In order to get around Bell Sympatico's bittorrent throttling I recently switched to Azureus (aka Vuze). If you switch to the "classic" UI mode, it has some stunning visualizations of what's happening with your torrents.

The main screen contains a bit more information than you might need, but if you play with the columns that are visible (right click on the headers) you can get something like this:

What you've got there is downloading torrents at the top and finished ones at the bottom. Green happy faces are currently in progress. Gray ones are queued. In the bottom right corner you can see that my total download speed is 311 kilobytes per second, and total upload is 50kB/s (I'm on ADSL).

Suppose I want to zoom in on one particular torrent — double click on it. This shows each of the peers I'm connected to. What pieces of the file do they have? How far complete are they in total? Bittorrent downloads files in chunks and it does the chunks randomly, not from start to end, so this information can be interesting.

The above shows me EVEN MORE details if I really want it (OK, some of this stuff is really excessive). It shows which of the pieces I've got (blue) and which ones are downloading (in red). Just in case you wanted to know...

Swarm (above) is an actual animation of the pieces of the file as each of your peers around the edges send the bits to you in the middle. And it also shows the reverse as well. And the pie charts show how much of the torrent each peer has. Wild stuff.

So, that's if you want to know what's happening with one particular torrent. But what if you want to know about your overall connection with all the different peers and torrents? Well, Azureus gives loads of graphs and charts for that as well.

This one is your overall bandwidth monitor:

Nice. I love staring at this one. It's a really good example about how to cleanly show multiple related variables in a time-based chart (aka histogram). For the top one, the blue filled area is your download speed. Really interesting is the gray line, which is the average download speed of the SWARM. In other words, what is your average peer getting? If you're below this line, then you're getting screwed — or there's something wrong with your configuration. If you're above it, you're doing well. It's a good way to get a quick fix on the health of your downloads as compared to other users. It also makes it really easy to see if you're being rate-limited by your ISP.

On the bottom half, you can see that I've enabled Auto-Speed and it's automatically cranking the max upload speed up and down based on measuring my bandwidth and other factors that I'm not too clear on.

There's other visualizations but those are my favourites. Some of them aren't really documented and I don't really understand exactly what they mean (transfers and vivaldi for example). Still, obviously one of the azureus open source developers is a data viz keener and s/he's done some fine work.

When I first saw this, I thought, hey cool! Then I took a screenshot and when it came through in the screenshot, that was even cooler. It's not often you get something like this. Memory corruption, maybe, not terminal, and not detected by the graphics software. My laptop gets hot sometimes, maybe the memory got corrupted that way? It happened on wake from sleep. Anyway, voila.

It sort of went away when it redrew areas of the screen but not completely, so I restarted.

A bunch of links and things.

Ahree Lee created (or is creating?) an amazing short film. Starting in 2001 she started to take a picture of herself, every day, in the same pose. As of 2004, she created a short film called Me in which the images are flashed at you at the rate of about one week per second. If you want to download the film, you can use mplayer (like I did...) with something like this from your unix shell. (Note that the rtsp URL might change, you can get it from AtomFilms web page / View Source.) (Also note that I had to insert a backslash in front of the exclamation mark, probably inserted by atomfilms to foil script kiddies trying to use this method.) I think you could do some cool analysis of the images over time.

mplayer -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream 'rtsp://shockreal.edgestreams.net/real.atomshockwave-secure_!/me_300.rm?auth=caEascHb6b7dRbpdudXcLbKdibBaHbDbbdP-be81D5-cOW-REAwJrGowGoHn3wlB&aifp=123&span=10800' 

My cousin Suzanne Thoma finally has a website. She still sings but mostly she's now a freelance graphic designer. My opinion: website needs some work. I'm not sure that my parents would be able to navigate it.

How to create little bar charts inside the cells of an Excel spreadsheet looks useful and pretty easy to do. Generally speaking Excel's graphing sucks, and it looks like the Excel 12 graphs aren't going to get any better. Apple's iWord graphs are somewhat better but not perfect and some important graph types are missing.

Finally, let's hear it for art: The Grooming of the Woodside Man V1 by Simon Donikian and The Grooming of the Woodside Man V4 .

Enough for now...

Can you tell the difference any more?

Go to the source to find out.

I'm always super pissed off with the Camino bookmarks browser because I can't organize my bookmarks and view the pages at the same time. (Safari is no better.) In fact I was never happy about the transition from drawer to bookmarks panel but hey, what can you do. The drawer wasn't popular.

Anyway, here's a new idea which I think would make organizing my bookmarks a lot easier . I can never remember what all my bookmarks are for, and having a little preview would make it a lot easier to sort them out. So, with this floating around in my head somewhere I was pretty impressed with the "now playing" box in iTunes where you can see a live preview of video podcasts that you've downloaded.

So, here is a concept drawing of what Camino bookmarks browser would look like if it had a preview pane. Thoughts? Email me! sbwoodside@yahoo.com (my public/spammable email address).

I actually made up a design for a unified drawer design for the Camino browser, ages ago, which I thought was pretty cool at the time. Unfortunately at this time Camino was about to ditch the drawer (against my wishes). I don't browse full screen, and I think most people don't ... but I lost that argument.

This is one of my original concept drawings. The idea was to merge the HI for three things (bookmarks, history, and tabs (aka "sessions") into a single list. One part of this design which is still innovative is that the list of tabs (or "sessions") was universal to the whole app, and it didn't matter what window you looked at them in. I thought that was cool.

A later iteration took the merging a step farther. Note that this was drawn before tabbed browsing was invented!

Finally, a contribution from someone else (sorry, I have no record of who..) which clearly is a precursor to the Omniweb thumbnail tabs. I bet Omni ripped it off... They have the guts to make this kind of leap.

In response to my post Rui noted some pics of what purports to be an Apple 'iHome'. The photos aren't photoshopped, but it looks to me like a mock up. I did some "forensic analysis" in photoshop (I've been doing a lot of image processing lately).

I used photoshop's edge-detection convolution code to locate any strong/fast colour gradients in the image. This is a good way to find hard-to-see features.

This first big clue showed up using Find Edges and Levels. There's an extra horizontal line on the back of the box between what should be the top edge and the apple logo.

Also what are those vertical lines that run across the ports? They look a bit like the lines that appear in transparent shrink-wrap packaging.

This image of the front of the box shows what appear to be the edges of a card or inserted sheet of paper under a plastic wrap.

Plastic wrap might also explain the rainbow line effect that is visible across the dvd slot. Due to thin-film interference (diffraction).

For the next images I used Levels and Hue/Saturation. The blocking comes from JPEG.

Home run. There's a tell-tale colour transition on both sides between the card and the background material. The card shows up more brownish in the top pic, the background/box material as purple-ish. This indicates two different kinds of material.

My thresholding algorithm for semacode is getting pretty good I think. Check out these results on the classic "Barbara" computer graphics test image.

Next up we have my threshold of the image (adaptive, with an algorithm based on Chow and Kaneko, but the bimodal detector isn't as good as theirs)

Finally, by comparison, a threshold of the image by the person at this page . Mine is better in some places (like the fabric grain and the hand) but not as good in others (like the face).

(If you go there you can also see what you get with global threshold, which isn't as good.)

The Gallery of Computation

More: The Processing gallery (I liked Tokyo).

A cool timeline with pictures .