7:30 – 3:30 ESSO

• Brought in a new version of vis2, but the colors still don’t work quite right for a three-element chart
• Making larger text looks as straightforward as setting up the magnification and sizing appropriate to the conference room screen.
• Tooltips will still be a problem. Need to get the magnification value passed to them.
• Need to include the name of the Label Column when loading from XML. Fixed. For some reason I was forcing the _labelColumnField to the name of the 0th column in WidgetBase.setColumns. Dunno why.

8:00 – 4:00 ESSO

• Worked on getting all the data in the data visualizer for Col Dukes’ presentation on Thursday. 
  • Cleaned out a lot of old code, files and cruft in general.
  • Had problems getting the ingestor to swallow alerts. Diagnosing this lead to a problem with Projects Under Budget. We’re about halfway through the fix for all that.
  • Loaded up the latest COGNOS data
  • Integrated Comitted with the rest of the FY13 data
• Javascript
  • Chapter 6, or how to do OO when there is no such thing as a class in JavaScript.
  • JavaScript prototypes are most peculiar.

9:30 – 5:30 ESSO

• Ice storm this morning. Yuck. Still, the best traffic I’ve ever seen in the region.
• Spent most of the day with Dong working out the queries to get the FY13 presentation running from the project_portfolio database. I think it’s all working, with the exception of the data that needs to be input from COGNOS. A couple of issues:
  • Committed is not showing up in any of the plots. Need to look through this with Dong.
  • When Lenny tries to bring up the slide show, the charts do not populate. I think this is a permissions issue.
  • Need to make sure that a transition is not required when running a slide show.
• Still need to import FY12 COGNOS data. Tomorrow.
• Back to Javascript. Done with Chapter 5.

8:00 – 10:00, 1:00 – 4:00 ESSO

• Backed up.
• Role problems with PA, talked to Dong, who got a fix in by this afternoon
• Rolled out preferences. There was a DB bug, where the preferences were set up as VARCHAR and not TEXT. Fixed.

10:00 – 1:00 FP/OH

• Meeting with David Moor about what to do with the FP. Looking at synthetic users.

8:00 – 4:00 ESSO

• Backed up.
• Rebuilt query spreadsheet for Dong
• There may be a problem with PA, but it is more likely an older version. We’re adding in a test that checks the DB for the latest “Compiled” string and evaluates the date. If the local date is less than the DB date, the app throws up an “Update” dialog with instructions for FF and IE. If the date is greater, the app updates the string in the DB, otherwise things start normally.
• Javascript!
• Cool thing:

    var num = 0;
    outermost: // create a label for this for loop
    for (var i = 0; i < 10; i + +) {
        for (var j = 0; j < 10; j + +) {
            if (i == 5 && j == 5) {
                continue outermost; // go to the label
            }
            num ++;
        }
    }
    alert( num); // 95

• Switch statements can switch on variables?
• IMPORTANT!!! –
  • Function arguments in ECMAScript don’t behave in the same way as function arguments in most other languages. An ECMAScript function doesn’t care how many arguments are passed in, nor does it care about the data types of those arguments. Just because you define a function to accept two arguments doesn’t mean you can pass in only two arguments. You could pass in one or three or none, and the interpreter won’t complain. This happens because arguments in ECMAScript are represented as an array internally. The array is always passed to the function, but the function doesn’t care what (if anything) is in the array. If the array arrives with zero items, that’s fine; if it arrives with more, that’s okay too. In fact, there actually is an arguments object that can be accessed while inside a function to retrieve the values of each argument that was passed in.
  • Unlike in other languages, naming your arguments in ECMAScript does not create a function signature that must be matched later on; there is no validation against named arguments. The arguments object can also be used to check the number of arguments passed into the function via the length property. The following example outputs the number of arguments passed into the function each time it is called:

function howManyArgs() {
    alert( arguments.length);
}
howManyArgs(" string", 45); // 2
howManyArgs(); // 0
howManyArgs( 12); // 1

• When a variable is declared using var, it is automatically added to the most immediate context available. In a function, the most immediate one is the function’s local context; in a with statement, the most immediate is the function context. If a variable is initialized without first being declared, it gets added to the global context automatically.
• And in the “No Free Lunch Dept: Setting a variable to null effectively severs the connection between the variable and the value it previously referenced. The next time the garbage collector runs, these values will be deleted and the memory will be reclaimed. Even if you have garbage collection, it never hurts to help out.
• As in other languages, ECMAScript arrays are ordered lists of data, but unlike in other languages, they can hold any type of data in each slot. This means that it’s possible to create an array that has a string in the first position, a number in the second, an object in the third, and so on.
• Ringbuffer: ECMAScript also provides an unshift() method for arrays. As the name indicates, unshift() does the opposite of shift(): it adds any number of items to the front of an array and returns the new array length. By using unshift() in combination with pop(), it’s possible to emulate a queue in the opposite direction, where new values are added to the front of the array and values are retrieved off the back.
• Hit the wall reading about functions. I need my ride, and it’s only 21 degrees!
• Burned a disk with the new PA on it.