Where and when to meet?
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
Bram suggested Monday nights, and I don't have anything on Mondays, so
that would work for me. Given that March is almost upon us, I would
think we ought to be able to make either the first or second Monday in
March. The question is "where?"
So:
1. Is the first or second Monday of the month going to work for
everyone? If not, which has fewer conflicts?
2. Where do we want to meet? The only strong preference I have is for
something walking distance from a MAX stop and no further east than,
say, Lloyd Center.
As far as content is concerned, I'd be willing to do a demo of some of
the R exploratory data analysis / visualization tools, especially my
favorite, RGGobi. But further down the line, I'd like to see someone
talk about Processing, visualization in Python, GPU programming, etc.
I know someone at NVidia who might be able to get us a GPU expert.
I've downloaded the toolkit but haven't done anything with it. What
other ideas for themes do people have?
Tim Denney
I'm busy MW 4:30-6:30pm. flexiable on the other days.
I'd really like to see a demo of R, its visualizations, and some
general stats packages. It sounds like what you have in mind would be
perfect!
Visualizations is includes quite a few catagories:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visualization_(computer_graphics)
I could talk on Flash, 3ds max, and a little on beginning processing.
Topics i'd like to see:
visualization toolkits/libraries
KML - Google Earth markup language
Tufte - visual display of quantitative information discussion
Qt
I know I had lots more but I can't think of them at the moment.
Ron Barrett
works for me.
2. Would Cubespace be available? If not, then AboutUs?
NVidia would be an interesting presentation. I have a side interest in
using the GPU for general processing.
Prefuse-Flare are very interesting free visualization toolkits.
Unfortunately, I'm not a coder, so I wouldn't be able to demonstrate their
use other than showing the demos on their website,
http://flare.prefuse.org/.
Ron
Micah Elliott
<zzn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think we have enough people to have at least one physical meetup.
> Bram suggested Monday nights, and I don't have anything on Mondays, so
> that would work for me. Given that March is almost upon us, I would
> think we ought to be able to make either the first or second Monday in
> March.
> 1. Is the first or second Monday of the month going to work for
> everyone? If not, which has fewer conflicts?
Mondays are good for me.
> 2. Where do we want to meet? The only strong preference I have is for
> something walking distance from a MAX stop and no further east than,
> say, Lloyd Center.
Cubespace (not so convenient but most people used to it) or Souk,
or Nedspace?, or maybe even OTBC (I could see if Steve is
interested).
> As far as content is concerned, I'd be willing to do a demo of some of
> the R exploratory data analysis / visualization tools, especially my
> favorite, RGGobi.
Sounds good. Maybe we start with an R night? Who's using it,
why gaining popularity, whirlwind REPL tour, CRAN, favorite
books, strengths/weaknesses, default/alternative vis toolkits.
> But further down the line, I'd like to see someone
> talk about Processing, visualization in Python, GPU programming, etc.
Right. Just don't want to cram too much into the first night.
For a future meeting I could work on something for Python (tried
Ubiety recently, saw VPython demo at PPUG).
> I know someone at NVidia who might be able to get us a GPU expert.
> I've downloaded the toolkit but haven't done anything with it.
What is the toolkit? That's probably less interesting to me, unless
there's a FOSS means to use it.
--
@MicahElliott | m...@MicahElliott.com | http://MicahElliott.com
Sent from: Beaverton Or United States.
Tim Denney
sure if it was too specefic.
I'll probably end up doing a lot of work in it very soon. Maybe I
could give a talk on that in the future.
On Feb 21, 10:26 pm, "Ron Barrett" <ronabarr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. My schedule is pretty open. So, the first or second Monday of the month
> works for me.
>
> 2. Would Cubespace be available? If not, then AboutUs?
>
> NVidia would be an interesting presentation. I have a side interest in
> using the GPU for general processing.
> Prefuse-Flare are very interesting free visualization toolkits.
> Unfortunately, I'm not a coder, so I wouldn't be able to demonstrate their
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
> On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 9:16 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
> <zzn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think we have enough people to have at least one physical meetup.
>> Bram suggested Monday nights, and I don't have anything on Mondays, so
>> that would work for me. Given that March is almost upon us, I would
>> think we ought to be able to make either the first or second Monday in
>> March.
>
>> 1. Is the first or second Monday of the month going to work for
>> everyone? If not, which has fewer conflicts?
>
> Mondays are good for me.
>
>> 2. Where do we want to meet? The only strong preference I have is for
>> something walking distance from a MAX stop and no further east than,
>> say, Lloyd Center.
>
> Cubespace (not so convenient but most people used to it) or Souk,
> or Nedspace?, or maybe even OTBC (I could see if Steve is
> interested).
Yes ... go ahead and ask Steve. I think we're small enough for OTBC,
it's two stops away from *my* MAX station, and Westside Proggers already
meets there. I'm guessing we will grow bigger than OTBC can handle, but
we can deal with that when it happens.
