3D graphics in Resolver One using OpenGL and Tao, part II: an orrery

In my last post about animated 3D graphics in Resolver One (the souped-up spreadsheet the company I work for makes), I showed a bouncing, spinning cube controlled by the numbers in a worksheet. Here's something more sophisticated: a 3D model of the planets in our solar system, also know as an orrery (click the image for video):

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3D graphics in Resolver One using OpenGL and Tao, part I

I've been playing around with 3D graphics recently, and decided to find out what could be done using .NET from inside Resolver One. (If you haven't heard of Resolver One, it's a spreadsheet made by the company I work for -- think of it as Excel on steroids :-)

I was quite pleased at what I managed with a few hours' work (click the image for video):

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Clicking the tabs from left to right

It looks like visitors to the Resolver Systems website are predisposed to clicking through the tabs at the top of the page, from left to right. Does anyone else see this kind of thing?

The figures I'm using are from Google Analytics, which is based on JavaScript embedded in the page and run in the browser, so I don't think it's caused by bots/crawlers just clicking each of the tabs in turn because they appear in the page source code in that order -- and in addition, if it were a result of automated systems, you'd expect a consistent bias, whereas it's actually quite variable.

Here's the full dataset. Each line below shows a Google Analytics overlay, which tells you for each selected tab what percentage of people clicked on each of the other tabs during July 2009:

It looks like we managed to break tracking of access to our "About us" page for that month, so I put the results for that tab aside and did a bit of simple statistical analysis (in Resolver One, naturally) on the remaining data. The results:

The "from" tab is top to bottom, the "to" tab is left to right -- so, the chance of someone who is currently on the "Buy" tab clicking "Download" is 29%. The average chance of someone clicking on a given tab across all sources, and the standard deviation of those figures, are summarised at the bottom. Each cell is coloured based on how many standard deviations from the average it lies -- if it's more popular than it normally is, it appears red, if it's less popular it's green. The intensity of the red/green is based on how much more/less popular it is.

I think there's a very clear pattern -- the line of red starting at the "Home tab to Buy tab" cell, and going down and to the right to the "Screencasts tab to Get help tab" cell. That indicates that people are significantly more likely to click on a tab when it's the one to the right of the one they're currently looking at.

You can download the analysis spreadsheet from here, and if you don't already have a copy of Resolver One to run it on (shame on you ;-), you can get an eval version here.

This is interesting -- is it just our visitors, or have other people seen similar results?

A Resolver One model on the FT politics blog

Yesterday, my co-founder Robert Smithson presented a fascinating spreadsheet he's built in Resolver One to one of the Financial Times' two UK political correspondents, Jim Pickard. The spreadsheet gives predictions about the next UK general election using a clever methodology Robert has developed, and if you're interested in british politics or clever spreadsheets, you should definitely take a look.

Jim has blogged about it, and Robert has also done a guest post on his father's incredibly popular PoliticalBetting.com website; unsurprisingly, our website traffic's spiked a bit today...

[Update, 27 July] Looks like The Register found the story interesting too!

Talk at London Geek Night

Last Thursday I did a talk at the London Geek Night about the business side of founding Resolver Systems; 10 minutes or so of prepared talk and then 20 minutes of Q&A, which was the structure suggested by the night's organiser, Robert Rees. Skills Matter recorded the whole thing, and the video's online now (albeit inexplicably categorised under Erlang). Be warned that I was talking particularly quickly that evening, even by my normal standards of gabble, so you'll have to listen carefully :-)

Other talks that evening were from my colleague Jonathan Hartley, who talked about the tech side of Resolver Systems, and Martin Dittus of Last.fm, who talked about some of the heavy-duty tech infrastructure they use.

Resolver One and Digipede

We kicked off the beta programme for version 1.5 of Resolver One today. It's got some really cool new features, including a console that lets you interact with your spreadsheets from a command-line-style interface, but there's one other change, a tiny one that enables something really interesting -- a combination of the spreadsheet's ease-of-programming with seriously parallel computing that I don't think is really possible with other tools.

We've been in touch with Digipede since Dan Ciruli, their Director of Products, blogged about Resolver One in January 2008. The Digipede Network is a system that allows you to easily code .NET programs that run on a grid of computers -- and he'd set up a Resolver One spreadsheet that was able to call into code running on a Digipede Network to perform part of its calculations, which was particularly impressive given that he only needed to spend five minutes or so putting it together. Looking at what he'd done, I found myself asking "wouldn't it be even cooler if the thing you ran on your compute farm was itself a spreadsheet?"

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One-day discount

We're running a one-day discount at Resolver Systems today -- you can get an unrestricted copy of Resolver One for $75! There's more about Resolver One here.

R in Resolver One (and perhaps IronPython generally)

We've just announced the winner of this month's round of our competition at Resolver Systems, and it's a great one; Marjan Ghahremani, a student at UC Davis, managed to work out how you can call R (a powerful statistical analysis language) from our spreadsheet product Resolver One. You can download a ZIP file with a detailed PDF describing how it works and a bunch of examples.

If you're not interested in Resolver One, but want to use R from your own IronPython scripts, you may be able to do that too, using her instructions as guidelines -- I've not tried it myself, but there are no obvious blockers. If you do try it out, I'd love to hear how it goes.

Usability testers needed

A repost here from the Resolver Systems news blog:

We're looking for experienced spreadsheet developers to spend a day with us in our London office, building Resolver One spreadsheets, as a way of usability-testing our software. We're paying GBP200/day for this, so it's perhaps something of most interest to current business school students.

Does this sound like something for you, or for someone you know? Drop us a line!

xmlrpc

One of our customers had been asking about how to call XMLRPC servers from Resolver One. It doesn't work in version 1.3, and he was having problems getting it to work in 1.4. The problem turned out to be simple and fixable, and unlikely to affect other people, so I'm proud to present a really simple XMLRPC/Resolver One example that you can use as a starting point: a Python script that creates a server exposing an is_even function (which tells you if a number is even or not), and a Resolver One spreadsheet that uses it. There are only two lines of code in the spreadsheet, which is pretty cool :-)