Words occurrencies of Horror

As the whole world, I have been horrified by those event in Norway’s events which occurred several days ago.
I have been moved as a man, as a dad, as an artist, as a world’s citizen.

I wanted to work more on it but I didn’t have time.
So, I used the wordle.net tool and produced a data visualization of the words occurrencies of the mad man’s text/manifest.
It only shows the 250 more repeated words without the most common english words (like “the”, “of” etc)

The text contains 1518 pages, 772632 words, 4073914 non spaces characters.
I’m not interested at all by reading it but I want to process it more & more in order to analyze it or help to analyze it.

You can click on it, grab it, spread it.

I’d like to have more time to visualize more patterns, more schemas.
I’ll try if some people would request it.

Take care & peace.

IMPURE, a graphical framework for data visualization

I discovered very lately this powerful graphical programming framework.
Its main purpose is data visualization.

As Ben Fry defined the data visualization field of knowledge, in order to achieve a whole project of data viz (the short name often used), you have to process 7 tasks:
- acquire
- parse
- filter
- mine
- represent
- filter
- interact

The last step can be put on the side, as some authors made, but I consider it to be a real & strong step in this big process because it provides the human/machine interface necessary & sufficient to people to manipulate/change/alter the filter (often) and makes them better understanding the purpose.

There are a lot of librairies to achieve that on the web.
By using Proce55ing, you can “easily” grabbing data, processing them & visualize them too.

Processing provides a core .jar (BIG java library) but a light IDE too.
You can download it and test it for free here: http://processing.org/download
A bunch of examples are available and there is a strong community too.

In the case of Processing, you have to code using a JAVA overset of the official library.
A lot of functions visualization-oriented are coded especially for you but… in the end you have to type lines of code!

If you don’t want to dive into a code language but if you want to make strong data viz, just make a try withIMPURE
Please, just do it now !

Bestiaro (the startup behind it) defines it like that:

Impure is a visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information. With impure is possible to obtain information from very different sources; from user owned data to diverse feeds in internet, including social media data, real time or historical financial information, images, news, search queries and many more. Impure is a tool to be in touch with data around internet, to deeply understand it. Within a modular logic interface you can quickly link information to operators, controls and visualization methods, bringing all the power of the comprehension of information and knowledge to the not programmers that want to work with information in a professional way.

Those folks are clear & precise, they just invite us & provides us a strongly art/design oriented framework to build from light to complex data visualizations!

Basically, it is all about boxes & patch cords.
You probably know Max5, another graphical programming framework with a less precise purpose, but with a so powerful & strong implementation… It is “a bit” like that.

You connect some objects between them and those objects make their job!
The framework is actually supported only for your browser (that is the fate of all applications & software one day or the other).
But it just proves that our browsers are strong frameworks to parse JS & HTML5 & Flash scripts & binaries!
We already knew that, but it is another reminder

The result, at the end of this tree of patched objects, are pretty nice visualization which can help you to analyse data, or to represent them for a public who don’t care about abstract arrays of numbers.

You can check their flickr gallery too.

I contacted them and they are nice & gave me a feedback about IMPURE.
Indeed, I wanted to know more about further implementation & especially about the fact I’d be very interested by a local implementation (I mean, outside of the browser)

As I’m beginning a big personal project about data viz inside an immersive system, I’d be very interested by plugging it to Max5, for instance.
The AS3 under the hood isn’t open-source, but I hope it will be 

Feel free to contact me, as I’m currently working a bit with IMPURE.
And spread the word for them, they just deserve that!

API & Ableton’s CEO words

Gerhard, I met one time in my life, is a very smart person.
He understood a lot of things around software development and his words about opensource are nice for me.
He wrote this http://cec.concordia…es_ableton.html

About API,
API are those pieces of software that brings the VERY internal stuff from guts of the proprietary program to the air, to us.
Through these elements, another programmer can reach data models exhibited to the visible surface of proprietary programs.
I’m pretty sure that API number will increase in the very close future.
They will, because it has already begun !
Twitter, Ableton Live, Delicious and almost everything have API today!

Before Max for Live, which written in the rock the Cycling74 / Ableton collaboration, some guys and I worked with Live remote scripts Python codes. Some reverse-engineered and forbidden things have been done and we already began to manipulate some objects under the hood of Live (wow!) because they had let the door opened!

Now, it is a pleasure with max for live.
The protodeck controller uses the Live API
it means those knobs manipulate DIRECTLY those famous LOM (Live Object Model)
So my VERY opensource diy controller works, through the MIDI standard + the official Live API, directly with Ableton Live full proprietary software!
And the implementation is VERY tight!
I really can control THE WHOLE software through that.
A bit of Javascript, some routines are used for that too .. but still in an opensource mode!

So what is the point ?
Proprietary software & opensource software can live together.
In the Max for Live case, the opensource is only the spirit, the way of mind, cause they are proprietary.. ok.
But the objects created by someone can be use by another one.
More, through Python door that still exists inside Live, you can use some OSC classes + some Pure Data patches in order to control Live: the perfect wedding?

The future is: every artist will become a programmer even a bad one, or will die.
I’m not very sure about that but it reminds me Jamie Zawinski and his email law.
So even if I’m not the famous hacker, it is my blog and I can write that, and believe a bit!