Keith’s Blog

I took a couple of quick shots of the group:

and the grid:

More details on my xml.com blog post.
Tim Bray has better photos here.

Inspired by how easy it was to get JFreeChart working and some code from former colleague Andrew Bruno, I thought it’d be nice to write some JRuby to generate Edward Tufte’s Sparklines.
Here’s some simple example code on a semi-random dataset:

# Mostly inspired by
# http://left.subtree.org/2007/01/15/creating-sparklines-with-jfreechart/
# have JFreeChart in your classpath, obviously, as well [...]

I’ve been messing around at work trying to make some automated scheduling charts (basically Gantt-like) in Ruby. I’ve implemented it a couple of times using SVG::Graph, which is close to what I need, but I end up having to rewrite a lot of methods whenever I really start using it. It occurred to me today [...]

I just started reading the second edition of The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton and came across this gem:
We can’t avoid complexity, but we can push it around. We can bury it out of sight. This is the old “black box” principle at work; a black box performs a complex task, but it possesses simplicity [...]