Of course I had to go back and dig up my old Diablo 2 discs, reinstall them and play some D2. It's still a blast. I'm ready for D3.

It's official.

UPDATE:
After watching a bit of the (somewhat choppy) gameplay trailer, I'm very excited. The absolute best thing I saw in the trailer was when the barbarian knocked over a wall to crush a load of zombies! Now I just have to wait for Blizzard to release this.

Reading tea leaves for Diablo fans.

For my birthday, Susan, along with input from noizehole, got me a cool little preamp which will let me rip my vinyl and tapes. I got started with it today. Combined with Audacity, ripping albums is a snap.

I got two old Glass Eye albums done today, which makes me very happy. This also means that I'll finally be able to preserve their old demo tape, which must be on the verge of death by now given how much I played it and how old it is. I'll also be able to get a bunch of old out of print stuff and stuff that was only ever released on tape into my music library. What a great present.

I've successfully made it through another SXSW Interactive.

I've been to a couple of these now, and they've both been pretty interesting, even if I'm not the target for the conference. The main target seems to be designers and small web companies doing web programming. There's not a lot of panels geared towards programmers who work in large companies or on big, complicated business applications. But, that doesn't mean I can't learn anything.

I saw several good talks over the last few days. A few of the subjects: AJAX and Flash mistakes, scalability issues, Sci-Fi's influence on UI design, wireframing, and client side code and internationalization. That last one (client side code and I18N) was really informative. Google has thought a <b>lot</b> about I18N, and it showed in this presentation. I learned a few new things there and got even more daunted by how hard it is to get I18N really right.

And it wasn't all talks. We wandered through the Screenburn arcade to look at some of the games and saw some interesting sights.

Sadly, though, it's come to a close, and now I have to go back to work tomorrow.

OK, since seeing Guitar Hero, and now Rock Band, I've been saying that those would be great if you could use a real guitar and use the game as a learning tool. It seems that I'm not the only person who had this idea.

Guitar Wizard is apparently to be debuted at CES soon, and although the info at BoingBoing is slim, it looks like Guitar Wizard could be that teaching tool. Now I just need to wait for a bass version to come out and figure out how much it would cost to get a MIDI pickup on my bass.

So the past couple of days at work, I've been working on a small data visualisation project. In the course of searching for things to help me out, I've found some pretty nifty stuff.

Many Eyes is a really cool service for doing visualisation. The obvious problem is that, if what you want to do is for work, then you probably can't hand over your data to IBM.

I've found a couple of Java toolkits that look pretty good. Prefuse has some pretty swanky examples built on top of it, and JUNG looks to be fairly nice. (I ended up going with JUNG just because I've got a limited amount of time, and I was able to find documentation on how to do weighted graphs in it much faster than I could find that for Prefuse.)

These toolkits are nice, but they're still toolkits. You have to do all the swing programming yourself to draw the final graphs, and I'm not a swing programmer by any stretch of the imagination. What I really would like is a pluggable framework that would let me write a plugin that would read in my data and turn it into a graph, which the framework would then know how to render. The framework could even have options to let you choose various visualisations of your graph, all without your having to know anything about swing. Man, that would be cool.