Carl juggles with his creation

One of the things our customers love to do is print our beautiful object graphsландшафт and tape them to the wall for discussion. What they hate to do is print 30 pages, line them up, and tape them to a poster one at a time. So we bought a plotter, and I started plotting.

I needed to print directly to a Java Graphics object. Unfortunately, the available information on large output printing from Java is thin at best. While there are lots of ways to successfully place ink on paper, I was only able to find one that reliably lets the application pick odd paper sizes that plotters use, like 24×19.7 inches. (The term “plotter” used to mean something with pens for printing blueprints and such. Now it just means a large format printer, commonly printers that can use roll paper as a source.)

One of the first things you’ll learn when you start working with printing in Java is that a language intended to be all things to all people (i.e., cross-platform) is utterly lousy at tasks highly specific to a given environment, such as printing. It will not surprise you to hear that native print services on Windows are pretty different from those available on a Mac, which themselves are pretty different from the CUPS system common to Unix systems.

So, by and large, you are reduced to the least common denominator of printing. Part and parcel of this least common denominator is agreeing on what constitutes a piece of paper and sticking to it. This is fine for people thinking, “My paper is 8.5 inches wide by 11 inches tall.” It poses a bit of a problem for people with plotters who are thinking, “My paper is 24 inches wide by as many damned inches tall as I need.” Even relatively powerful programs like PhotoShop or GIMP don’t seem to support plotters well. I believe Photoshop works by specifying the exact paper size you want to use, but any technique in which the easiest solution for the user is to pull out a calculator does not meet with my approval.
(more…)

Palantir has entered the 2008 VAST Challenge. We present an in-depth look at one of our challenge solutions as the first public example of the Palantir platform in action.

Two years ago, the IEEE began an annual conference called VAST (Visual Analytics in Science and Technology). The VAST symposium focuses on the fundamental research contributions and real-world application of visual analytics. As a part of the conference, the VAST Challenge allows teams to compete on delivering analytic solutions against a synthetic real-world dataset.

Each year, the organizers build a very vast (pun intended) dataset from scratch. The data is entirely fictional but mirrors real-world use cases and scenarios. This year’s dataset is about a new religious movement that started on an imaginary Caribbean island (cleverly titled Isla del Sueño, or “Island of Dreams”) situated between Florida and Cuba. There are four subsets of the synthetic data: the Wikipedia page for the movement and its associated edit and discussion pages; landing and Coast Guard interdiction records for boats leaving Isla del Sueño for Florida/Mexico; cell phone records from the island; and RFID tracking data from people in a building that was attacked with an IED.

The types of questions asked in the problem sets are qualitative questions that require answers backed by data. These are the sorts of questions that don’t yield answers using a machine-learning/data-mining approach nor can an unassisted human get these answers by simple inspection of the data. They require some sort of human-computer symbiosis to solve.

To solve the VAST problems, we assembled an ad-hoc team of analysts — composed of a mix of engineers, in-house professional analysts, and one senior executive — and asked them to use the Palantir Government software to extract insights from the data.

The results speak for themselves: the complete set of Palantir’s VAST solutions are available here.

Read on for an in-depth look at how we deconstructed and solved one of the problems.

(more…)

About 10 months ago, we released set of nine screenshots from our applications. Time has passed and we have not stopped working; the look of the applications has evolved. Here are some updated screenshots:

 
 

(more…)

A montage of our time choosers. (click for webstart demo)компютри втора употреба

The notion of time is central to both of our products at Palantir, and there are many instances in which the user needs to specify a certain point in time. Although there are simple ways to create choosers (you could use a JSpinner that uses a SpinnerDateModel or simply use multiple JComboBox objects), I decided to experiment with writing some more visual time chooser components. These components are fairly experimental — they aren’t used in either product yet and I coded them up pretty quickly so I could get some feedback.

You can see these choosers in action in our office furniture in Bulgaria
webstart demo. The source code is available in the office furniture in Bulgaria
JAR.

If anyone has any feedback or suggestions as to how these choosers could be improved (or any ideas on how to make a better time chooser altogether) please leave a comment and let me know!

Meanwhile, if you want to know a little bit more about these choosers and how I went about designing them, read on…

We recently had a visit from some distinguished guests. Chris Campbell, a member of the Java 2D Team at Sun, came to see demonstrations of the Palantir products. We were very pleased and flattered by his positive reactions to the work that we’ve done.On the basis of that visit, we were added to the Java Desktop community site as a Swing Sighting Preview and merited a mention on Romain Guy’s blog: Another Pretty Java Application.We’re excited to present this series of screenshots as the first public unveiling of the Palantir applications. On a technical note: everything you see in these screenshots is from live, running applications. The applications are entirely written in Java and the GUIs are composed of custom Swing components.After the jump: bigger thumbnails with a description of each screenshot. You can click above or below to see the full resolution screenshots. (more…)