This is sort of a staging ground for future projects. It was ported from the Google Wave page, “David's Potential Projects”

One side: MECARD data for Contact list entry, along with simple text, Helvetica if possible.
Other side: (Faded) Website code or other cookie. (Make available for writing on.)

Goals

• Small codes (fewer “dots” per side)
• Nice looking or interesting codes (Doesn't have to be black and white.)
• Affordable but nice looking. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoIvd3zzu4Y

Resources

• MECARD Specification: http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/service/imode/make/content/barcode/function/application/addressbook/
• Python PIL library
• Do NOT use: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/types.html#qrcodes It makes codes that are too big.
• Do use: Custom Python wrapper for http://megaui.net/fukuchi/works/qrencode/manual/index.html It makes tighter codes.
• Zazzle (Or VistaPrint: There's an email promotion “Buy 250 business cards, get 250 more on Us” Best way to specify cards? With PNG file, web app? Here's an image that's the right size for VistaPrint.)

Notes:

Figure out the best tradeoff between:

• Small QR Code. (Can optimize by basing contact info off of dlma.com, like d@dlma.com)
• Enough information
• Not too much information

On the front of the business card. (And somewhere in my iPhone, for easy contact transfer to another smart phone.) This is an unaltered code that contains my real personal information. Please don't distribute. It's bigger (more dots) than I like, but it had to be this big to include the website, too. But I think including the website is important.

On the back of the business card, I'll either put this code or the one below. This was a QR Code that had enough error correction in the middle for me to color in some white dots around the “face” in the middle, bringing it out. The face is no longer signal, though, and it could be colored out, too, and replaced with anything. I don't know if I want to include a manipulated QR Code like this, or not. It's neat because the face draws attention to it, but is it worth “cheating” and losing the benefit of some of the error correction?

And this is the most minimal code that can exist and point to me. It points to http://dlma.com/ . I should make that landing page more useful, especially if I chose this code for the back.

Awesome Visual Displays of Quantative Information

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/world-bank-public-data-now-in-search.html
• http://david.dlma.com/lifestream/all.html (available in UTF-8 or SQLite)
• http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/names_files.html
• http://www.swivel.com/
• http://getpivot.com/
• http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
• http://timetric.com/
• http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/eureqa
• http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/loess-smoothing-in-excel/

• Flot http://code.google.com/p/flot/ (beautiful, uses jquery Example: http://binarybonsai.com/code/silprob/ with download link )
• Simile http://code.google.com/p/simile-widgets/ (timeline, and the plurk karma timeplot)
• Protovis http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ (Michael used it here).

• graphy, google-chartwrapper andpygooglechart all wrap the Google chart API. So there are limitations on the dataset and image sizes.
• pycha, CairoPlot and PyCairoChart all reply on PyCairo.
• matplotlib is mature, robust and big.
• reportlab. Don't know yet.
• pychart. 1.39 in 2006. Consider this example.