Many massive multiplayer online games have their own virtual economy where virtual goods are traded against a virtual (or sometimes real) currency. These trades happen in either a direct form, e.g. player to player or player to NPC or in an anonymous form of an auction. The later allows a price finding and represents an almost perfect market. A distinguishing feature of these virtual auctions is the limited set of merchandise.

In this article I will look at the virtual goods auctions in the browser game Horizon. This game is staged in a SciFi space environment and the goods in question are ancient alien devices. These devices can be found or harvested in various ways and may be traded amongst players in a direct way or using a common and annonymous auction place.

It is important for players as well as the game administrators to know the value of these goods, and with the help of the auction results it should be possible to predict the outcome of an auction before it is started.

Reading in syslog files is easy, a lot of script languages provides means to do that. But is it also possible to perform a quick analysis request with these languages ?

Your task: Extract the IP addresses out of the text portion and get the access count of every single address.

Dedicated Time: None. Your Boss stands behind you...

I recently stumbled over a Blog post "A geek plays darts" talking about the ideal aiming point in Darts for various skill levels of players. Throwing darts is a stochastic process with a two dimensional normal distribution around the target spot (at least in an idealized world without systematic errors).

One of the big current challenges in the computer industry is how we can make the power of the modern multi-core CPUs available to a large audience. Many attempts center on improving and extending existing procedural programming languages or shifting towards paradigms that are friendlier to parallel execution, like functional or dataflow programming. Unfortunately, most of them only address trained programmers and computer scientists and usually require a complete upfront design of the desired solution for the problem at hand.

So what about domain specialists in areas like advanced data analytics (e.g. data mining), data visualization or financial analysis (e.g. business intelligence and financial controlling), who require (and thus are often used to) more intuitive approaches and tools to solving their problems?

Even better: wouldn’t it be great if there even was a way enabling practically “everyone” to easily create solutions for their everyday computing problems, harnessing the full power of parallel programming, without the need to write a single line of code?

Interestingly, there is already a large group of people who unconsciously write parallel dataflow programs every day without being aware of it: I am talking about the users of spreadsheet applications like Excel or Calc (which is part of Open Office). Unfortunately, spreadsheets are afflicted with 5 major problems, so this choice can turn out to be a dead-end street for many.

What are these problems, and is there a way to get out of this trap? Can we bring back the fun into mining information from our data?

I recently had a problem explaining various image filters and decided to try a different way of visualizing the result. So instead of simply applying the filter and generating a series of images, I rendered a set of 3D images of the resulting image using the brightness as the height of a mesh.

Last week I had to use a customers tool which starts RTSP sessions in a video on demand network. This tool dumped its logging information into a text file which I had to analyze after each run. The logfile got bigger and bigger and it became more and more inconvinient to find the interessting places. And if that wasn't enough, the log contained a lot of unuseful message lines ( at least for my job ).
To get an idea about the amount of data : the tool produced ~ 500 lines per second.

So I decided to create a little FlowSheet which should support me a little bit.

Web pages provide a plethora of information and mineable data. Unfortunately most of them are not using the XML based XHTML but the classic HTML. Therefore we decided to extend the ANKHOR XML parser to accept most HTML content.

With this extension it is now quite simple to e.g. extract all <img> references from a web page and convert it into a table.

 I have created a simple web crawler for testing purposes that walks through all reachable documents on a given domain starting at the root. It uses a while loop to iterate through the access depth. A HEAD request is executed in parallel for all resources that are reachable at this level and have not been accessed in one of the iterations before.

In the blog entry from March 28, we showed you how to exchange data between ANKHOR FlowSheet and traditional spreadsheet applications using the clipboard or CSV files as intermediate data format. However, the latest release 0.9.47 of ANKHOR FlowSheet provides a great new library that supports the direct import of XLSX and XLS files, offering immediate access to the data fields in the workbooks and even (within certain limits) the automatic conversion of cell formulas into FlowSheet macros. This means that the original spreadsheet can be automatically converted into a corresponding FlowSheet!

In this article we explain how to make use of the macros in the new "Spreadsheet Import" library.

When beginning to use ANKHOR FlowSheet, you may have the desire to use tables of data that you created with one of the "traditional" spreadsheet applications like Excel as a starting point. This short article shows you how to achieve this task, and gives an outlook on the planned features in this area for the upcoming releases of ANKHOR FlowSheet.

In its current state, ANKHOR FlowSheet does not support the direct loading of Excel sheets (this is planned for one of the next releases). However, two methods exist by which you can still import data from that application:

1. Exporting the Excel sheet as a CSV ("Comma Separated Values") file, and reading this file in ANKHOR FlowSheet with an operator.
2. Via the clip board, using Copy & Paste

We start with the first method. Save your current Excel sheet using the "Save As..." menu item, and selecting the "CSV" format from the "Save As Type..." drop down list:

Suppose we want our diagram bars with shades of blue instead of being colored with one of the color sets from the Standard Diagram Library. Here's how you can do it.