One of my favorite pet things to learn about is data
visualization. Another pet is automation. Another pet is computers
interacting in ways other than the usual "computer" - like through
or with different hardware.
So I was reading today about using Lava Lamps to monitor
development build status. Often there are tests to tell the status
of development builds. This would be similar to when you are
building a webpage and you have links to other pages: some work and
some don't (if you mis-typed them). If a system automatically
tested each link and reported to you: that's very similar to what
development build tools to for programming/coding.
If a build failed (there are bad links), then a red lava lamp
gets lit. If the build is good: a green one. So, at any time, you
can look at the lights and get status of the most recent build.
This alone is cool, but the beauty comes from the nature of a
lava lamp: the lava heats up, right? So you are communicating not
just most recent status, but also "age" of that status (more lava
flowing = older). Of course this breaks down at some point (the
lava only gets so alive).
I thought that was an interesting way of communicating
information in an external device.
On Dataviz:
Page with a bunch of graphs:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/
Video with an animated way to show global UN data: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/140