daydreaming

I recommend going to Vimeo so you can watch these in HD and see more details.

These are two visualizations I did of a few days activity on Yahoo Live, Yahoo’s lifecasting/videochat service. On the first one the horizontal axis represents time, and the vertical axis is number of viewers. It is very information dense, so blow it up to full screen and watch a few times; you may see some interesting patterns. A shout out to Phil Pearson for his help with some of the finishing touches.

Visualization of Yahoo Live! (no. 1) from Nikhil B on Vimeo.

This one is a collage showing all the simultaneous channels at once. If you watch carefully you can notice that there are fewer broadcasts at night and more in the morning. You might also catch a glimpse of morning light and evening darkness.

Visualization of Yahoo Live! (no. 2) from Nikhil B on Vimeo

I needed some high resolution mouse cursors for a mockup I was doing, and was unable to find any stock/clipart on the web…so I made some and scaled them to a few sizes. Enjoy.

Mouse Pointers by Nikhil Bobb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

This number was a bit hard to find:
“You can call AT&T DSL Customer Care at 1-877-937-5288 (1-877-XDSLATT), and select the billing prompt.” from the AT&T DSL faq.

update March 28th, 2008
I also just found out that “CA customers can call 858 522 8838 (not tollfree)” at fatwallet. This number was really quick, and went direct to the customer service rep without any menus.

update April 2nd, 2008
If you want dry loop service (DSL without a phone line) you can call the AT&T dry loop department directly at 1-800-942-6037.

Fire Eagle (not fireeagle) is a new location platform from some of my colleagues here at Yahoo! Brickhouse. I’ve put together a simple sample app called whereis which shows off the power of the platform.

What is whereis?

Each instance of whereis lets you share location within a trusted group of people. Whereis does not update location in Fire Eagle, you should do this using other apps (eg. Fire Eagle automatic device updaters, or other sites). This screenshot basically sums it up -

What can I use it for?

• Run it on your intranet to easily share location between your co-workers
• Run it on the internet so friends and family can share location

Who is whereis intended for?

Whereis is intended for developers who have familiarity with Ruby and access to a server.

Why are you releasing it?

It is a simple app (~200 lines of code) built on top of the camping framework. If you understand Ruby and the MVC pattern, it will give you a good idea of how FE works and can be used. I think the code is pretty self explanatory, drop me a line if you have any suggestions.

Continue Reading »

If you want to add a call to all the controllers in your Camping miroframework app you can use before or after overrides. These are similar to the before_filter in Rails.

Remember to return the superclass or Camping will throw a “Read error: #<NoMethodError: undefined method `status’ for nil:NilClass>” because it can’t call back into the returned controller. A modification of the above linked wiki page example illustrates -

Camping.goes :YourApp

module YourSession
  def service(*a)
    @session = YourApp::Session.new
    s = super(*a)
    @session.close
    #return s from above after completing
    s
  end
end

module YourApp
  include YourSession
end