So I'm not completely hopeless after all… ;) Hanging out with
uber-geeks at events such as the International Game Developers
Association social last night has made me feel really non-technical,
but a full day of good hacking's made me feel okay again. I finally
got the hang of the prefuse visualization library for Java. It didn't
have documentation and it doesn't have much of a Google footprint, but
I used my mad source-reading skills to piece things together, cobbling
together pieces from different demos and diving through the API for
things I know should be there.

Java was, as usual, a pain to deal with, cross-platform – version
incompatibilities with my browser plugin at the beginning! – but after
a lot of searching, I finally got that all sorted out. I was very
happy to get the visualizations to work, and a couple of people in the
Cambridge lab had fun with it too.

It's good that I've found something for drawing polished, interactive
visualizations. =) All I need to do now is learn graphviz so that I
can also be an ubercool researcher. ;)