Looks like a pretty neat course. I've been meaning to jump in to the Processing language for a while now; never had enough time to.

If you're in to data visualization, I would highly recommend Edward Tufte's beautiful tome Envisioning Information http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0961392118/ . (Which reminds me, Amazon, please introduce some decent looking permalinks. Am I giving away my SID with that link or what?)

You may know Tufte from his wonderful essay lambasting PowerPoint and it's role in the Columbia shuttle disaster: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... .

The Visualizaing Data book from http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514556/ is a good easy way to jump into processing.

There are some frustrating typos in the code, but if you're a programmer you should be able to fix them quickly, and you build some neat stuff.

No, you aren't giving away your SID. The random-looking number is the ASIN of the product. (You could have reassured yourself by reasoning as follows: everything apart afrom that final number clearly contains very little product-specific or user-specific information; and there surely isn't enough information in a 10-bit number to identify both a product and a user uniquely.)

I don't think it's reasonable to expect Amazon to have product URLs with no random-looking unique ID in at all, and 10 digits seems pretty modest. But I don't see why they couldn't make http://www.amazon.com/ASIN/0961392118 take you to their main page for that book.

Okay, I admit, I was being cheeky :) But there was a whole section of the query that I left out that looks like this:

  ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238082049&sr=1-1

This all looks like info they use for clickstream analysis, so nothing too critical. But I wish they had basic functionality on the page itself to generate a URL like you just gave. Maybe with some more info as well like tufte-envisio-XXXXXXXXXX.

You need a login to see the videos from the links shown. Only Harvard students will have that. Unless you go to http://www.cs171.net and choose "2008 Videos on iTunes U" Then (through iTunes) you can get to CSCI E-64 which seems like the same thing taught through the "extension school".

Try this link for the spring 2009 lecture videos:

http://cm.dce.harvard.edu/2009/02/22872/videopage.shtml

Thanks, that works really well

Sounds interesting.

Hanspeter Pfister is a very smart guy.