Strangely enough...

It appears that those who can remember that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" are condemned to repeat it.

Pity John Bolton's Family...

...because he's about to withdraw from the nomination to spend more time with them.

I'll bet he kicks the dog, too.

Proper Reverence

A great post at Pharyngula.

Data Loom for Windows

Yesterday I released the Windows version of Data Loom, my implementation of Alfred Inselberg's Parallel Coordinates visualization.

I was quite happy with the Mac version of the program, and the most important features from it translated perfectly well to Windows. The best features are translucent traces - so where there is a concentration of many traces, it appears more prominent than in areas of less dense coverage - and simple but powerful selection: you can select simply (just drag around trace vertices), or toggle-select (hold down the Shift key), or accumulate-select (hold down the Ctrl key), or - and this has always been the most useful, to my surprise - hold down both Ctrl and Shift to refine-select, that is to select from among the already-selected traces.

This new implementation is written in C# and requires the .NET libraries (which I'm finding is a significant impediment to adoption, in both this and my exploratory sequence analysis program). I didn't look, even once, at the original Mac C++ implementation, and it still took just two easy weeks. I left off some of the bells and whistles of the original - we'll see whether there's any demand to restore them - but still, I'm very pleased with the pace that C# lets me work at. And TDD - until I got to the interface elements, this was almost 100% test-driven. I still don't "get" how to test-drive user interfaces, despite Phlip's best efforts - but I keep trying.

If you'd like to use Data Loom, Windows or Mac, you can get it from the Yahoo group.