truly scalable tree visualization?

The creators of TreeWiz claim that their tool scales to phylogenetic trees with tens of thousands of nodes. It looks very interesting. I'd like to take a test drive, but their example applet fails with FileNotFoundExceptions.

using XSLT to insert variables into another XSLT

I recently encountered a need at work to insert an XSL variable into an XSL stylesheet. This is fairly easy to do using XSLT. The transformation shown below takes one XSLT and produces an XSLT result tree with a new XSL variable inserted just below the <xsl:stylesheet> element. In this case, the XSL variable is named locale and has the value en.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="xsl:stylesheet">
    <xsl:element name="xsl:stylesheet">
      <xsl:for-each select="@*">
        <xsl:attribute name="{name()}"><xsl:value-of select="."/></xsl:attribute>
      </xsl:for-each>
      <xsl:element name="xsl:variable">
        <xsl:attribute name="name">locale</xsl:attribute>
        <xsl:text>en</xsl:text>
      </xsl:element>
      <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </xsl:element>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="*|@*|text()">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="*|@*|text()"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>


By the way, don't try using <pre> tags to preserve whitespace when trying to post code in Blogger. Blogger's templates don't accommodate <pre> very well and it does bad things to your blog layout.

structural comparison of large trees

InfoVis pundit Tamara Munzner has made an interesting contribution with her TreeJuxtaposer tool. The strategies employed by this tool may yield benefit in my Masters research.

newest joys

Bob DuCharme's XSLT Quickly arrived at my door today courtesy of the nice people at Bookpool. Ever since I tore it out of its protective cardboard cocoon, I have been rapidly filling in the gaps in my knowledge of XSLT and XPath. This is an excellent reference (and a fairly good tutorial) to have if you plan on doing any moderately complex transformations.

I've been listening to Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head. It is quite deserving of the accolades it received last year.

new email

I'm switching to gmail for good. My address is jbshep <AT> gmail <DOT> com, but I will probably just use jason_b_shepherd <AT> acm <DOT> org publicly since I can always change the forwarding on that one.

more zui information

It is becoming easier to find information on ZUIs. Alan Salmoni has written a survey article on ZUIs over at Advogato. Hornbæk et al. also contains a comprehensive view of the ZUI research landscape.

MWAR reunion

Microware (MWAR) had a reunion this summer, which I was unfortunate to have missed. MWAR is the (now defunct) company I interned with while in college.

It's amazing what can happen in the span of 6 years. According to the bios section, one of my MWAR managers ended up getting engaged to one of the gals I went to college with. Weird.

la musique du jour

Music has always served as a heartbeat for my mind, especially when I'm trying to drive through hard problems. I've recently (re)discovered several CDs that have proven helpful as I work through some issues with my Masters work. These include:

Norah Jones - Come Away With Me
Abba - Gold: Greatest Hits
Maurice Ravel - "Bolero"

infotec 2004 revisited

At the request of a co-worker, my Infotec 2004 presentation can be found here.

ian is 1

We were very fortunate to have many members of our family at our house yesterday for Ian's first birthday party. There is a plethora of photos over at Ian's site, but some of my recent favorites are shown below.

drawing ordered trees

Buchheim et al.'s article proposes revisions to Walker's Algorithm for drawing ordered trees. This is probably what I will use to draw the XML document trees on the zoomable canvas as part of my thesis research.

gazing into the future by starring into the past

During my undergraduate days at Buena Vista, I binged on new programming languages and paradigms. I constantly downloaded new compilers and interpreters for various languages. For each language, I would choose a fairly large problem to solve, and would then learn that language using the problem as a sort of final exam. By the time I was done with my B.S. degree, I knew over 15 different languages.

One language I never made it to was Smalltalk. Ralph Johnson's recent comments make me want to go back and pick it up.

Do you want to know what software will be like in ten years? In twenty years? Learn Smalltalk. - Ralph Johnson

It looks like downloading Squeak might be a good place to start.

gmail cometh

Thanks to my good friend, Ravi, I now have a Google Gmail account. You can send mail to my gmail address (jasonbshepherd ~AT~ gmail ~DOT~ com), but I'll probably stick to my Yahoo address as my primary email (jason_b_shepherd ~AT~ yahoo ~DOT~ com). With nice features like Google-searchable email and automatic message threading, I may not stay with Yahoo for long.

palindrome nerdliness

Have you ever wondered what the world's longest recorded palindrome is? I thought you had....