Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

Interesting links for January 6th through January 7th:

• Data Visualization: Modern Approaches | Graphics | Smashing Magazine – Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.
  Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization
• louisgray.com: Disqus2FF Mashes Up Fractured Conversations – As the Disqus blog points out, an enterprising Disqus community member, Carter Rabasa, put together a quick application on Google's App Engine, called FF2Disqus. By entering your API key for both Disqus and FriendFeed, assuming you use both services, the tool will check your blog posts on FriendFeed and pull in FriendFeed comments to your site, or send Disqus comments to FriendFeed.
• Closure make File Access so Easy in Groovy « Aldry’s share about Java, Groovy and Grails – Closure is a class that only contain a pieces of code. If you came from C/C++ Closure will be identical to function pointer, but Closure has more capability and better safety mechanism. In this article, I will show you how Closure support in groovy can make file access whether it is read or write operation so easy.
  //Create new file and write to it using withWriter method and with closure argument
  file2 = new File(’c:/mylovepoet2.txt’)
  file2.withWriter{
  writer ->
  writer << ‘oh my sweety\n’
  writer << ‘please come to me’
  }