Concern

I spent part of this weekend hacking together a chart renderer for JFreeChart that renders box-and-whisker datasets as quartile plots, the design Edward Tufte suggests in his book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I was doing this for my paper on Ceph that I’m writing, because I was dissatisfied with the way the box-and-whisker renderer looked.

The code is here: QuartilePlotRenderer.java. I think this renderer needs a little more work, but here are some samples of what it produces. I mostly like the results of this renderer; I think the lines can cause a bit of vibration if they are too heavy and too close together, but for very small datasets, it looks pretty good. I haven’t come up with a good way to render the outliers yet, so they are simply omitted.

Here’s an example of the “dot and whisker” style. I like this one the best. It uses the least ink and makes for a striking design:

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Against better judgement, I’ve recently taken to expressing myself in 140 characters or less.

I mostly enjoyed 300. It doesn’t have much to offer up except all kinds of style, and it’s oozing with macho attitude. It seems like the kind of movie that could get males in a fightin’ mood.

Does Hip-Hop

a) Turn otherwise normal people into frakking morons, or

b) Draw frakking morons out to wherever the Hip Hop is playing?

(Since it usually seems to involve baseball hats, I’m guessing (b).)

One trend you seem to see in feed fetcher bots (like those for Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, etc.) is that they tell you, in their user agent line, how many people read your blog. Now I know that just about the only thing people really care about is what other people think of them, but it seems a tad rude for some bot to stumble by your website and let you know, unasked, that you really aren’t all that popular.

(Alternatively, you can take comfort that no one is actually reading this junk)