We’ve seen a lot of high profile data privacy and data leak issues in the news lately.

• Facebook is constantly under fire, for apparent lapses in securing private data.
• Just today, classified documents from Guantanamo Bay were leaked to the public. In fact, these were leaked by WikiLeakes, who was in the news frequently in the last few years for similar leaks.
• Millions of passwords were stolen from gawker media
• News that credit card data is targeted and stolen appears almost routinely these days.
• Dropbox’s privacy policy has been under attack due to apparently misleading comments about data encryption and security
• Some smartphones are keeping track of where you’ve been either by design or by error, but raising privacy concerns either way

And I’m sure the list could go on and on and on…
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Topics near and dear to my heart, largely because they keep me employed, absolutely include all things Data related. In particular, lately, Data Visualization has been a hot topic. We got to attend a presentation today by Frank van Ham about some IBM offerings in the Data Visualization space.

IBM has some pretty cool things going on.  Sadly for us tinkerers, a lot of their cool stuff is either tied to expensive proprietary software, or simply way too complicated to just play around in your free hours with a random data set and a laptop.  Fortunately, Frank reminded me that there are a lot of tools out there, that can let you do just that sort of playing, and often with a tiny footprint and for free.  IBM, for example, runs Many Eyes, which is apparently now bearing their Cognos brand, and which allows you to play with a ton of cool visualizations without too much more than a web browser.

Many Eyes isn’t alone, though… right now I’ve got over a hundred decent sites tagged “visualization” over at del.icio.us. Many Eyes is one of them; Protovis, Processing.js, Flare, and many others provide a rich playing field for starting with visualization. Some of these are tools, others are examples, but there’s plenty to look through so you can gain inspiration or code snippets.

Enoy!

I’m sure you’ve noticed a derth of posts on chiplynch.com in the last, say, year. Well, that’s Ok. It’s not that nothing’s been going on in my life, actually it’s been quite insane (and sometimes in a good way). I’m just behind. But, I’m trying to catch up! There are scads of pictures in the gallery, but I’m probably missing a couple of thousand (sorry, Emily — I’ll get your wedding photos up soon, promise!).

In the mean time, I’m going to start cross-posting things from some of my other blogs.

What’s that, you say? I have other blogs? Well, yeah, apparently, although I haven’t kept up with them either. I’ve got a pitifully bad habit of not knowing what things to post where either, so they ALL get posted here, and then I split the rest of them up accordingly. Trust me, it’s going to all work out somehow. The great part for you, my devoted followers, is that this may actually give you something to read.

And it may not.

Happy hunting,

—Chip

Note: This is a special guest post written by Chipmonkey

I made a few new friends last week! My human (Chip) has a friend Taco, who is spending a year traveling around the country with his Human (Mia); you can keep track of their adventures on Taco’s blog. They were going through Las Vegas, and since I have some friends out there too I decided to have Chip fly us out there to meet them and have a few nights on the town; Angela even came out for a whirlwind 36 hours — just the right way to do Vegas!

Chipmonkey and Taco

Viva Las Vegas!

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