Category Archives: Phil

Phil 11.8,9.12

8:00 – 4:00

  • Meeting with Lenny and Don about VisTool. After a lot of going around, they want more (as yet unspecified) scripts. After having now interacted with Ray (An actual user!), I want to have fewer Financial Mitigation pages popped up at people who have no money to spend yet.
  • Was able to replicate the freeze problem. If the user has not set up any “desktop” styles, the objects that define the panel borders are null, which freaks the color calculations out. I added traps for that, and also experimented with what the best change in the ‘per wedge’ hue rotation in a pie chart is. It looks like it’s 23 degrees, and I took out the code that varies it as a function of the hue difference between the panel bg and border.
  • Committed all changes and burned the new vis2, PPM and PA to disk.

Phil 11.5.12 – 11.6.12

11.5.12: 7:30 – 9:30, 1:00 – 4:00 ESSO

  • Backups
  • Deployed release versions of everything.
  • Meeting with Morpheus folks. Demoed everything, and they are interested. Had an odd experience, where the chart view in the data visualizer froze. Upon reloading, everything was fine.

11.5.12 10:00 – 1:00 FP

  • 810, then video production presentation

11.6.12: 730 – 2:00 ESSO

  • Backups
  • Wrote up meeting notes for Dave W.
  • Jim G. wants status for October
  • Set up a bunch of users for Data Visualization. When showing one how things work, I ran into the freezing problem again. I reset the deployed code to be the debug build, and can’t get it to happen on my box, but it happens on his. I need to test further. Not even sure how to debug this one yet.
  • Experimenting with using Google Drive to hold my Eclipse development directory. If it works, then there is always a snapshot of the current codebase. THis doesn’t replace SVN, which hold the ‘working’ codebase. Instead, this is the version that each user is working on, before it’s shared.

2:00 – 4:00 FP

  • 805, and a bit of coding to determine Levenshtein distance for strings.

Phil 11.2.12

8:00 – 11:00,  12:00 – 4:00 ESSO

  • Deployed yet another version of vis2. I think it’s free of any ‘stupid’ errors, at any rate.
  • Monday 2:00 Morpheus meeting
  • Wednesday 9:30 VisTool walkthrough
  • Announded the URN victory
  • Compiled and burned release builds of other VISIBILITY apps.

11:00 – 12:00 FP

  • Meeting with Bill Shewbridge. Looks like studio time on Nov 20 or Dec 4. Preference for Nov 30.

Phil 11.1.12

8:00 – 2:00 ESSO

  • We have our VizTool URN!
  • Looks like next week for Morpheus
  • Interview today?
  • Discovered a small bug today when deploying the new version. Although data tips for other items are able to use HTML, tips for pie charts don’t. Pulling out the offending code .
  • Talked to Dong about passing variables into SQL, and about creating some release builds to evaluate.
  • Burning a new disk

2:00 – 4:00 FP

  • More papers and HCC foundations

Phil 10.31.12

8:00 – 4:00

  • Backups and discussions with folks on site. Working on getting a meeting set up with the Morpheus folks.
  • fgmdev.com was down. Dong and I spent most of the morning trying to get it up. That you are reading this means success!
  • Working on adding color code. Incorporated and working nicely!
  • Checking code in
  • Burning a disk

Phil 10.30.12

10:00 – 12:00 ESSO

  • Still wet, but no wind to speak of. Cold – in the 30’s. We apparently got 80 mph gusts and I’d believe it.
  • Updated the WP engine for this blog.
  • Looking at some papers about User Interface/ Experience to see how the Alert Manager App should be built.

12:00 – 2:00 FP

  • Reading “Facilitators and Barriers to Adopting Robotic-Assisted Surgery:  Contextualizing the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology”. I want to find a rule for User Interface adoption
    “

Phil 10.29.12

8:00 – 4:00 ESSO

  • So begins a very wet day.
  • Working on figuring out why coloring chart lines is so different from all the other charts. Going to try building a toy project with just one line chart in it and (maybe?) an item renderer.
  • Well that turned out to be easier than I thought.
	private function init():void{
		var hsb:HsbObject = new HsbObject(0x0000AA);
		var lsa:Array = new Array();
		lsa.push(createLineSeries("Profit", "Profit", hsb));
		hsb.rotateHue(40);
		lsa.push(createLineSeries("Expenses", "Expenses", hsb));
		hsb.rotateHue(40);
		lsa.push(createLineSeries("Amount", "Amount", hsb));

		_linechart.series = lsa;
	}

	private function createLineSeries(yf:String, dn:String, hsb:HsbObject):LineSeries{
		var scs:SolidColorStroke = new SolidColorStroke(hsb.getHexColor());
		scs.weight = 3;
		var ls:LineSeries = new LineSeries();
		ls.yField = yf;
		ls.displayName = dn;
		ls.setStyle("lineStroke", scs);
		return ls;
	}

The project files are here. There are two projects. The EdgeUtils project contains the HsbObject class.

