I fixed the bar graph. It took longer than I thought. I kept having to add tweaks here and there, until the whole thing was so ad-hoc that I scrapped it, sat down to plan out what I needed to do, and started over. It worked pretty well after that, except for one issue that really had me lost for a while. I'm using a Perl module called EzDate. It's great - you can do a lot of "natural" things with a date, like incrementing it without worrying about going from March 31 to March 32, or comparing dates with the usual comparison operators. The problem I ran into is that when you compare dates, it uses a property called epochday, which for some reason rolls over at 1:00 a.m. instead of midnight. As you can imagine, that was causing insidious, hard-to-catch errors. I ended up just setting all times to 2:00 a.m., since I'm only interested in the date and not the time for that part of the code. But the bar graph is completely functional now, and it pulls the data so quickly!

Once I finished that, I worked on the popup calendar. I found out how to limit the range so that the end date can't be more than X days past the start date. It was a lot easier than I expected. You can give it the number of days, and it will take care of calculating months and such for you. I changed the bottom panel from "Clear All" to "Go to today." I did a lot of tweaking of the theme (i.e., colors, borders, and other visual effects), probably more than was necessary, but I feel that now it's easy to use and understand. (I may find out differently Wednesday!) I'm happy with the look and feel of the calendar now. Once I fix the built-in range for allowed dates, I should be ready to put the calendar files into the subversion library and implement the calendar on the bar graph page.

What to do next? I don't think I will have time to do both the new visualization (which I haven't started) and the changes to this visualization by Wednesday's meeting. I'm actually not sure if I can get the bar graph page completely changed over by the meeting, but I have a better chance of that than of creating the new visualization from scratch by that time. Maybe I could work on the new visualization the rest of the week after the meeting and have someone show it at the meeting next week when I'm out of town.