Andy Kopciuch's Blog
Thursday, May 12, 2005
PHP Graphs, True Type & New Stuff
Wow have things ever been busy the last few weeks. I made it back to Calgary with Marshall quite nicely. We missed the early ferry due to it being full. We knew we were so screwed to make good time, so we took it slow. This also gave us a reason to make many stops and play some heads up holdem poker. I'm into Marsh for $50 after the entire trip. It was worth sitting at a truck stop in the dark, outside on some wobely table playing poker, and some trucker goes ... hey cool ... who's winning? What a trip. We did get home just adfter 4:00 A.M. Not bad for leaving victoria at 8:00 A.M the day before. What a _long_ trip!
Of course I needed a few days to recover from the trip, travel, and everything else. Days just seemed to rip on by and I'll never get them back now. I did roll up my sleeves and get back into the toolkit code for L&Y. I'd been looking forward to it because I had not really gotten any chance to really sink into some things I wanted to do. Now is my chance. I've been on a good roll. I just compelted a major improvement adding a tracking level of arbitrary terms to each prospect.
After a conversation with AJ, I was motivated to look into graphing out statistics on the commercial activity. I did some searchiong for PHP graphing tools, and came accross a fabulous library JPGraph found here : http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/index.php. It is a collection of classes that make use of the GD library to dynamically create images of every kind of graph and chart you could imagine. The examples has 297 differnet images, complete with source code examples of how to do it. I must say it is written quite well, and the documentation is quite good. I installed it on my machine, and made my first statistical graph in under 1 hour. I was super impressed and pleased. My clients are absolutely thrilled about this. They are compilling a list of all the different stats they might want.
Installing this package on the server was another story. When I built the server, I made the choice of having it headless. No X server, no desktop environment. Simple console with ssh access. For 3 years that's been perfect. When I attempted to use theJPGraph libray I realized some errors were due to missing True Type fonts in the X11 directories. After some playing around, and compiling ttmkfdir for SuSE, installing some noarch rpms, and then installing X11 through yast it worked like a champ. The fonts are great, and within 2 hours from start I had the library figured out, and multiple statistics are being used. I especially like the 3-D pie chart. The possibilities for the usefulness of this are endless.
On the personal side of things. this is the wekk for "New Stuff". My cell phone contract was up this week, and I went and got a new phone. I had been wanting one for quite a long time, and my new kyocera is fabulous. I have had it on for 2 days straight, and the battery still registers completley full! I also switched my residental phone to the new Shaw Digital Phone (VOIP) so I got a new phone number. The plan was too good to refuse. Unlimited anytime calling in North America. I get 6 phone features for free. Flat rate will never change. It's insanely good.
Today I started to receive the insurance settlement from my break in a few months ago. I chose to wait becuase I was out of town again. I got a new DVD player, and CD player, plus I got some new DVDs. I still have tons left on the credit to get CDs, and more movies. I'm happy for now, and I do have 2 years to use up the store credit. So all this new stuff is overloading my brain. Good thing I've started to make use of Kontact's TODO list, and calendar appointments. I'd never get anything done without it ΒΆ 10:30:00 PM 0 comments
Of course I needed a few days to recover from the trip, travel, and everything else. Days just seemed to rip on by and I'll never get them back now. I did roll up my sleeves and get back into the toolkit code for L&Y. I'd been looking forward to it because I had not really gotten any chance to really sink into some things I wanted to do. Now is my chance. I've been on a good roll. I just compelted a major improvement adding a tracking level of arbitrary terms to each prospect.
After a conversation with AJ, I was motivated to look into graphing out statistics on the commercial activity. I did some searchiong for PHP graphing tools, and came accross a fabulous library JPGraph found here : http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/index.php. It is a collection of classes that make use of the GD library to dynamically create images of every kind of graph and chart you could imagine. The examples has 297 differnet images, complete with source code examples of how to do it. I must say it is written quite well, and the documentation is quite good. I installed it on my machine, and made my first statistical graph in under 1 hour. I was super impressed and pleased. My clients are absolutely thrilled about this. They are compilling a list of all the different stats they might want.
Installing this package on the server was another story. When I built the server, I made the choice of having it headless. No X server, no desktop environment. Simple console with ssh access. For 3 years that's been perfect. When I attempted to use theJPGraph libray I realized some errors were due to missing True Type fonts in the X11 directories. After some playing around, and compiling ttmkfdir for SuSE, installing some noarch rpms, and then installing X11 through yast it worked like a champ. The fonts are great, and within 2 hours from start I had the library figured out, and multiple statistics are being used. I especially like the 3-D pie chart. The possibilities for the usefulness of this are endless.
On the personal side of things. this is the wekk for "New Stuff". My cell phone contract was up this week, and I went and got a new phone. I had been wanting one for quite a long time, and my new kyocera is fabulous. I have had it on for 2 days straight, and the battery still registers completley full! I also switched my residental phone to the new Shaw Digital Phone (VOIP) so I got a new phone number. The plan was too good to refuse. Unlimited anytime calling in North America. I get 6 phone features for free. Flat rate will never change. It's insanely good.
Today I started to receive the insurance settlement from my break in a few months ago. I chose to wait becuase I was out of town again. I got a new DVD player, and CD player, plus I got some new DVDs. I still have tons left on the credit to get CDs, and more movies. I'm happy for now, and I do have 2 years to use up the store credit. So all this new stuff is overloading my brain. Good thing I've started to make use of Kontact's TODO list, and calendar appointments. I'd never get anything done without it ΒΆ 10:30:00 PM 0 comments
