I had a totally awesome day at IBM today, crunching some data and
doing some nifty photocloud visualizations of all the people who had
blogged about a certain topic. I sorted it by domain in order to
collocate people from the same lab, and resized the photos according
to the number of posts they had made, linking each picture to the
respective blogs. I then ran the same analysis on their bookmarks.
Next week, I'm going to do a 2D plot… =)

It was _tons_ of fun hacking together a little Java program to do the
analysis. I had to look up a lot of things in order to do the first
program. It took me a while to dump SAX in favor of DOM, but once I'd
gotten the XML parsing code out of the way, I wrote the data analysis
quickly. My code wouldn't win points for elegance or efficiency, but
it works. I wish I had either Ruby or Python on that system – heck, I
could do this stuff in Emacs Lisp. I think I'll go install the Windows
versions of my favorite programming languages as soon as possible,
although I might have to clear it with IBM first.

Today put me firmly back in the programming/hacking camp. I couldn't
pry my fingers off the keyboard. =) Mark had to call me to make sure I
didn't miss the 3:55 bus. I just had so much fun writing glue code and
crunching all the data. In terms of geek stuff, this is where I
belong…

There is a classic story related about a Persian cat. Perusha-neko ni
kanren shita furui o-hanashi ga arimasu.