Shane's Blog » General

In-cell Graphing

Shane — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 09:30:11 +0000

The guys from Juice Analytics have put together an interesting series on in cell graphing (parts 1, 2, & 3). This is a feature that is due in the upcoming version of Excel 2007, however the technique the Juice guys use works across all versions of Excel and is quite visually appealing too. Added bonus, I can confirm it works in OpenOffice.org, Gnumeric and even Google Spreadsheets (all to varying degrees).

Data Mining Cup 2006

Shane — Fri, 05 May 2006 03:02:11 +0000

The Data Mining Cup (DMC2006), has launched for 2006. This year the competition focuses on eBay auctions. The target is to predict for each new auction whether the actual sales revenue is higher than the average sales revenue of the product category.

LaTeX Presentations

Shane — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 02:18:05 +0000

Now you can design presentation templates in Inkscape and use them as a LaTeX style. From the LaTeX Presentation Designer website:

The package contains a documentclass called “presentation” which takes as an argument a slide style. The package also provides a simple python program that can interpret SVG files generated by Inkscape and build a slide style, usable by the “presentation” document class, directly from it. This means that creating new custom slide designs is as simple as drawing what you want your slides to look like in Inkscape.

LaTeX based presentation are handy when you want nice looking equations on your slides. Other good alternatives are Beamer and Prosper.

Future of Radio

Shane — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 23:37:50 +0000

You may have listened to Internet radio before, but Pandora is a station of a different kind – totally personalised. Its a Flash based player (sorry Andy!) that sits inside your browser, so no problems with firewalls. But the real innovation is that when you start it up, you tell it the artists you like, and it will attempt to determine what other songs you will like too, and play those to your personal audio stream. As time progresses you can give each song played the thumbs-up or thumbs-down which will further refine what music is played to you!! Its not bad, but they should some more advanced techniques like MusicMiner to better adapt to user tastes.

MusicMiner uses a Self-Organising Maps based technique (”Emergent SOM“) to determine and visualise music similarity:

The major advantage of MusicMiner is obviously you can use it on your own music collection and choose to play a particular song, whereas Pandora you can only define your interests and listen to see what is played. There is no guarantee Pandora will actually play that artist although usually it will eventually.

More on Online Advertising

Shane — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 00:58:29 +0000

I previously blogged about advertisers going troppo for The Million Dollar Homepage. Well, online advertising is hot all over the net and is gaining on all traditional mediums fast. Australian Internet advert spending was AUD$620 Million last year, and will be AUD$1 Billion by the end of the year. Interestingly Internet advertising only accounts for around 6% of Australian advertising budgets even though Australians are spending 15% of their media contact time online.

Everyone can get in on the action, too. Even for small bloggers, it is quite easy to display context-sensitive Google AdSense adverts and make the odd buck from the online advertising revolution. AdSense is based on an auction system, AdWords, where advertisers have to bid for which relevant keywords will trigger their ads to be displayed. As such some keywords are worth significantly more than others. Some people say they are making a living from ad clicks. Take Darren Rowse, for example, a professional blogger who claims an income of $400,000 — just from revenue generated from ad clicks! This may sound too good to be true, and maybe it is – author and Google expert Harold Davis says it is reasonable to expect a profit of USD$10 per page per year from AdSense.

Segway

Shane — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 10:51:21 +0000

Andy acquired a new toy at work: a Segway HT! It was only fitting that I visit and give it a spin! Let me just say, the Segway is one impressive ride — I want one!

Weee!: Me riding the Segway HT.

Cruising: Video of Andy riding the Segway (DivX, 6.6MB)

The Segway website also has a proof-of-concept 4-wheeled product called the Centaur. Awesome! Check out the video too.

Google Maps

Shane — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 01:50:20 +0000

Google Maps now covers the entire world! Some interesting sites include the Pyramids and the Arc de Triomphe. An interesting comparison can be had between The White House, which has blanked out roof tops, and Parliament House… who is alert and who is alarmed?!
It seems only about half of Melbourne is covered in high resolution and none of Geelong is! However Lara is entirely in high res, go figure!! Here are some local maps:

Docklands, Telstra Dome and Spencer St Station
Monash Clayton (horrible resolution!)
Lara SC, Safeway and APCO
Andy’s old house, new house

Andy: since Google Maps uses the same Long/Lat co-ords as Street Directory, I wonder if the two could be combined?