Out of the Woodwork

Giuliani's Campaign Plans Leaked

Ben Smith of the New York Daily News has just released details from an internal campaign document laying out Rudy Giuliani's strategy for a 2008 presidential runs. Now I'm not trying to turn this into a political blog. Promise. I happen to think this story is interesting regardless of one's opinion of Guiliani or any other likely candidate.

Specifically, I find it interesting to see just how willing the mainstream press is to toss around leaked information like this. Yes, I realize that it's their job to inform the public. And yes, I realize that Giuliani is a public figure. But I don't understand how the paper was serving its readers in this case. After all, we're not talking about the Watergate Tapes and uncovering corruption which is damaging to the public interest. I'm no expert on media ethics, but I would think that should play a part in determining when they do and don't publish leaked material.

Just because something is secret does not make it evil or appropriate news material. Giuliani believes that he'll need a lot of money to run for president and that opponents might try to exploit past episodes from his personal life. Wow. That is shocking news and absolutely nothing like any other candidate I can recall. What will you uncover for our benefit next, Mr. Smith? A certain notorious group of herbs and spices? The secret world of fraternity handshakes? My grandmother's prescriptions?

I feel safer and more informed already.

Tags: media politics

Posted at 05:04PM Jan 02, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Potpourri  |  Comments[0]

Drilling Down in the Solaris Registrations Map

Recently Jim Grisanzio referenced our Solaris Registrations Map to illustrate the volume of OpenSolaris activity in Japan. Since I'd love to see more people using our map in this way, I thought I'd talk about it a bit.

For this kind of use, one handy feature is the ability to reference a particular map view directly. This can be done by copying the "Link To: ... This View" URL when you have the map zoomed and positioned as desired. For example, Jim could have referenced this URL when talking about Solaris-related activity in Japan. This allows everyone to look at approximately the same map view and statistics. (Note: the URL controls the map type, zoom level, and center coordinates; it obviously cannot control clients' screen resolution, which is what determines how much of the map around the center is shown and leads me to use the "approximately" qualifier.)

On my screen, this view currently shows:

How do we interpret these numbers? Well, one thing they do not mean is that there are just 8409 Solaris users in Japan. As the FAQ notes, this map only shows data for "Solaris 10 and Open Solaris instances that activated Sun Connection to receive automatic software updates." As with any product, only a subset of total users will go through a registration/activation process.

I'm not aware of a good way to estimate what percentage of total users will have registered. So I can't infer the total number of Solaris and OpenSolaris users in Japan from this map view. On the other hand, it seems likely that whatever percentage of users choose to register/activate in one region would roughly equal the percentage of users who do so in other regions. If that's true, we should be able to use this map to compare the relative size of Solaris and OpenSolaris users in different geographic regions. For example, a fully zoomed-out view of the map currently shows a total of 83268 activated instances. So comparing our Japan total (8409 instances) to this number, we could estimate that around 10% of worldwide Solaris and OpenSolaris users are in Japan. That's interesting (and makes me think that perhaps we should update the map to show such percentages automatically).

Hopefully this gives you some ideas on how to dig for interesting views and stats in the map. As we've seen, the statistics it shows are not good indicators of the number of users or installations in absolute terms, but may be useful in estimating the relative populations for different geographic areas. We plan to investigate adding new data sets (such as Jim suggests) which may provide more absolute population info. Stay tuned. And let me know if you have ideas for a data set you think should be included.

Tags: google maps mashups pinkdots registrations solaris visualization

Posted at 10:21AM Jan 02, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Maps  |  Comments[2]