Blog | Archive for October, 2006
Enron Postscript: The Emails
By Charles Armstrong | Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
The Wall Street Journal unearths some gems in the Enron Explorer.Read “Enron Postscript: The Emails” on Wall Street Journal
Posted in Media | No Comments »
OBSERVER: Enron sins, seen through the inbox
By Charles Armstrong | Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
The FT investiages the Enron Explorer. Subscription only.
Read “OBSERVER: Enron sins, seen through the inbox” on Financial Times
Posted in Media | No Comments »
Enron Explorer hits Boing Boing and del.icio.us
By alistair | Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
Since we got Boing Boing’ed yesterday, Google Analytics shows that we’ve had over 21,000 page views so far – and that’s just to the front page. Unfortunately the GA javascript can’t be included in the main app, as it’s pretty much all AJAX requests, so we’ll have to wait for analysis of the Apache logs for full statistics.I also put the Enron Explorer on del.icio.us 4 days ago – it’s now been echoed by 112 people, including one who speaks Russian, by the looks of it. Google Analytics confirms that we’ve had visitors from 71 different countries, interestingly enough including two from the Cayman Islands and one from an anonymising proxy – Kenny Boy, that’s not you is it….?
Some of the comments are fantastic :
fpaulus “Interesting (both technologically and economically) walk through the Enron e-mail archives”
markwithasee “searchable database of all of enron’s internal email from 99-02. WOW.”
RStacy “A look into what the future could look like in corporate transparency and analysis.”
slightlyfleury (ahem – best not repeated here!)
some of the tags that people have applied to it (under the posting history on the right) are also interesting – I always find it intriguing to see how other people see what we’ve done.
Posted in Organisations & Technology, SONAR | No Comments »
java stack trace annotation
By mccraig | Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
i’ve just spent an age tracking down a problem parsing an xml file with commons digester. it turned out to be because someone had missed an element out of the hierarchy, and digester was trying to call a method which didn’t exist because of thattracking down the problem took ages because there is no information in java stack traces other than a list of method calls. if each method called had an ability to annotate the current stack frame with some application related information [ the name or path of the xml element currently being processed in this case ], then i wouldn’t have needed to fire up the debugger and manually correlate the stack trace with objects in the debugger
all that would be needed would be some method like :
Thread.annotateStackTrace(String)
Posted in Coding | No Comments »
Enron Night at Trampoline
By Charles Armstrong | Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
During development of the SONAR platform we needed a corpus of real enterprise data to road test the social network and theme extraction technologies. Jan hit on the bright idea of using the 200,000 internal Enron emails released into the public domain during the fraud hearings. However we found ourselves spending rather longer burrowing around in the emails than was strictly necessary for testing purposes. Also whenever we mentioned it to our friends they wanted to get their hands on it too. So in the end we decided it was simpler just to put the whole thing on the web and let anyone access it.Never ones to do things by halves, we designated this evening “Enron Night”. At six o’clock we hosted a screening of the excellent documentary “Enron – the Smartest Guys in the Room”. Now, at half past nine, we’ve just pressed the big red button to launch the Enron Explorer. Get exploring here!
Posted in Events | 2 Comments »
Bless her and all who sail in her
By Charles Armstrong | Thursday, October 12th, 2006
Much as a growing child needs a new set of clothes from time to time, so the replacement of one website by another marks the evolution of a growing company. Trampoline’s first site was cobbled together with leftover bits of the user interface from our initial product. It served its purpose for a couple of years, with extra pages tacked on here and there, but by summer 2005 it was becoming a bit of an embarassment.As every software or web development company knows, finding time to work on your own site is next to impossible; it always, but always, gets put off because there’s something more pressing. So in September 2005 we simply decided one morning that by the time we left that evening we would have a new website, and thus was born Trampoline’s second site. It was beautifully simple, just a single page bringing together all the key information. But a year on it was clear we needed to communicate more and it was time for a third site.
This time it’s happened with surprisingly little effort. Mike’s very first design template got everyone’s approval. There was a brief false start with MovableType but the attractions of dynamic publishing led us to try Symphony21. The main content was hacked together yesterday afternoon.
And now, here it is.
Posted in Events | 4 Comments »