Government posts visualisation with Isotope

I found this visualisation on my server this morning - hadn't looked around the directory structure for ages and forgot I'd made it. I think it's quite cool, might think about carrying on with it in some way or another.



You can play with it here:

http://danpaulsmith.com/apps/postlist_new?dept=dft.

You can replace "dft" with a department acronym (e.g. co, dfe, hmrc...).

Ten years of road deaths (visualisation)

BBC have plotted the road incidents resulting in death for the last ten years in the UK.

I'm sure I've come across this before, but it's a good visualisation.

Simple, meaningful and accurate.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15975720.

Interface fail - iCal (Lion)

After I've carefully and lovingly filled out a calendar entry, I go ahead and click "Delete".

London Tube Station passenger counts - 2009

Transport for London have just released a set of APIs that return various types of transport information for the city. Below is a little bar chart of London tube stations using the Passenger count API. Looking forward to using the APIs in the future!

Interface evolution - Football Manager

This is what will hopefully be the first in many posts on a particular evolving interface - an interface that people use, offline or online. I'm not quite sure what I aim to be talking about, but they'll basically be to express my thoughts and share my observations on what I think are interesting interfaces.

MAudio Audiophile - An ongoing saga

I'm not sure how long I've had this piece of kit, but damn it's been a nightmare. It's literally a matter of luck whether it works and I've always spent just long enough for me to hit a lucky setting or switch that seems to touch it's sweet spot.

I'm documenting what I've done incase anyone else out there is Googling away while pulling their hair out.

SVG-based, linked-data-driven chart widgets

In Feburary I was asked to have a pop at visualising some spending data for some local UK councils. The data was in linked data format (RDF/Turtle) - so stored in a RDF store somewhere and had the Linked Data API layered on top (the Puelia implementation).

The brief was to build an open-source, interactive, cross-browser dashboard of widgets; that would allow the comparison of council's spending data, say, per month.

After a little time spent researching, I came to the conclusion that RaphaelJS (an open-source JavaScript vector library) would fit the bill for this project nicely. The documentation wasn't great (I'm used to that though as I've been using theJIT library for previous visualisation work), but understandable enough to pick some of the demos apart and get the hang of how things worked within a few days.

The great thing about RaphaelJS is that it's simply a drawing library, so you can create a static SVG image of a banana or you can create a animated, multi-coloured, shape-shifting, real-time rotting banana, thanks to being able to manipulate and listen to events on the SVG DOM elements that form the vector image.

How to read your Oyster Card journey history

So as luck has it, I've answered myself while writing this post (one of the many advantages of writing I imagine) - I've left all the writing though because I want you to see what I meant. Post starts from here...

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="138" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

Linked Data API - JSON endpoints

For developers who are familiar and comfortable with JSON - I've gathered a list of linked-data JSON API endpoints, to provide shallow waters (that can still attract the most colourful of fish!) for linked-data beginners.

Organogram work on the BIS department website!

Another public appearance for my work, this time on the Business, Innovation and Skills department website.

Snippet from the site:

"This application is an interactive visualisation for government structure - running in real-time, directlyfrom the organogram data provided by each government department.

Dan Smith is the developer. He wanted to help departments to more easily spot mistakes in their organogram data, and to provide an 'explorer' interface for the public, giving everyone an insight into the structure and responsibilities of posts within departments.

The next version of the visualisation will include the costs of each post."

Installing memcache on Ubuntu 10.04

Another Linux guide, simply because I had to use a mixture of guides to get memcache working for me.

Installing Wordpress 3 on Ubuntu 10 (Dirty)

After spending all day migrating stuff from server to server, finding that some servers were slower than others, trying out different server hosts etc etc, I thought I'd list what I've narrowed down to be the essential steps to setting up your own Wordpress website (as well as your own server based in London) - for only 7.44 a month. Bar. Gain.

London wifi

Been looking for something like this for a while. I'll add my own personal favourites if they aren't included on this map.