If you just need a beautiful graph to put into a document or post, then the Chart Wizard is the best place to start. You simply choose the type of chart you want, input your data and choose the colours, labels, settings etc, and the wizard generates the URL for you to copy and paste!
The charts are highly configurable and can easily be changed by editing the URL to the image (view the source of this page to see the URL for the chart shown above). This makes it really easy to generate similar-but-different charts in your web applications, by using the wizard and then replacing some relevant parts of it.
As mentioned above, it is very simple to generate charts with Google Charts API – and all the information for generating the chart is on a URL which returns a png file of the resulting chart. This makes it ideal for integrating into our dynamic web applications and charts that are generated are almost overwhelmingly configurable. That said, there are a few key options that will get you started quickly so let’s take a quick tour.
.bash_history (there’s a limit on how many it stores but for me it goes back a few days). I find it really useful to look back at the history to use the same commands again or edit them slightly. You can press the up arrow to go through your history but it can take a really long time to find what you’re looking for. So instead, try Ctrl + r.
To do this: first press Ctrl + r, then start typing the command or any part of the command that you are looking for. You’ll see an autocomplete of a past command at your prompt. If you keep typing, you’ll get more specific options appear. You can also press Ctrl + r again as many times as you want to, this goes back in your history to the previous matching command each time.
Once you see a command you like, you can either run it by pressing return, or start editing it by pressing arrows or other movement keys. I find this a really useful trick for going back to a command I know I used recently, but which I can’t remember or don’t want to look up again. I hope this is a useful trick for you too!
I looked around for some export functionality for github but I got a lot of posts complaining it wasn’t there. Since I hate applications that take your data and refuse to let you remove it, I was disappointed by this news but further inspection showed that although there might be no “export from github” button, there’s an API that more than has it covered. The API returns JSON which is easy to work with from many programming languages, and is perhaps even more powerful and flexible than the simple export I initially expected, so here are some examples.
The axes in Google Charts are a bit interesting, because what they display bears absolutely no resemblance to what data is there – you label the axes separately, even if they are numbers. To label multiple things – in this example a scale and some units, you simply specify the axis more than once. To specify which axes should be shown, use chxt (CHart aXis Title) and set something like this:
&chxt=x,y,y
Then add the labels as required, for example:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chxl=1:|Sun|Mon|Tue|Wed|Thu|Fri|Sat|2:||Week+37
&chxr=0,0,20&chxs=0,676767,11.5,0,lt,676767&chxt=y,x,x&chbh=a
&chs=360x240&cht=bvg&chco=CC0057CC,3D7930&chds=0,20
&chd=t1:10.059,12.578,13.6,11.135,11.018,7.104,6.92|50,60,100,40,20,40,30
This produces a graph like this:
You can then add labels (using chxl) and ranges (uses chxr) to your axes as you wish – and even add axis labels to the top and right hand graph edges, using the t and r axes, with as many of each as you’d like, and using their list position as a parameter to the range/label settings. I hope this is useful to someone, as it took me a little bit of research to figure it out.
I’m coming up to my 5th anniversary of blogging and looking at my stats, I’ve written around 150 posts per year for most of that time, although in 2010 I “only” wrote 102 posts, possibly because one or two other things happened in my life. So many people tell me they want to blog, or they have a blog but can’t find the time to write, that I thought I’d try to give some pointers for those resolving to blog this New Year.
To launch a link into a new tab in an existing Opera window, I simply used this:
opera --remote 'openURL(<url>, new-page)'
Where the <url> is the address to access; the same trick works in other programs too. For example I use irssi for IRC, with the openURL plugin, and this can do the same trick. To launch the link I simply set the http handler like this:
/set openurl_app_http opera --remote 'openURL($1, new-page)'
Since I have to look these settings up every time I want them, I thought I’d blog them for next time – and of course for anyone else who finds this useful between now and then!
I love it when really fantastic events happen in the north, especially because I’m based in Leeds and have ties to the North East, so I’m very excited to be speaking. Tickets go on sale in the New Year and I hope I’ll see lots of you at the Sage on 8th June!
Recently I have been getting to grips with the ZCE since it was updated to take account of PHP 5.3. In the last few weeks I’ve both passed the certificate myself and also taught Zend’s certification training course as a classroom course at NTI Leeds. I thought I’d share my top tips for preparing for taking the ZCE – getting to the standard, last-minute preparations, and also some tips for surviving the day itself (disclaimer: everyone sitting the ZCE signs a declaration not to disclose the contents of the exam, so I can’t actually tell you the questions, sorry!)
To make this work, when you sign your OAuth request Google will accept some default values for consumer key and secret – see their documentation on signing oauth requests. To do this, set both consumer key and secret to the value “anonymous”, and proceed as you normally would. The only difference so far as I can see is that the user will be shown a more cautious message when they are prompted to grant access to your application. Personally I think this is a great approach, particularly when prototyping ideas. Registering the applications though is simple and quick so I’d recommend registering for most applications once they get beyond concept stage.