Here's an applet (based on touchgraph, with several mods) that renders the relationships between Texas state Senatators and their committess. The data is pulled from the FOAF/RDF/XML file I wrote about previously.

It's similar to my friendster hack, but the all the xml-related parts are completely different. I made some rendering changes, and added wheel mouse support for zooming.

Since my state Senator is Gonzalo Barrientos, I decided to initialize the applet so it's pointing at him. Click on any node to refocus, and it will show the two-degree network for that Senator or committee. Right click on nodes for more options. The little blue numbers indicate how many hidden connections stem from each node.

I spent some time today experimenting with a JGraph-based viewer. I can't say I really like either of these graph libraries all that much. Touchgraph is small and fast, but buggy and awkward to program. JGraph is equally unwieldly in its API, but much more consistent at least. I haven't got my head wrapped around automating graph layout in JGraph yet but I plan to give that a try next.

Dell has decided to set up operations there, and guess who's going to train all the Martians? Sounds like somebody's in for a promotion to Interplanetary Director of Customer Neglect. If you thought you spent too long waiting in the call queue before, wait till you have to factor in the propagation delay caused by a distance ranging from 55.7 million to 401.3 million kilometers.

I truly pity the fool who has to talk to Martians in order to get a hard drive replaced.