry editor, Hacker gives access to zz85's Three.js Inspector.

With a bit of luck, the next few days should see Hacker providing easy access to even more 'shoulders of giants'. But the real proof of the potential of the Hacker way of doing things will be the production of blog posts. The more posts you you see the more the efficacy of the system will be demonstrated.

Links

Live: http://va3c.github.io/viewer/va3c-hacker/latest/
Code: https://github.com/va3c/viewer/tree/gh-pages/va3c-hacker
Readme: http://va3c.github.io/viewer/va3c-hacker

Terrain & Terrain Viewer Updates

De Ferranti Gives A Thumb's Up

A large portion of the Jaanga Terrain elevation data originates from Jonathan de Ferranti's Viewfinder Panoramas web site. It is essential therefore to have his approval for the usage and translation of the data.

I emailed Jonathan de Ferranti over the weekend explaining the nature of the Terrain project. He responded quickly saying that the usage of his data in this manner is acceptable. Attribution is requested but not mandatory.

So please do feel free to use the Jaanga Terrain data in any way that you wish. The Jaanga portions of the effort are under an MIT license. And similarly to Jonathan's request: attribution is nice but not required.

Terrain and Terrain Viewer Repositories Now Have Menus

All Jaanga material on the GitHub website is available in two ways. You can view the material as source code at github.com.jaanga/terrain or you can view the material as a web page (using the GitHub Pages feature) at jaanga.github.io.

If you use the latter, there is now a nice and simple menu system that enables you to move around the web pages quickly and easily. There have been a number of previous iterations of of this menu system. This one is the simplest and easiest to maintain/

The goals include

• Write everything only once
• Everything that is written automagically appears on both the source code and the web pages
• Write everything in Markdown format
  
• Everything is turned into HTML automagically

There's quite a bit more to the system, but not that much more - or it would start to get complicated which is what we are trying to avoid.

All of this is worth a post or two in its own right, but for the moment just be happy to be able to Roam the repos more easily.

Links

jaanga.github.io/terrain/readme-reader.html

jaanga.github.io/terrain-viewer/readme-reader.html

New Repository: Terrain Plus

This repository is for smaller data sets/

The gazetteer with over 2000 places names with latitude and longitude has been moved here

The very beautiful 'unicom' elevation data is now here. More about that data in a later post

Link

https://github.com/jaanga/terrain-plus

PNG Viewer r3: Many New Features

There is now a dropdown that allows you to 'travel' to over 2000 locations.

A 'Lighten' button makes very dark PNG files much easier to read 

The major new new element is that every place in the gazetteer that is withing the current tile area is now displayed on the PNG with a little red box. To the right of the box is displayed the name of the location and its elevation. Not that the elevation is just a height relative the the lowest point in the heightmap. It will take a bit more learning about de Ferranti's data to display the actual elevation. But the data should not be good enough so that an object such as a building can be place on the map and not be up in the air or totally underground.

Now that there is a working prototype, the next step will be to add his feature to unFlatland and start adding objects.

Link

jaanga.github.io/terrain-viewer/png-viewer/

  

   

   

Jaanga Pivots Again

Much as I like the thought and idea of blogging in 3D, it looks like I don't do enough of it.  I am already doing more than enough 3D stuff on GitHub, so the work here on the blog is being neglected.

And, on the other hand, there are a lot of matters that I would like to be discussing that relate to coding and 3D and designing that I am not writing enough about.

So here's what I am thinking of doing for the time being:

Jaanga.com - this site - becomes all writing and then all the demos and code are on GitHub - at jaanga.github.io and gitihub.com/jaanga.

Well, the demos and code are already there there. So all I need to do is link to these from time to time from posts here in this blog.

I envisage writing short text-only posts. This could easily be a Tumblr thing, but since I have enough material on Blogger I don't feel the urge to do a big switch. And let's not get into a Blogger versus WordPress thing. I love them all. All of them are adding so much to the blogosphere both in terms of content but also in ways of processing that content. Hats-off to all three.

3D in Blogger with Three.js ~ Day 4: We Have Callbacks!

What's new today for blogging in 3D?

There's a new 'in your face' masthead to your right. Links to last year's apps have been lost for the moment, but a link to the new jaanga organization in GitHub has been added.

The really fun thing was that I added the ability for every post to have its own unique animation. Yesterday, every post could have different data or models but everything just spinned in an identical manner.

