And Again!

Another update to FlexChart this evening, providing set and series colors (both fills and strokes), an option for including/excluding the legend when exporting a chart to PNG, and a few new examples showcasing the features (including some really ugly developer art).
With the coloring support, the 'Grouped Series' example makes a lot more visual sense, so [...]

More FlexCharts Goodness

Another batch of changes to FlexChart.
First is grouped series, which is hard to explain, but easy to understand.  Go hit the demo and select "Grouped Series" from the dropdown.  The chart layout has always been possible, but the legend just displayed a flat series list with no awareness of the groupings.  To see the old [...]

FlexChart Update

Long time no blog…  I've updated my FlexChart component slightly, as well as repackaged it for easier consumption.  The new feature is the availability of a 'dataTipFunction' attribute on the root 'chart' element, which will be called to format data tips.  It gets passed an object with various keys about the backing chart item.  Since [...]

Checkbox Range Selection (a la GMail)

If any of you use GMail, you'll know that you can shift click the checkboxes on the conversation list to select a range of conversations (i.e. click the second conversation's checkbox and then shift-click the tenth conversation's checkbox). You can also deselect the same way (click the seventh, and then shift-click the fourth). [...]

Report/Query DSLs Update

I've posted a simple demo app for both DSLs that you can play with. It's included in the distribution as index.cfm, so you'll get it if you pull down the source from SVN. I've also created a readme.txt file in the distribution with the text of my intro blog post.
I also made a [...]

Report/Query DSLs

I use a pair of stacked DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) for searching, reporting, and goal management in a couple applications. A discussion at work (with Joshua and Koen) provided the solution for the final piece I wanted to implement before releasing them. The first layer is for parsing query strings, and the latter [...]

My Blog, Or Is It?

I wanted to thank everyone who read, and especially commented on, my My Blog, My Rules post a couple weeks ago.  It's nice to know that people care, and even better to know that they appreciate what I've done.  And apologies to Charlie for the firestorm.
So is this my blog?  Or is it everyone's site, [...]

Programming Creativity

Creativity is an interesting characteristic, because it means so many things.  Bach was creative.  So was Picasso.  Da Vinci.  Shakespeare.  Thompson and Ritchie?
Is computer programming a creative endeavour?  My instinct says yes.
Merriam-Webster defines "creative" as "having the quality of something created rather than imitated".  So by definition, everything that is created is the result of [...]

Music…

I have musical talent of a very mediocre degree, but I love listening.  Popular, rock, choral, new age, instrumental, anything that's interesting.  But what makes it interesting?  What about music evokes feelings?  Why are some collections of noises beautiful while some are appalling, even if they're made up of the same constituents?  A very perplexing [...]

Tokamak is Offline

I've had a Linux workstation (named tokamak) as my primary computer for the past several years, and until this past year, work was exclusively Linux as well.  Tonight, for the first time in literally years, I took tokamak offline.  It'll come back on, rest assured, but it's off, and it's weird.
I got a new Thinkpad [...]