I first learned about Ben Fry from running across his original thesis paper on computation information design.  Apparently, he has done all kinds of additional work on the topic since his PhD thesis, which has led to a very cool new software language, Processing.  This software language is meant to both teach and be used by professionals to create visually more stunning work than can be done with most "out-of-the-box" expensive software solutions, and it's open source!

You can see more of what this cool Processing software is capable of producing by viewing some of the demos on the homepage for the software.

A recent blog post was linked to by Payment News today regarding the potential that the new Google Chrome beta release web browser could bring to online banking. Unfortunately, neither the blog author or the Payment News brief link to the blog post thought through the many ways that such things have been suggested, accomplished, and failed at in the past. Read the rest of this post for my responses to the original ideas posted on the blog article about Chrome.

The software program JMP is a wonderful resource for doing graphical statistical analysis, and the documentation included with the program is generally quite excellent.  The program even comes with its own scripting language, JSL, which is relatively easy to learn to build more automated graphical analyses for a production environment.  Unfortunately, when building an automated production system that relies on JMP to run queries, automate data calculations, produce graphics, etc.