Fooling with Graphviz:

Radial graph

digraph G {

"a" -> "b";
"a" -> "c";
"a" -> "d";
"a" -> "e";
"a" -> "f";
"a" -> "g";
"a" -> "h";
"a" -> "2";
"a" -> "3";
"a" -> "4";
"a" -> "5";
"a" -> "6";
"a" -> "7";
"a" -> "8";
"a" -> "9";
"a" -> "10";
"a" -> "11";
"a" -> "12";
"a" -> "13";
"a" -> "14";
"a" -> "15";
"a" -> "16";
"a" -> "17";
"a" -> "18";
"a" -> "19";
"a" -> "20";
"a" -> "21";
"a" -> "22";
"a" -> "23";
"a" -> "24";
"a" -> "25";
"a" -> "26";
"a" -> "27";
}

Rendered with: $ twopi -Tpng sample116.dot -o sample116.png

This works quite well with just a handful of nodes, but with node numbers in the dozens and hundreds, edge length for the outer nodes increases dramatically. There doesn’t seem to be a way to pack this sort of graph tightly for lots of nodes.

Judging by the 11,000 bookmarks on Del.cio.us and the 3,000 diggs on Digg, the brand-new bitmap-to-vector service from Stanford got off to a good start. The professionals are impressed, too.

Me? I’ve done some auto-tracing in Inkscape, which does a good enough job for my needs. Still, I’ve just put a number of graphics through Vector Magic that I had sitting around from many years ago: ink-on paper line art of mine that I scanned and reduced to aliased gifs way back in time. Vector Magic did really well on them. Here’s a side by side comparison.

View the complete slide show, have fun with open-source icons.

According to Ohloh, WordPress consists of two million lines of code now. This seems a lot if compared against the code base of competing open-source site-building kits such as Joomla and Drupal but still pales in comparison with the gargantuan OpenOffice.org.

Surprisingly, Google Trends reports that Joomla has had a higher search volume than WordPress since mid-2005. It still beats Web 2.0 though, but loses to Paris Hilton.

The Web is Agreement · Historical Roadmap[1] · Map of Online Communities · Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0 · Crucial DNA of Web 2.0 · Logo 2.0, Part I · Logo 2.0, Part II · Yourdon’s Mindmap · Map of the Internet · Periodic Table of the Internet · Web 2.0 Innovation Map · Web 2.0 Map · Web 2.0 Map · Web 2.0 Meme Map · VisiBone Country Chart · Data Mining: Mapping the Blogosphere · Web 2.0 Around the World · The Million Dollar Homepage

—-
[1] This map was presented by Tim Berners-Lee as part of his Short History of the WWW, delivered in October 2007.

Pop! (needs Flash)

I’ve just mixed a few of my students’ feeds into a new site: Tawawa.SuprGlu.com.

This isn’t going to become permanent, but a similar project might get going soon…

By the end of March, I’ll be leaving this university and I’ll need to clear out of my office. What to do with the data on those two computers? I’ve been lazy and unsystematic about doing backups, and I’m not so happy about the CD-Rs I’ve burned.

The other day I went to an electronics store and looked at external hard drives: why not copy the whole lot onto a portable drive and be done with it?

While discussing the issue with a computer scientist, we got to talk about network backups. I asked him to explain why he liked the idea so much. And he did:

Just before I learned about StrongSpace I was thinking that such a system needed to exist. The reason is that there are some problems with backups:

1. People forget to do them or don’t bother because they are inconvenient.
2. If they are located in the same machine as the original data they are not protected from catastrophes (e.g. fire).
3. Making a backup means you have another copy of your data floating around, which means others could steal that data and see all your naked people pictures and health records and stuff.

Offsite backups (to a file server someplace) solve some of these problems. You use a script that is run every so often, and it magically uploads your stuff to some network storage space. However, transmitting data over the internet means that it is inherently less secure: people could sniff the packets as you transmit them, and the network admins running your internet storage can see what your files are. Ethically, they should not care, but I do know that sysadmins snoop. Plus if the police come asking for your data the sysadmins have to provide it. From a security standpoint you would prefer that the sysadmins are unable to see what is going on.

Strongspace almost solves the entire problem. It provides a connection that is probably secure for your data, and it provides lots of space. If your office catches fire you can still get your data, and if the StrongSpace servers catch fire then you have the data in your office. That is good.

The only weakness is that the sysadmins can still snoop on your files. There are ways around this (encrypted or doubly-encrypted filesystems, or just encrypting your tarballs before sending anything), but StrongSpace does not make that easy.

Network backups are the wave of the future. StrongSpace excited me because I knew of nobody else that realized this enough to offer committed hosting for backups.

Keeping the stuff online would have its benefits, too, because it would remain accessible from anywhere. But then most of the stuff won’t need to be accessible from anywhere because I probably won’t ever look at it again. Maybe I don’t need to catch the wave of the future just yet, so, after all, I’ll buy an external drive for stashing it away offline. We’ll see.

Bloglines has been very frustrating of late — in some cases feeds weren’t updated for several days. Happily, the people who run the service seem to be aware of the problem. Their news release from a couple of days ago says:

We’re not going to beat around the bush about this. Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately. Why? In short, Bloglines has been busting at the seams like the Incredible Hulk.

All of us here at Bloglines have been foregoing sleep and social lives over the past several months to keep Bloglines running and preparing for our move to a new access center (with bigger britches and a very elastic waistline).

So hang tight because there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The move will happen soon; we’ll keep you posted.

Incredible Hulk? Sucked eggs? The entry might be hard to understand for anybody who has a perfectly fine command of the English language yet happens to lack familiarity with American colloquialisms and cultural references.

Here’s a translation:

We have to admit that Blogline’s performance has been very poor lately. Why? Because Bloglines has been growing at an incredible rate.

All of us here at Bloglines have been working overtime for the past several months to keep Bloglines running. We’re also preparing for our move to a new data center, which will provide us with more processing power and sufficient room for future growth.

So please be patient because things are going to improve. The move will happen soon; we’ll keep you informed.