Little Logos

New Project. Love new.
Inventory control of human specimens in the morgue on campus.
RFID was the initial thought but ended up with more conventional Barcode scanners.
Great chance to do some work in .Net and SQL with GPRS (mobile) PocketPC devices although the web front end may still end up in domino given our in-house experience and the security model.

The decision to use PocketPCs with mobile telephony was actually pretty straightforward on cost and implementation grounds.

More to follow.

Starting to plan our big walk in Tassie. Next January a few friends and I plan to walk the Overland Track (wiki entry) from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Claire with a detour via the Labyrinth.
This will be my longest walk at 9 nights. The walk normally takes 5-6 days but we plan to do some climbs and detours.
Have also started going back to the gym to do some conditioning.

Walk diary

Did my first stint as a cricket scorer this weekend for Marc’s game.
Both the boys play for the Kingsgrove Cricket Club in the under 10’s. Marc plays in the A’s and Ryan in the C’s (there is no B team this year).
Anyway, the temperature was about 12 degrees (c) which is OK for Rugby but it’s just not cricket. Brrr.
Anyway I have started to learn the ins and outs of the arcane art of scoring. It’s a wonderful pencil and paper system with a great history.
Marc unfortunately got out for a duck.

Wordpress Sidebar widgets are cool but can have an impact on some plugins. Sparkstats for example is a very nice little plugin that I like to use. But it no longer works when you use the new sidebar widgets.

In trying to fix Sparkstats I first used one of the built-in text widget and pointed an IMG link directly to the sparkstats .png file.

eg:

<img alt="SparkStats" src="/wp-content/plugins/sparkstats/curstats.png" />

This is a simple fix that “just works”. It also shows how useful the text and rss widgets can be.

Another fix was to play with Stewart Ugelow’s “theme widgets“. This is kind of a plugin on a plugin but was a good intro to the whole custom widget world. So following his notes I created a file called “widget-sparks” using the sparkStats_imgURI() as a variable. This was a little cleaner but I’m not sure if I will keep on using the theme widgets long term.

It was late but why not go the whole way says I. Well thanks to Kaf Under and his example widget I was inspired and able to make my very own sparkstat widget. A few hacks later and a new widget is born.

You can grab a (txt) copy of my beta version here.
Note: You will need the sparkstats plugin and the sidebar widgets plugin. Then rename the sparks file with a php extension and put it in the plugins/widgets directory.

From a post at Lifehacker from a post at juiceanalytics showed a cool way to put mini graphs in a cell next to the data in Excel. This is not new but a good reminder of what can be done with old fashion ASCII art.

Reminds me to go back and look at the work of Edward Tufte and his beautiful displays of information - I have used sparklines and other techniques from his books.

Also worth pointing out that this also works nicely in lotus notes and domino views using basically the same code and exactly the same technique.

The formulas in Notes for the above cols are:

@Repeat(”l”;NumberField) for a Number Field
and
@Repeat(”l”;@TextToNumber(TextField)) if a text Field

then you can format the col as you need