Three.js 3D in Blogger ~ Now with Animation

This is day two of 3D blogging and the 3D is improving. As you can see (I hope) data can now be animated.

The idea is to be able to display 3D animations created using Three.js in Blogger headers and posts and, well, anywhere on the page.

So let's see how it's done.

Giving Jaanga A Little 3D Love

In the top right hand corner, there is a colored spinning cube. If you cannot see it, the your browser does not support WebGL.

If you can see it, then welcome to my new little 3D happy bloggy thing!

3D on the web is still a very new thing. Even web sites that are deeply involved and engaged with 3D tend to be mostly 2D based.

The current poplar standard for 3D in your browser is WebGL. WebGL is maintained by the Khronos Group.  You will have to dig quite deeply to find some 3D there.

Have a look at webgl.com, learningwebgl.com and learningthreejs.com. These sites show you images and videos of 3D but do not actually publish 3D in there posts.

So, hey people, get with the program!

If mrdoob.com can do it all in 3D so can all of us.

Jaanga - Now a GitHub Organization

The process of moving Jaanga files from my personal GitHub repository to their own repository on GitHub has begun. Jaanga is now an official GitHub 'organization'. See:

https://github.com/jaanga

This means that ownership of the project can now belong to a number of people and not just to a single individual (me in this case). I urge anybody that wants full collaboration and an ongoing existence for their open-source project to consider moving their project to an organization. It's easy to do.

In moving the project to its own pages, I have - of course - made the source code public. And, I have also made demos that work available using the GitHub gh-pages branch

http://jaanga.github.com

Jaanga WeB3D Real-time R3 Takes Off

Jaanga WeB3D Real-time R3 displaying every stock on the SP500 

As promised at the recent WebGL San Francisco Meetup, the first portion of the code that I presented there is now available on GitHub.

Jaanga Web3D Real-time R3 is ready for you to bang on (ever so lightly, please):

Live demo page
Source code repository

About Jaanga: John Tukey + Exploratory Data Analysis = Awesomeness

John Tukey - courtesy Wikipedia

John Wilder Tukey (June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American statistician.

I am not a statistician and, as yet, have only the vaguest notion of the history and development of statistics and the visualization of data. Therefore there may well be even more wonderful figures in the world of statistics to honor. But for the moment John Tukey provides me with more than enough delight and inspiration.

Why is Tukey so cool?

Tukey invents the computer terms: "bits" and "software". Actually there's a byte more than that.

About Jaanga: Tufte is so Old School, Tufte is so New Cool

We can say that Edward Tufte is the world's chief curator on the visual display of quantitative information. As c2.com says. Tufte wants you to "show people as much data as possible with as little ornamentation as possible". Tufte has been doing this sunce 1975 and there's probably no one better at doing this than Tufte.

But what is the "this" that Tufte does?

About Jaanga: The Deluge of Data

Image from the Economist's Special Report on managing information

If you look at the About Jaanga page it says. "The thesis of this web site is that if the world is to prevail over the deluge of data then entirely new methods of displaying that data must be established."

So what is this "Deluge of Data"?

It's been around for some time. The Boston Globe says five centuries: Information overload, the early years.

Why Do You Want Photorealistic Charts?

From: Creating 3D Chart  in Papervision 3D

A thesis of this site is that those six Bloomberg screens that the aging hedge fund dude stares at will soon become a scenario of a sunset industry.

The Wii/Kinect generation will perform very similar functions but the kids will interact with the numbers in the mileau of an evolved First Person Shooter (FPS).

Instead of numbers flashing there will be flows and patterns and particle physics and more.

So, of course, there will be anti-aliaising, smooth shading and high frame rates per second.

But do you really need shadows, day light and photo realism when you are doing mere data analysis?

Jaanga Roadmap

Test case code showing a portion of the S&P 500

Jaanga is being re-programmed as a widget.

The benefits include:

• No browser plug-in or program install necessary
• No intermediate servers are required

The desired goal: It just works.

Jaanga is an ongoing project. In the next few weeks and months here are some of the features and benefits you might start seeing:

Jaanga Old School

Screen shot of Jaanga Old School - click to enlarge

Here is one of two still images I have of the old Jaanga. Unfortunately I never took any videos while it was in operation.

Jaanga displays every symbol in the S&P 500. Updates occur about every five seconds.

You can pan, zoom and rotate the scene in 3D in real-time while the symbols themselves are moving.