Pooh on Projects

December 28th, 2007 in Craftsmanship | No Comments

The Bear and Friends have a way to speak truth. Just before heading to the doctor this morning, my wife put on The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh for our son. It’s been years since I’ve seen this, and my ear caught something of it while it played in the background. Pooh has eaten too much hunny and is stuck in Rabbit’s front door. Owl comes by to try and solve the problem. Does any of this sound familiar to you as you’ve seen other IT folks talk to business people about how to solve their problems:

[Owl] You, sir, are stuck. A wedged bear in a great tightness. In a word, irremovable. Now obviously this situation calls for an expert.
[Gopher] Somebody call for excavation expert? I’m not in the book, but I’m at your service. Gopher’s the name. Here’s my card. What’s your problem?
[Owl] Yes, yes, yes. It seems the entrance to Rabbit’s domicile is impassable. To be exact, plugged.
[Gopher] And you want me to dig it out?
[Owl] Precisely. I say, it’s over here my good fellow.
[Gopher] Fist thing to be done is get rid of that bear. He’s gumming up the whole project.
[Owl] Dash it all, he is the project.
[Gopher] Umm… Hard digging, might hit bedrock, danger can happen, risky. Needs planks for bracing. Big job, take two, three days.
[Pooh] Three days? What about lunches?
[Gopher] No problem, I always go home for lunch. Oh, this will run into money.
[Owl] I say, how much
[Gopher] Er, do the job for hourly wage, plus cover material plus overtime plus 10 percent.
[Owl] And your estimate?
[Gopher] N’. N’. Can’t give you an estimate, too risky.
[Owl] Blast it all.
[Gopher] Good idea! Will dynamite, save time.
[Owl] What’s the charge?
[Gopher] The charge? Oh, about seven sticks of dynamite.
[Owl] Oh no no no, the cost, the charge in money?
[Gopher] No charge account, I work strictly cash.
[Owl] Obviously, but I should think…
[Gopher] Well I can’t stand around lollygagging all day, I’ve got a tight schedule…Think it over. Let me know. You’ve got my card. I’m not in the book, you know.
[Owl] Oh dash it all, he’s gone.

I laughed at how little things some things have changed since the Disney writers took liberties with the Pooh stories and created this funny dialogue.

GMail IMAP in Mail.app Slow?

December 26th, 2007 in Perplexed | 12 Comments

GMail IMAP downloading at 1.1 KB/s

I never download anything in Safari this slow. It’s easily hundreds of times faster. It’s been well over a month since I setup my GMail IMAP. I’ve done some initial investigation, but nothing concrete showed up that I hadn’t tried. Any ideas?

Using Google’s Chart API to Create Sparklines

December 17th, 2007 in How-To | 2 Comments

Just a couple weeks ago I was wondering how Google made its sparklines for Google Analytics. I was creating a Health Page of sorts for my application (a rudimentary listing of recent performance statistics, like how long it took to get a DB connection). I had designed my stats collection piece to keep track of data over the last 15 minutes or so, hoping to show a chart of recent activity when I hit my health page. I had plugged in the Colt statistics library to perform some calculations on the set of measurements in each minute. I had a lot of data points ready to display.

But I didn’t like how the Java Sparklines library worked, and I couldn’t see an easy way to mimic Google. Then just a short time later, they released their Chart API. So this morning I put my data into their API and the charts came out pretty decent (ignoring the fonts, decimal formatting, and alignment of my other stuff):

Sparklines using Google's Chart API

I can’t figure out how to get rid of the x and y axes entirely. I mimicked the Analytics chart size of 75×18 (or thereabouts), and it’s close. The Analytics charts also seem to have a minimum 2px buffer of fill along the bottom, so even 0 has some fill below it. They also seem to auto-size so the max measurement it at the top. There are several ways to refine what I’ve started with, but for an admin page that’s full of 80-150 charts, and only viewed by a few people, it’s a decent start.

Please leave a comment if you’ve got any tips on how you use Google’s Chart API to create sparklines.