>
>> As far as content is concerned, I'd be willing to do a demo of some of
>> the R exploratory data analysis / visualization tools, especially my
>> favorite, RGGobi.
>
> Sounds good. Maybe we start with an R night? Who's using it,
> why gaining popularity, whirlwind REPL tour, CRAN, favorite
> books, strengths/weaknesses, default/alternative vis toolkits.
OK ... I'll do R for the first meeting. By the way, I have started
rebuilding my main web site in Drupal, so I'll be able to post R stuff
there. I don't know how much I'll be able to say that's credible about
comparing R with other things, though, since I am
a. An R fanatic
b. Totally inexperienced with other visualization toolkits.
I *have* used some of the more traditional statistics packages like
Minitab and SPSS, but those comparisons are well documented and it boils
down to two things -- R is free and open source vs. the others being
proprietry, and R deliberately by design is a programming language vs.
the others are statistics packages that you *can* program but shouldn't
have to.
> Right. Just don't want to cram too much into the first night.
> For a future meeting I could work on something for Python (tried
> Ubiety recently, saw VPython demo at PPUG).
Yeah ... also, you might want to check out Sage (http://sagemath.org).
It's written in Python and wraps just about every open source math
package available, including R.
> What is the toolkit? That's probably less interesting to me, unless
> there's a FOSS means to use it.
Well, the NVidia drivers are proprietary, although all the community
distros give you hooks to install them. That's a battle the open source
geeks aren't likely to win any time soon for a variety of reasons.
Here's a link if you're interested.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html
In the long run, I do think open source will make some inroads into
these areas, but it's going to be similar to what happened with Java.
There are probably hundreds of people who had to sign off on that before
it could be done.
>
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://www.linkedin.com/in/edborasky
I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.
Ragav Satish
I work there.
I could possibly demo my wordmap tool. I've used flare some so I can
talk about it.
I'd also like to see some discussion about the engines/math/physics
behind many of the toolkits. Projective/hyperbolic geometry, Linear
transformations, quaternions, force-directed methods ... My personal
experience has been that any sufficiently complex visualization
eventually involves pushing the toolkit enough that you have to get into
the guts of it.
I've also been playing with papervision. So I could give a talk about
that sometime in the future
I've used R occasionally for statistics and I have some concrete
problems that could benefit right now with a better visual presentation,
so I'm looking forward to the R talk.
--Cheers
--Ragav
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
> Once a date is decided I can check with cubespace for availability since
> I work there.
OK ... BTW, for those commuting from the West Side to CubeSpace via
Tri-Met, it's pretty easy. Going in, you take the MAX to Goose Hollow,
walk east to the bus stop, get on the #6 and get off at Alder and Grand.
Coming back, you walk to Grand and Morrison, get on the #15 that runs
west on Morrison, get off next to the PGE Park station and get on the
MAX there.
>
> I could possibly demo my wordmap tool. I've used flare some so I can
> talk about it.
Sounds great! Looks like we have enough to get us into May / June
already. By the way, speaking of June, I encourage everyone who's got
some open source stuff they want the world to hear about to submit a
proposal for Open Source Bridge. The CFP is
http://opensourcebridge.org/call-for-proposals/.
I've submitted one on the Linux I/O stuff I've been building.
>
> I'd also like to see some discussion about the engines/math/physics
> behind many of the toolkits. Projective/hyperbolic geometry, Linear
> transformations, quaternions, force-directed methods ... My personal
> experience has been that any sufficiently complex visualization
> eventually involves pushing the toolkit enough that you have to get into
> the guts of it.
Meaning down to the hardware? :) I can recommend the book _SIMD
Programming Manual for Linux and Windows_. The tools associated with
that book are open source and can be downloaded from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vectorpascalcom
I haven't done anything with this recently. I downloaded it back when I
bought the book, but had some problems getting it running and moved on
to doing the Linux I/O thing that I've been hacking on. :)
>
> I've also been playing with papervision. So I could give a talk about
> that sometime in the future
Sounds good ... that takes us into July. :)
Ragav Satish
> > I'd also like to see some discussion about the engines/math/physics
> > behind many of the toolkits. Projective/hyperbolic geometry, Linear
> > transformations, quaternions, force-directed methods ... My personal
> > experience has been that any sufficiently complex visualization
> > eventually involves pushing the toolkit enough that you have to get into
> > the guts of it.
>
> Meaning down to the hardware? :) I can recommend the book _SIMD
> Programming Manual for Linux and Windows_. The tools associated with
> that book are open source and can be downloaded from
>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/vectorpascalcom
:-) No .. not *that* far. I have enough trouble getting into the
algorithmic guts of toolkits. If I have to get down to the SIMD level
I'm throwing in the towel.
--Cheers
--Ragav