9:20 am - 5:20 pm

I worked on that second animation. I found my problem. I had been trying to do something like this in Javascript:

    myDiv = document.getElementById("coolJunk");
    myDiv.style.top = myDiv.style.top + 1;  

Apparently this works in HTML 4.01 Transitional, but not in XHTML 1.0 Strict. Here's a place where me throwing in a doctype before doing anything turned out to be a disadvantage. I found a script and stripped out everything nonessential -- see this page and try switching between doctypes. One works, and the other doesn't. I think the DOM must be different between the two. The one is built on HTML, and the other is built on XML. At least, this is the best understanding that I was able to piece together.

Oh, and it seems that if you do the following,

   .coolJunk {
     top: 5px;
   }
   <div id="coolJunk" style="color:red;"></div>

then your javascript call to myDiv.style.top will come up empty, because top wasn't set in the style element (ie, you could call myDiv.style.color, but not .top).

I finally gave up and decided HTML 4.01 Transitional would be just fine. See the fruits of my labor. Note that you can easily edit several parameters all in one place in the source. 

Nate made it in today after being sick for a few days. He showed me how we install Catalyst plugins. I learned that when you open an SSH session, you should log out of it before you close your terminal window. Otherwise, it will leave a process running until the end of time on the server, potentially causing tears and grief for some sysadmin someday.

Nate also showed me a neat Flash graph on Google Finance. I then googled "Google graphs" and found a very cool interface that is probably even more suited to what we want to do: http://tools.google.com/gapminder/ . I've emailed Gapminder to ask about using their software with our data. The FAQ says this is OK, but the license on the first software download says otherwise. And I'm not sure the downloads they have listed are quite what we want. Sidetrack: Gapminder did a presentation that looks like it would be really neat to watch sometime.

Nate and I looked at that auto function that I couldn't get to work. I learned some cool shell commands, but we didn't meet with much success. I did, however, find in the mailing list archives that someone else had had the same problem as I did. The solution given was fairly high-level, so I'm going to have to keep looking to figure out how to do what they said to do (specifically, how to check for a path). It's rather frustrating.