The more I use VoodooPad Pro, the more I like it. Version 4 was a great update - the best part being the singular palette like Acorn (another FLying Meat product), which makes it very easy to manipulate things in the notebook.
With 4.0.3 released today, there are a lot more things to like. Most of these things are bug fixes and a few extensions. Nothing hit me, but it's great to stay up to date.
Probably the nicest graphing package for Mac OS X - DataGraph, was updated to v1.6.2 today. He added a lot of nice features - templates, assistants for the date/time formats, pop-up widgets for the selection of values like line width, etc. It's a nice little update. I still like the fact that if you register for $30 (or something like that) you can incorporate his graphing frameworks into your own apps. My idea was to use this as the basis of a lot of simulation graphing. I haven't gotten around to it yet - as much by the time as for the fact that he still doesn't support the types of graphs I need - 3D mapped to 2D. Contour, heat, those kids of graphs.
Still doesn't make this any less nice of a package. Excellent.
Amazingly, BBEdit 9.1 had just the feature I was hoping it'd add - stripping white space at the end of lines. I do that a lot - even have a macro for it, but now I don't have to. Just set it up in the Text Files preferences pane and every time you save, it's going to strip those nasty trailing whitespace characters.
The release notes have a lot more - like a new font: Consolas Regular. It's remarkably like my current favorite: Panic Sans from the guys at Panic who distributed it with Coda, their all-in-one web development app. It's clean, clear, and the only difference I can see is that the point sizes are a little different. Consolas 10pt is Panis Sans 9pt. That's it.
Yet there's even more. BBEdit 9.1 has a much improved FTP/SFTP interface that is supposed to be much faster than the previous version. Excellent. RCS keywords are handled better - it's amazing, really. The list goes on and on. It's still my favorite editor on the Mac.
UPDATE: I've been looking at the new Consolas font and how it differs from Panic Sans... it's got more white space above and below the line. More even, than the same point size in Panic Sans. Meaning that if Consolas 10pt is the same horizontal size as Panic Sans 9pt it's got more vertical room than Panis Sans 10pt. That's very interesting. More whitespace in between the lines may make this more readable while making the horizonal compression able to get more columns in the same real-estate. Interesting.
Well, I heard in this article that in JDK/JRE 1.6.0_12 and beyond, Sun is going to be delivering a 64-bit Java plugin. Finally. I've been waiting for a long time for this, and while I have to say it's not going to impact me that much as I don't do a lot of web/applet-based development any more, it's nice to know it's there should I ever get back to it.
Now all we need to see is a pre-packaged Firefox for Linux that's 64-bit.
This morning when I'm trying to get things done, Comcast is at it again! They take down the cable model, maybe reconfigure it, and then it's up for a minute, and then down again. In all, I probably had it less than 5% of the time this morning. Annoying, to say the least.
I know that they are supposed to be coming out with a new 50Mbps service this month to much of ChicagoLand, but from reading the press releases, it sounds like it's not going to get to the western suburbs until 2009 - which is fine. I'm not sure it's worth another $70/month for 50 Mbps/10 Mbps - but it's close.
Anyway, I wish they would not do the maintenance at 3:30 - 4:00 am... that's when I need it.
I've heard it was coming out any day now, but it's great that today is that day. There are the assorted bug fixes and security updates, but 10.5.6 is also probably the last update before we see 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in the beginning of next year. Maybe not, but it's going to have some neat new things, and I'm super excited about updating.
If only Comcast had been up this morning. Grrr... I'll have to wait until later today to update.
[10:44] UPDATE: I finally found the time to update to 10.5.6. Glad I did. Now I just need to get rid of my hiccups and I'll be golden.
This morning I noticed that Perian 1.1.3 is out and available within Perian for update. With this release they have put in a few more decoders added more sanity checks for some of the streams, and even reduced the memory footprint.
This is just a great way to be able to view a lot more diverse content in QuickTime. GOtta love that.
A few days ago (late last week) a couple of developers stopped by my cube to ask me if the BKit graphs had anything like a multi-select scatter graph where the data points were grouped into data sets and then they could be overlaid on top of one another to build up a more complex graph.
Well... the answer was clearly "No", and they didn't think so, but we got to thinking about how you could do it with the existing tools, and I got to thinking how to do it with the TwoDimCrossScatterViewer. So, I started work on the new graph as they started working on the different data structures to make it work with the existing scatter graph and the pseudo z-axis capabilities.
The first thing I knew I needed was to get the TwoDimCrossScatterViewer working without the lines. That was simple enough. But then it was on to the coloring of the data points and labels. This was a very tricky thing.
The breakthrough was finding the Status producer in the docs. The default way of associating a Status object with the data is row-dominant - meaning that a complete row has a single Status object for rendering. I needed to change that to column-based, and this little code did exactly what I needed:
/** * We need to create (and use) a StatusProducer that looks at * the columns of the graph for a Status. If we didn't do this, * we'd be looking at a row at a time and that's not what * we're after. */ AbstractStatusProducer statusProd = new DimensionalStatusProducer(DataSet.diCol); _graph.getData().setStatusProducer(statusProd);
with this, I could then set the Status flags for a column. Well, that's good, but all the code I have in place now assumed it's row-based. Well... time for a significant expansion of the code to allow for the testing of the kind of graph we're working with and then to switch to either "by row" or "by column" way of looking at things.
With all that, we have a pretty decent first-cut at the multi-scatter graph:
There are still things I need to do tomorrow - like a lot of testing to make sure that my changes haven't messed up another graph. But I think I'm pretty close to what the guys were looking for.
Today I spent several hours trying to figure out why loading a collection of windows was exhibiting different behavior than loading the windows individually. Basically, I use a visualization system that was written and maintained by another company (a vendor) and it's pretty decent - and terribly complex. There is a way to load a window with multiple views, and a way to load a collection of windows.
Unfortunately, the collection of windows wasn't loading properly. I'd get the first window up just fine, and then the second window would appear to start loading but then all the views from the second window would get sent to the first window. Very odd.
Reverse the loading order and things are reversed. Everything seems to want to go into one window - regardless of which one that is - save it's the first one loaded.
So I wrote an email and sent the window definitions to the vendor's support contacts. I'm not sure what's going to come of it, but it's a bug, and recently introduced, as this used to work. We'll see what they come back with.
This afternoon a couple of developers stopped by trying to do something in the graphs I've built on VantagePoint, and I'll admit - it wasn't going to be easy. Basically, they wanted a multi-variable scatter graph - just like the TwoDimCrossScatterViewer, but with all the GUI widgets to make it easy to use by the target audience.
The first step was to be able to easily control the visibility of the lines on the x-y graph, because if I could do that, then I could easily build on that and just use it in the "no lines" mode and be ready to go. But in order to do that, I needed to have a clean way to turn on and off the lines in all pairs, and a pair at a time.
What I came up with was the simple applet PARAM tag showxylines. If that guy is true, then the graph will show the lines, if it's false, then it won't. If it's missing, then they will be shown, by default. The neat addition to that was to add the PARAM tag showxylines:columnName and if that's true, the lines with that column in their definition will be shown, and not otherwise. This makes it very easy to turn all lines off and then some select few on, or vice versa.
This doesn't mean I'm done, but it's a great stepping-stone. From here, I need to add in the GUI widgets to control the graph, make sure the lines are "off", and then put it all together. Not trivial, but I've done this several times and it's not as hard as all that.