What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I was reading the JavaDocs for VantagePoint's TwoDimCrossScatterViewer to see if I was missing anything on the secondary Y axis issue I was having yesterday, and I saw it. In working with the new graph type we have two ways of looking at the data - as pairs and as columns. In the first cut I assumed they wanted the pair number. There, in the docs, was the key I'd been missing. In the docs for the TwoDimCrossScatterViewer was the method:

    public void setSecondary(int colNum, boolean isOnSecondary)

Clear as day... they are saying that in order to put a column on a secondary axis, you have to specify the column. Not the pair. You can put either the X or Y on the primary or secondary axes - making this far more configurable than I had planned. This was very clever of Gordon. Love it.

The result is beauty:

I fired off an email to Gordon to tell him I "got it", and to ask him which question of mine he wanted to answer next. There were three:

• How to format Dates on Time Series Graphs - this is so we can make better line graphs for the developers doing a lot of time-series data.
• How to put Labels on the bars in Bar Graphs - this is in order to make the data identified in the graph and not by the legend.
• How to put Bars in a TimeSeries Graph - another developer wanted to have bars and not lines on the time series - another graph I'd have to add support for.

VLC 0.9.8a - a security update for a problem in the Real codec, is out today. I found out by starting VLC to play a little downloaded YouTube video ('The Website is Down'), and it said there was an update, and asked me if I wanted to download it. "Sure", I say.

Then it acts as if I'm downloading a file - not updating the app. What gives? These guys make a Mac OS X app and don't even bother to use Sparkle? It's free and will do all the upgrade stuff for you. If not Sparkle, then the Google Code updater, update-engine. There are just too many reasonable ones out there to have something like VLC that's been in the works for so long, not to use one.

Anyway... it's updated now.

OK, there's a few things that get under my skin, and Comcast being down is one of them. It's not the end of the world - it's not even a reason to get really angry... but it's part and parcel of my work and what I do. It's the way I get my news, stay in contact with tracking packages, etc. It's my primary personal interaction medium. And when it's down, I'm disconnected.

I don't really use the phone all that much. There are probably weeks where I don't make or receive a call at home. I need it for emergencies, but that's about it. I don't know of anyone that uses US mail to send me anything anymore. It's just not done. I know people that start their day with the Wall Street Journal, and if they don't have it, there's a serious feeling of loss of information.

So I don't read papers, talk on the phone, or mail stuff. I do all these activities on the computer: RSS feeds, IM, email... it's my morning routine. Except for days like today.

Well... when I get into work I'll be able to get a connection there and then be able to get what I need.

UPDATE: it's just come back up at 3:52 am... OK, let's get what we need and head to the train.

UPDATE: a minute later it's down again. Grrrr....

[9:25 am] UPDATE: still down. I've gotten a call from the house saying the internet is down, and I said "Yup, it's Comcast". It's still down, and I now wish I'd moved to git from CVS as I'd have what I needed on my laptop. It's not horrible, but it's annoying, and getting more so. I want the line back up.

[1:00 pm] UPDATE: Liza called and it was back up. Hope it stays up.

One of the types of graphs that we have wanted to make available in BKit with VantagePoint is the true x-y line graph. Currently, the line graph assumes that all x-coordinates are shared across all data sets and that they are uniformly increasing. This means that there's no way to really properly display a step function... or anything that might "double back" on itself like a hysteresis loop.

A while back, I asked Gordon at VantagePoint if there weren't some way to do this, and if not, could it be added? He responded that yes, indeed, there was - the TowDimCrossScatterViewer. Basically, it's meant to be able to plot multiple scatter graphs where each set of points is a data set. But if you go in afterwards to the data points and tell them to connect the dots, you can actually get a graph. Like this: (sort of)

The problem here is that I'm trying to display the square wave on the secondary axis, which was Y in the previous graphs, but it now seems to be X, and that's not really what we're going for. So it's close, but I still need to ask Gordon what I need to do to get the secondary axis to be the secondary Y axis. We'll see what he says, but it's getting really close. Exciting stuff.

It's exciting to see that there is clearly the new ability to create non-functional representations. This has been something that I really wished we had had a long time ago. Well... better late than never.

