I first encountered the Heatmap visualization in CrazyEgg. At the time I thought it was a nifty way to draw attention to popular sections of a site. Today via Ajaxian, I discovered an interesting jQuery plugin - aptly named “HeatColor“, which brings heatmap style visualizations to tabular data sets. HeatColor is a great idea and I can see it being useful in a number of scenarios to help a user identify/highlight areas of concern/interest. I will certainly be using it instead of sortable jquery plugins.

I’ve been researching code generation techniques for my PHD proposal. I was pleasantly surprised to find code model to code generators that output code for Spring and Hibernate:

• AndroMDA
• Sculptor

I’ve not had time to explore either yet, but hope to get my hands dirty this weekend.

In the mood for some light hearted mathematics (I lie, but the video medium makes it look simple)? If yes check out this video on Moebius Transformations.

JRuby is a way into the enterprise for Rails.

…. and believe me the enterprise needs Ruby and Rails and well yes Oracle too ….

Glad to see Sun and Oracle embrace Rails and Ruby so passionately in recent months.

Check out Oracle Mix.

Just how precise can vectorization get? Ever wondered?

Well pretty exact if you try Vector Magic - an online tool.

I’ve loved the Express Editions of Visual Studio for a while now - they get the job done, are not bloated and are a fraction of the Visual Studio install. This makes the Facebook Development ToolKit for Visual Studio Express very tempting.

…. there is even a Facebook PopFly block! Microsoft sure seem keen….

Adobe have announced that they wont be developing a new version of Authorware. I guess this means the end, unless Authorware is made open source. The only real way for Authorware to survive would have been for it to output to the Flash file format. I guess I feel sad having started my career building educational multimedia software.

Room 401 is the best new show on TV (if you get MTV). Its a totally creepy supernatural like version of Punked. We can thank Ashton Kutcher for this one as well - so cute and so talented

There’s a new version of TinyMCE. Don’t look for too many new features, but you can look for valid XHTML output.

Three months ago I would have tried the copy from Word cleanup, but as I no longer work on a LMS, I really don’t care. ….and believe me at my last job I had enough of migrating content from one LMS to another that had bad HTML. Word cleanups only went so far and JTidy never got updated.

I have a tip. If you really want to convert that Word doc to HTML:

1. Get a Gmail account
2. Send the word doc as an attachment to yourself
3. Receive the email
4. Click the link to view the attachment as HTML
5. View the source and see clean, pure HTML

Ruby, my favourite programming language is taking over the world. I have proof:

1. JRuby reached V1 this year
2. I can run Ruby on Rails apps on GlassFish
3. IronRuby runs in a browser via Silverlight (meaning .NET does Ruby)
4. Ruby is pioneering Behavior Driven Development with RSpec and RBehave
5. …..and we have BuildR - a Java build tool written in Ruby

Ruby promotes Language Oriented Programming - we need domain specific languages to do the task at hand not Java or C# syntax to do any job.