How do people prototype their quantitiative visualizations

Been a while since I blogged. There are a lot of things in the works but they involve a fair bit of scripting, thus I’m spending more time smoothing out the rough edges before I blog them. Projects include

• new 10046 parser aimed at analyizing I/O specifically
• IO/ZFS/NFS monitor for NFS filers running on top of ZFS
• TCP dump analyzer for NFS traffic speeds
• wrapper for fio to run a database centric set of I/O benchmarks and formate the output nicely
• orastat – a vmstat like tool for monitoring Oracle I/O latency and IOPs
• moats.sql exention to include I/O histograms. Might have to release this as a separate tool if Adrian and Tanel don’t incorporate the changes
• Analysis of the impact of filesytemio_options on non-buffer cache I/O

But in the mean time, methods of visualizing quantitative data are consistently of  interest to me. Excel, Tableau and R have all been recent tools that I’ve used. R recently came to the top of the pile as the only tool of the 3 that could properly graph a 3 dimensional graph. R is on the list of exciting tools to spend more time with. At a recent D3 meetup in SF, the majority of attendees used R to do mockups before coding the visualizations in D3. On that note, what are the tools other people are using. Here is a good list from the Eyeo conference:

from http://blogger.ghostweather.com/2012/06/eyeo-2012-processing-my-data-vis-ptsd.html

• Hand-written calculations and paper highlights (Stefanie Posavec)
• Java (Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas)
• Processing and MySQL, pdf exported into Illustrator and InDesign (Felton)
• Tableau and Excel and Gephi and Processing and Photoshop (Moritz Stefaner)
• R (Amanda Cox) [I know this from the Chartsnthings blog and a previous talk; although the NYT Graphics team uses many other visual design and development tools as a group]
• Processing (Ben Fry, Wes Grubbs, Jer Thorp)
• Dat.GUI (Koblin)

of the list above, check out the blog from Amanda Cox and NYT Graphic Team: Chartsnthings blog