GraphicConverter 6.3 is out, and it's one of the first graphics apps I got for my first G3 MacBook. It's been a valuable asset to me over the years, and while I haven't used it much since getting Acorn, I still want to support the authors, and while this was a free update, I'll get the paid updates as I think this is really good software and is deserving of my support.

For quite a while, we've been trying to make a true x-y line graph with VantagePoint. The problem has always been that the traditional line graphs assume that the points on the x-axis are simple markers and equidistantly spaced on the axis. Not good if you have scientific data.

I heard back from Gordon at VantagePoint and they do having something that I can use to create a true x-y line graph - the TwoDimCrossScatterViewer. It turns out that this graph takes pairs of columns (x,y) as the Variables and then plots them independently on the graph. Not bad, but I need to connect the points as well. Gordon has that covered as well:

  /**
   * This is the way to draw a line between points on a cross scatter graph.
   */
  for (int var = 0; var < itsGraph.getNumCrossVars(); ++var) {
    VariableAttributes   va = itsGraph.getVariableAttributes(var);
    va.setOption(VariableAttributes.voiDrawLine, true);
  }

With this, I can make it look a lot like the traditional line graph, but instead of just giving me columns to plot as lines, the users will have to give me pairs of columns for a single line - just like you'd want.

I'll need to make a new kind of graph, but that's not a problem. It'll be similar to the line, but under the covers it'll be a very different beast. Good job, Gordon!

I decided this morning that I'd spend a little time updating my resume - specifically, clearing out the stale links after the Big Shut Off in my office. Most of the links were old, and I doubt that there's anyone that's going to miss a few pages on my old projects, or a crypto-quip solver that can probably get spanked by an iPhone app, but it got me looking at what I've done for a career.

Some days it just doesn't seem that cool.

I'm sure a lot of people look back and say the same thing. It's the nature of some people (like myself) to minimize their achievements as simple, or easy at the time. We forget, or at least trivialize, the pain we went through. We look at what we've done as something anyone could do. And it's not fair.

While much of it might not be on par with curing cancer, it was something that took all I had. I wouldn't trivialize the accomplishments of my kids, why do it to myself? Answer: because deep down, we all know our own dirty little secrets. We can't really respect ourselves because we know too much about our failings.

I need to break out of this. It really is a wonderful life. I have done some pretty impressive things - so people tell me. I have lots of interesting and funny stories that I can tell pretty darn well. Maybe that should be the true measure of one's self-worth: How many people would willingly listen to your stories?

I have friends at Citadel, and this news is just not good for them. They do point to the up-side that the market-making fund is doing well, and I'm glad for that - for them. They are really good guys, and I'd hate to see them take any additional stress because of this, but I'm sure they will. It's part of the industry.

Just thinking about the few friends I have, and hoping they are riding out this storm OK.

This morning I saw that the great guys at Panic have released Coda 1.6.1 with quite a few improvements. I've been seeing quite a lot of traffic on the Coda mailing list - a good deal of which was a pretty nasty thread about Git integration. Now I'd love it if they supported CVS and Git, but I'm not going to get out of hand if they don't - face it, the tools don't have to be integrated to be useful.

It's a wonderful took for working on non-Java web sites. Nothing wrong with that. But it would be nice if they had CVS and Git support to the tool.

This morning I was spending a little bit of time trying to see if I could add in a few nice section headers using the h2, h3, etc. headers. I knew from experience what I liked in the defaults, but I wanted to dive into the CSS and see if I could make them better, and more logical - like why is the first one I like h3?

Well... it turns out to be an interesting problem and because the WordPress Theme makers use these in their layout as well, it's not really up to the posts to change these. For example, h1 (in my theme) is used for the title of the page, h2 is used as the title on the post, etc. If I wanted to make an h1 for the post, I might be OK, but if I did that to h2, I'm going to have a problem with the title of the post.

So while the might have explicitly used a class="post_title" to indicate what they were doing, I can see why they chose to use the more familiar h2. After all, these are probably not modified by a ton of folks, and if they are, then, like me, you're going to see the problems and then decide how to get around them.

It's all possible to fix - but it involves essentially re-writing the entire theme and putting in the class tags to make sure that there will be no conflicts with the default post tags. Not impossible, but more work than I wanted to do today. I got what I needed - two levels, and that's going to be more than enough for what I've been doing.