Freaky Friday 2013.0

After a white hot Friday of buzzing keyboards, a raucous unveiling at the following Friday's Reckoning, and perhaps a few evenings in-between, I'm excited to share the results. Here are the projects, with categorical winners of lavish prizes and unrepentant bragging rights flagged...

Freaky Friday 2013.0 ultimate champions, and their spoils.

Abhinav Dayal (winner, most marketable)
Abhinav created an alternate version of the drive-time algorithm that hits the Bing service for an over-fetch network of route segments which are then pared back to equal drive-time blobs. Abhinav also created a vector caching strategy that pulls the full geometry of a feed to the client initially, then generalizes and clips in the client without requiring more requests. He also demonstrated a labeling utility he created for the DOT.

Abhishek Banerjee
Shek used great circle algorithms to render *actual* straight lines in Visual Fusion rather than mappy straight lines.  He’s also clipping at the international dateline and world-wrapping back around.

Adam Flink (winner, most original)
Adam created a runtime mesh layout construct so that anybody can set up and edit their own Visual Fusion dashboard of live/linked viz tiles arranged how they like.

Adam Hill (winner, best of show)
Adam wrote an extension to Visual Fusion that lets users capture settings and views as keyframes then smoothly animate through them. Additionally, he added a z-value offset option for feed items to elevate them off the map as a whole or individually tied to some data value.

Daniel Briggs (winner, most promising)
Daniel reduced the dependency of FETCH! configuration overhead and the users’ knowledge of syntax with an algorithm engine that accepts open-ended inputs and finds best matches and automated reporting including summaries and item-in-population mini-charts.

Daniel Lipsy
Dan set up an intermediate layer of keyboard commands wired to Visual Fusion actions.  With this mapping he demonstrated controlling Visual Fusion with voice commands via Kinect and alternatively with a 3rd party mobile app that serves as a trackpad for other devices.

Irfan Ali
Irfan created a starter-kit database with templates and sample vector data tables and stored procedures as a guide for VF projects using SQL Server data sources. Also included are ETL and other useful SQL scripts.

Jamie Rytlewski
Jamie tied Homeland Security’s National Terrorism Advisory System threat level alert feed in to Visual Fusion as a live status image and link.

John Nelson
John demonstrated his Excel map hack where a spreadsheet with Lat/Long columns can be pivoted and formatted to form a pseudo map.

Justin Hoffman
Justin created a right-click context button framework so that Lat/Long services can feed the user ad-hoc information at that location, i.e. weather, elevation, address.

Merav Nahoom Aelion (winner, most needed)
Merav wrote a connection to SQL Server to store Visual Fusion/VCC Favorites parameters so that the Favorites bookmarking feature is not dependent on SharePoint or a file system.

Riyaz Prasla
Riyaz demonstrated Visual Fusion security trimming using only SharePoint permissions and Composer. Variations included permissions at the user and group levels, and trimmed feeds or specific feed items.

You may recall Adam Hill won the previous Freaky Friday best of show, making his dominance of this particular slice of glory complete.  Here are his consecutive hoodies of goodies, signed by all who fell...

Click here for way more professional look at IDV Solutions, and examples of things we do not on Freaky Fridays. However, the beard above is a requirement of the dress code.

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