I got all my scrachpad documents and todo lists cleaned up and organized! I emailed Nate the results of my "research," my online searching, regarding image maps and graphs and virtual agents (see it here). Andy has been working on using mySQL in QT, and since I've got some mySQL experience, I've been trying to help him there.

There's no Wednesday meeting tomorrow, since folks are working hard on a big grant proposal that's due this week.

I started working on the bubble graph. If I call the javascript function that creates the graph (it uses document.write a lot) from the page, that works fine. But if I call it from an onclick event, it never finishes loading - the throbber just keeps going. And the CSS isn't applied to the graph, either - I don't know if this is because it never finishes loading, or if perhaps CSS is only applied after the initial page load, or what. I should find out if this is a Firefox-only issue. I think that I've at least narrowed it down to being caused by document.write; I don't have this problem until the function I call contains a document.write command. Maybe I'll Google for something like "javascript never finishes loading document.write".

I did find out that one of my validation errors on that page was caused by trying to use <meta ... /> when the doctype is HTML 4.01 Transitional instead of 1.0 Strict. Apparently - at least in the context I was using it - you need to format your meta tag like <meta ... > (note the different closing) or else it messes up the things that come after - probably the validator interprets the tag as not being closed. 

I worked on making my bubble chart into something that could be used more generically. I implemented a new feature: user-defined color ranges. Now bubbles can be any color the user will create an image for, rather than only red or green as before. I need to talk to Nate about what the final version should look like. For example, should I translate it into Perl? Should I try to publish it as a library or module somewhere? I've never done that.

The final Firefox version is done [edit: Link updated]. I went to check it in Internet Explorer, and it doesn't look the same. It's still readable, but it's not as neat - for example, the tick marks don't touch the axis. The odd thing is that if you zoom in and then back out (hold down Ctrl and use your scroll wheel), it fixes itself. And then in Opera, something is wrong with the image heights, so the bubbles all look really squished. Maybe they think their height is a percentage of some other element's height rather than the table cell height.

Notes to self for tomorrow: 

• Tomorrow's task is to get this page looking good in those other two browsers.
• Scratchpad is called jul19, and it's just the ending portion. 

I spent most of the day trying to fix that IE bug I was talking about yesterday. I cannot figure this out! Here's a link to one of the places I posted my problem. I really don't know what to do. About my only hope at this point is that someone will respond to one of my postings with either a fix, or a resource that can help me fix it.

Oh well, I'm going to go home and go to my little brother's orchestra concert, and not worry about this too much until I come back in tomorrow. 

I've got to run as I'm leaving for a weekend trip, so this will be short.

It works!!! 

I'll post the solution after the weekend, and I'll fix the bad link on yesterday's entry. For now, you, my vast audience of dedicated readers (yeah right), will have to content yourself with a link to the working (?) page: clicky [Edit: Link removed. See July 25's post for a screenshot of the final (?) version.]

A great quote from someone who looked at my problem yesterday and couldn't figure it out either:

"on the bright side, IE 7 is almost here. and looking at it, i'm hopeful that IE 8 will finally fix current problems."

Nate will be leaving us to take a full-time job after this week. That will leave me as the only one working on the visualizations for a little while. I think I'd better leave my stuff pretty well-documented for whoever follows me!

Nate got Subversion set up and showed me how to access it. I committed various versions of our site to it until I got to the latest version, then gave it a more appropriate name. I learned about the system that uses "branches," "tags," and "trunk."

That page that was giving me so much trouble looked great in all 3 browsers this morning. Of course, when I go back to look at the code and finalize it, I tend to get just one more idea on how it could be improved. Between that and the subversion, and catching up on my email from the mailing lists from the weekend, the page is still very much under construction.

Tomorrow I would like to have my bubble graph completely finished, including having a way for Catalyst to hand it data. My scratchpad is jul24, and my master list is still progress lately, jul 17. At some point soon I need to decide when I'm going to start the paper about my summer experience.