Phil 10.26.12

8:00 – 4:00 ESSO

  • Put in the paperwork for an URN
  • Pinged the Morpheus folks to see how we can integrate
  • Working on tracking down bugs and coloring lines
  • Discussed how to add SQL stored(?) procedures to VSS with Dong.
    • Need an editor to create and name scripts
    • Need some kind of macro substitution
    • Some of this is available in the dbObjects in JavaUtils and FGMUtils, using the classes that I wrote to create databases that map to Flex objects.
  • Fixed the bug that was crashing the column rendering in WidgetBase by adding a try/catch block and resetting the array of visibile columns. Not pretty, but it works.
  • Still trying to figure out how to change the color of a line. This seems to be the way: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/flex/using/WS2db454920e96a9e51e63e3d11c0bf69084-7c52.html

Phil 10.25.12

8:00 – 2:00 ESSO

  • Got the following error:
  • RangeError: Index ‘2’ specified is out of bounds.

    [C:autobuild3.xframeworksprojectsframeworksrcmxcollectionsListCollectionView.as:529]
    at mx.collections::ListCollectionView/addAll()[C:autobuild3.xframeworksprojectsframeworksrcmxcollectionsListCollectionView.as:512]
    at com.edgeti::WidgetBase/listColumnsHandler()[C:PhilProject WorkspacesHelios_3.6 FB4.5_32_bit_Aug_2012GenericQueryWidgetsrcmainflexcomedgetiWidgetBase.as:236]

  • Backups
  • Status meeting
    • Dave wants a contingincy plan if the server goes down. Need to talk to Vernon about this.
    • Looked at integrating with Morphious.

Phil 10.24.12

8:00 – 4:00 ESSO

  • Working on getting auto colors to work properly in trend widget.
  • 10:00 Meeting to talk to GAO folks. I think that went well. There will be a followup meeting.
  • Continued to beat on getting autopallete working for TrendWidget. After stepping through the ThresholdColumnRederer and figuring that out, I wound up with the same wrong coloring that I was getting when I ran the fill function from within the TrendWidget. The problem was that the ChartItem index was referring to each *cluster* of columns, not the columns within the cluster. As a hack to get around this, I put an Array in TrendWidget that counts the yFields that are passed to the field function. The *index* of the yFields is then used as the hue angle. Anyway, here’s the code:
protected function setColumnSeriesColor(element:ChartItem, index:Number):IFill {
	var yFieldName:String = "_unset_";
	var o:Object = element.element;

	// check if the yFieldName is in an array. if it is, then get the index. if not, add and get the index.
	if(o.hasOwnProperty("yField")){
		yFieldName = o.yField;
		if(_yfieldNameArray.lastIndexOf(yFieldName) == -1){
			_yfieldNameArray.push(yFieldName);
		}
		index = _yfieldNameArray.lastIndexOf(yFieldName);
	}
	return ColorUtil.setSeriesColor(element, index);
}
  • Next is getting the line charts to work with the color scheme.
  • Oh yeah, and add dataTip formatting to pie charts in QueryWidgetBase.

Phil 10.23.12

8:00 – 2:00 ESSO

  • Backups and housecleaning
  • Installed new vis2.swf. Not happy yet with the colors, but the commas work.
  • Talked to Lenny about FACTS
  • Got some heads up on tomorrow’s meeting.
  • Working with colors. I’m going to increment a fixed amount off of the border color – see how that works. Well – I think:
  • Well, that seems to work nicely:

Phil 10.22.12

8:00 – 9:45 ESSO

  • Backups
  • Updated the index.html page to mention that we are production!
  • Made a printout of the xml that describes the FlexiChart that we’re using, and I think I figured out what the issue with the tooltips is. The yField does not exist as a row in the table. I need to get what the label and the mapping is for each row (series?) from the flexiChart.

9:45 – 12:15 FP

  • How users make applications fit their needs. Or, how users misuse Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint.

12:15 – 4:00 – ESSO

  • Digging into FlexiChart to see if I can get the series information and use it in the dataTip function. Done and working.

 

Phil 10.19.12

8:00 – 4:00 ESSO

  • Deployed new Vis2 and PA. Vis2 still needs some work with autocalculating colors, and tooltip values are being lost in some of the FlexiCharts.
  • We do have a production machine. It’s the one labeled ‘test’. Declare victory and move on!
  • VisTool Meetings are now every other Thursday starting next week
  • Added a minimum saturation value as well as min and max hue angle steps in the auto color code
  • Extended printing of FlexiChart tooltips to show all data names and values to see why things are not showing up in the on-site tooltips
  • We really do need to incorporate this – xkcd-style plots

Phil 10.18.12

8:30 – 2:30 ESSO

  • Backups
  • Some back and forth with Denise about servers. It turns out that she moved, and is in HQ now.
  • Some talk with Jim G. about OSGI issues on some of their work
  • It looks like there may be a demo on the 24th for GAO?

2:30 – 4:30 FP

  • Qualitative Methods and HCI

Phil 10.17.12

9:30 – 4:00 ESSO

  • Dentist this morning
  • More tracing of where the tooltip functionality is handled in FlexiChart. I’m starting to think it’s the default behavior, so I’m working on getting a data tip function to extract what’s going on and insert the appropriate text and values.
  • Wound up adding a dataTipFunction at the <flexichart:FlexiChart/> level that got the displayName from the HitData.element, which in this case is always going to be a series of some kind. The display name allows me to get the correct value from the item data Object, which is then formatted.
  • Still need to bring all the colors in line with the values that are now calculated from the palette.
  • Added in change logs to VISIBILITY.