Teaching old code new tricks

Posted by Chris Ball Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:58:00 GMT

ExploreTree

Over the July 4th weekend, I found time to release the tree visualizer that Mad and I wrote for the Processing Time code jam a few months ago. Mad's worked on it some more since the code jam, adding a search function, options for specifying font size and the tree depth shown, and a link from each node to its Wikipedia page. The program's available as an applet now, at:

http://exploretree.org/

Feedback welcome, especially if it doesn't work for you and you're able to figure out why.

Bugs Everywhere

Bugs Everywhere, everyone's favourite distributed bugtracker, has been seeing a decent amount of work lately thanks to some strong efforts:

It's nice to keep momentum going on some small projects. Counter-intuitively, I think it's much easier not to get tired of programming when you're working on code for work and different code outside of work, than when you're just concentrating on the code for work.

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Processing Time

Posted by Chris Ball Sun, 03 May 2009 15:28:00 GMT

Madeleine and I took part in the Processing Time code jam yesterday, and won a prize! Processing is a programming language for creating data visualizations, which Mad's been using to create graphs for papers recently. Our entry was a program that takes a description of a tree (in Newick format) and draws it, allowing you to zoom in to explore large trees.

The example we used, and the motivation for creating the program, was the phylogenetic tree of life. Since creating this comic, Mad's wanted a way to create a zooming interface to explore the same, but we didn't get around to it until we were put in the setting of having four hours to code and then present something. It was a lot of fun; I did the boring part of walking a tree recursively, and Mad worked out the geometry for a radial graphing algorithm that splits points along the edge of a semi-circle equally between end leaves of the tree.

For now, the code's in this Processing sketch archive, but we're hoping to make an applet out of it soon. Hat tip to the authors of TreeJuxtaposer, whose Newick format parser we used.

Here's the obligatory screenshot — zoomed in on part of the mammals section — which isn't very exciting since the whole point is to explore the tree interactively:


Thanks to the organizers and other participants for such a fun day; it's great to be given motivation to work on something fun, and lovely to be recognized for it too.

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