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Visualizing *lots* of numbers
Mission: You have a lot of data, and you need to make it all visible, and usable in a relatively small space. What do you do, sunshine? Just dump it into a bar graph and call it an early morning? Create multiple reports that digest parts of the data? Create a fairly cool little set of applets?
It is the last that the people doing the "Secret Life of Numbers" study did. They are attempting to track the "popularity" of all the numbers from one to 100000. While the ... usefulness of such a study is left to the reader, the...
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Moving and data migration
I sit, here on my cushion, surrounded by empty rooms. M and I are in the middle of our latest migration - this time to Comox, BC. I am left with my cushion, two cats and (of course), my Internet connection. "Why?", you ask? Because we're migrating our data.
It doesn't matter if you use Waterfall, the latest Agile methodology or no methodology whatsoever, at some point you will likely need to migrate data for an application. You might have overgrown your XML or Excel file, desire to move from Access or MSDE to a 'real' database, or have switched vendors....
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A footnote for the next time you think, 'How could they have coded it this way?'
I've been amused lately by many of the "WTF were they thinking when they wrote it" posts I've been seeing lately, especially on CodeBetter. This came to mind as I looked at a Word doc I was vainly trying to convert to HTML for posting. No, don't worrry, this isn't another rant about Word 2003's "HTML" output. Instead, it is what people do when they are formatting documents. Here's a excerpt:
Arial, 18pt Bold (1 instance)Arial, 10pt Bold, Gray (2 instances)11pt bold, before 6pt (5 instances)Arial, 13pt Bold, Double line above (18 instances)
etc.
In short, we have a document where the formatting...
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Google Notebook
Latest from Google Labs. Will it wean me off of Del.icio.us? I guess I'll see.
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Sonu is piling on the Ajax goodness
First he provided the incredible GeoTagIt! mashup (written by Alessandro Gallo [Garbin]), now he's added a nice touch for rating content. The items have stars that you can use to rate the content. Click the value, and quicker than you can say, "Atlas", your vote has been recorded. The stars even twinkle to let you know (cute touch, and nice usability IMO).
Best part of all? Well, the news feeds on the site, of course.
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Ajax: programmers vs developers?
There's an interesting thread on Tim O'Reilly's blog today that can basically be summarized as, "Are there two perspectives on Ajax?"
The basic fault line is between web developers who are comfortable monkeying around with web pages, and programmers who have spent years trying to abstract that stuff away.
Apart from my distaste for the acronym, and how it's become the new "Just stick web on it, or an 'i', or 'active' and it will be cool", it is a useful technology. In some situations. JavaScript debugging is the suxx0rs, even with Firefox. It is interesting to see the comparison of...
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Don't you hate it when...
... you're working on a bit of code for a sample, you get into a great bit of Flow and finish the sample. Then you realize it's not showing one of the fundamental technologies it's meant to demonstrate? Gah. Just finished a (nice, IMO) demo for Ajax, but I forgot to include XML.
/grumble