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.

8:00 – 4:30 ESSO

• Backups
• Deployed new PA. There are some logic issues WRT Due, Overdue and Current. Wrote them all out, but Dong has them, so I can’t enter them yet.
• Printed out the Cognos query and results so that we have something to work with to produce the charts for Col. Dukes.
• Spent a bit of time discussing my travails and thoughts about JDeveloper and JavaScript
• OK, this book gets ridiculously good reviews on Amazon. Getting the Kindle edition.
• Holy crap!
  • One of the most powerful and most controversial parts of the < script > element is its ability to include JavaScript files from outside domains. Much like an < img > element, the < script > element’s src attribute may be set to a full URL that exists outside the domain on which the HTML page exists, as in this example:
    • <script type=”text/javascript” src=” http://www.somewhere.com/afile.js”></script&gt;
• In XHTML (and XML), CDATA sections are used to indicate areas of the document that contain free-form text not intended to be parsed.
• Aptana Studio 3? Downloaded. Interesting.

8:00 – 4:00 – ESSO

• Deployed Dong’s new PA, but there was a problem, so we pulled it back.
• Updated MySQL and Java, as per instruction from corporate. Don’t forget to update max-packet-size in my.ini to 100M
• Due to the inability of the ADF client to adjust the size of columns as a container resizes, I’m starting to have doubts about the choice of JDeveloper. I might not if the documentation were better (i.e. the Flex documentation with simple examples). But I’m not having good feelings about going down the Oracle path.
• I did find this page that points at JavaScript charting packages. Going to spend the rest of the day looking at that. Here’s my subset of the list that I think might work for us.
  • Minimal or no dependencies
    • CanvasXpress
    • D3.js
    • Flotr2
    • JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit
    • Processing.js
  • Require general-purpose library (e.g. jQuery)
    • Flot
    • jqPlot
    • jQuery-Visualize
      • The above is designed(?) to support a book Designing with Progressive Enhancement. So there is some built-in training here.
    • RAP
• Now, if we start writing without a compiler to lean on, we’re going to need something like Lint. Here’s some discussion.

8:00 – 4:00 ESSO

• Meeting with Chris, Lenny, Carla and Tom(?). Started out by discussing fixes, but became a session discussing how to make the new Financial Assistant. Over the next week, the Pit Crew will put together a spreadsheet that contains everything that they need to make a new entry in a table define by a budget center. Adding a line is essentially adding a MIPR (kind of). Adding a new line, can duplicate some or all of the previous line. Adding a MIPR addendum, for example, would duplicate the entire line except for obligation, outlay, and date. This data all goes back into the existing tables in the database. 
• One modification of the current bugs/requests – make it so contract information in the finding request dropdown maps only to the associated MIPR.
• Updated the servers with monitoring software and also updated their listings.
• Made sure that the VISIBILITY code works for Dimitri’s visit.
• Dimitri came by and we walked through an FP demo,  most of the VISIBILITY data visualization piece, hitting a lot of tangents along the way. He thinks he might find it useful.
• And I need to update my database. visibility_scripting is out of date and there is no alerts DB.