To bring it back to being on topic, I'd like to share a bit of the
REALbasic project I worked on for the elections:
<http://personal.tinrocket.com/AP/Picture-75.jpg>
<http://personal.tinrocket.com/AP/ELN_RESULTS_6C_11101125.jpg>
This is REALbasic-build software for creating PDFs of election
graphics on election night, for AP -- 1 developer, working for a few
months. The software cranked out about 11,000 PDFs during the election
-- 409 of which were actually released (based on calls, editorial
decisions, etc.) to AP members for use in newspapers, etc.
The software used several national graphics and 50 state graphics,
designed by my coworkers, and prepared as templates. The software
ingested them into my templating system -- which in turn was driven by
my SuperGraphics framework: <http://www.tinrocket.com/software/supergraphics/
>) as RGB SVG files which then kicked out CMYK PDFs. All the data
elements (charts, graphs & maps colorization) are were dynamic.
The core software cycled through downloading results, ingesting them
into a Db (Valentina), processing the raw votes and then producing 57
PDFs was about 3.5 minutes. For the rendering portion, instances of
the software ran in "network rendering mode" which allowed multiple
instances to be spawned to run the PDF jobs, distributed across a few
machines -- 1 3Ghz 8-core Intel Mac with 16GB of RAM was the main
machine. Satellite machines on the network were used by staff to proof
& publish the graphics once they were ready -- that's what the linked
screenshot is of. These proofing terminals actually ran dual 1920x1200
monitors with one screen (not shown) used for text reports of the
results used in the actual graphics.
I'll prepare a post-mortem on my personal site in a few weeks once I'm
fully recovered.
John
On Nov 11, 2008, at 8:34 PM, Ron D. wrote:
Thanks so much for your good wishes, Mark.
Without getting into politics here on the list, suffice it to say
that there
are many millions of us in the U.S. that are hoping for the same.
Best,
Ron D.
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