The first major thing I worked on today was the code in the Catalyst application, specifically trying to get the dbi->trace command to work. I made my own copy, renaming the necessary calls and files therein. I tried to line up the indents in the function that calls dbi->trace (genchart) to see what commands were in what loop, finally succeeding with the help of Kate (KDE Advanced Text Editor -- collapses blocks and everything!). I finally found out that the function was never getting called -- a copy in another file was. I got that fixed, got dbi->trace working, but I can't get the count command to work in this new function. I have to comment it out for the genchart function to run. I don't know what's wrong with it.

I bookmarked a couple of sites that talk about making imagemaps using Perl, for making our graphs clickable.  Check out graphviz -- purty!

Next I decided to work on mocking up a bubble chart, since Nate has been wanting to use those. I've got most of the pseudocode in.

Maybe I should look at learning Ajax or XML. Would those be compatible with Catalyst? Would they be useful? Would they be accessible, cross-browser-compatible, etc? (How much do we care?)

I'd also like to know how to stop a sql command (like "select *" returning 3 billion records) without having to log back into the mysql interface. 

But the most exciting thing I did today, by far, was learning about remapping my keys, mostly via xmodmap. I've swapped the left Ctrl with Caps Lock, and I think it's going to take a lot of strain off that pinky (keyboard fan that I am, I try not to jump over to the mouse more often than I have to). I also discovered some existing keyboard shortcuts here, including:

• Ctrl-Alt-L (well, Caps_Lock-Alt-L for me now) locks your session -- analogous to Win-L in Windows

• Alt-F1 pulls up the launch menu (read: START MENU). I couldn't figure out how to map this to a press of the Windows key. The buil-in control panel configuration options would let me map it to Win+sthg, but not just plain Win.

Can you tell it's Friday?

I found out that I need to run the command xmodmap .xmodmap when my computer starts up to make those keyboard changes take effect. I've attempted to set that up to happen automatically on startup -- we'll see if it worked tomorrow.

I made a bubble chart mockup [Edit: Links below removed]:

• Static version (no javascript, for validation)
• Dynamic version 

There should be no visible difference between the two. Don't view them with IE (Internet Explorer), though -- I found out later that they don't look too hot that way. I don't have IE on this computer, since I'm running Linux, so I generally only preview stuff in Firefox if it's just a mockup or proof-of-concept.

I spent some time learning about AJAX (Asynchronos Javascript and XML) today. Or is it Ajax, not all capitalized? I'm wanting to know if we could do something like those gapminder graphs in Ajax alone, or if I'd need to learn Flash as well.

I discovered the <canvas> element -- go to mozilla.org and search for "canvas examples." It's got some awesome capabilities, but it doesn't work in IE 6, so I don't know how useful that would be to us.

I went looking for examples of the use of Ajax to create graphs. I also want to look for (free) flash editing software for Linux. I may try creating an Ajax example page.

I discovered a neat site: http://www.lifehacker.com/ . It looks like it would be good to check this every so often to discover handy Firefox extensions and so forth. Speaking of which, I'm playing with Tab Sidebar (here or here).

My attempt at making a command run on startup was unsuccessful. I tried a few things and eventually posted on the Gentoo forums for help. Some people have offered suggestions, but no luck yet ...

I went back and looked some more at the list Nate left me. I looked a bit at the documentation for the two classes he mentioned, mostly the first one. I wonder why the examples show them loading Auto Core, but we only load Core.

I did a quick search on Catalyst role-based authentication, and I think it can be done using the plugins we already have.

I looked again at that problematic "count" call -- still don't know what's wrong.

I installed and played with "swftools," which lets you convert action scripts into swf (flash) files. I went through their tutorial and was really excited about it, but the tutorial was only a primer, and I haven't been able to find any actionscript tutorials that don't assume you are using Macromedia's app to edit your flash. Nothing text-only. I'm really disappointed, because I thought I could maybe start making some nice interactive graphs like what we saw for Gapminder. But all I can do for interaction is let them edit text and hover over things. No dragging. I looked for some sort of flash editor for Linux -- no luck yet. Tomorrow I'll probably search and post at the Gentoo forums, something like "gui editor for kde like macromedia flash for linux."

One way I could try to learn more Ajax is by dissecting the source code I see in Gmail.

If there's an easy way to view the actionscript behind a flash applet, then I could probably start learning flash -- well, actionscripting -- pretty quickly.

I did find a site with a very cool flash app that generates simple graphs for you. 

Today I went through the past several days' worth of journal entries to try to put together a cohesive list of what I've done and what I need to do. I would like to be able to quickly show my progress when I next meet with Nate. I'm ready to start going through the things in the "todo" section, which incorporate the older checklist I was working off of.

As part of organizing that, I went through a lot of the bookmarks I'd saved to potentially useful software and culled out the less interesting or relevant ones. Hopefully some of what remains can be useful.

Tomorrow, besides whatever's in the "todo" category, I would like to see if we can get Firefox 1.5 installed on Chinonye's computer so that she can run some useful extensions (such as Crash Recovery). Maybe that list of extensions I posted on this site will finally be useful for someone besides me! I need to add Crash Recovery to that list, too. Also, we may have next Tuesday off -- I need to find out for sure.

Today I spent a fair amount of time on the Catalyst application. I decided to take another whack at that "count" function. I found that an arrow -> had somehow become a dash - , which was causing the new error message I saw yesterday. Fixed that, so it was back to the old error message. (Closer to not broken, right?) Also, I moved the command into another function, and simplified it, so part of it works now.

I was having a really hard time finding anything on this count() function. I finally decided to not worry about where it came from, and try looking through the documentation from the angle of, "How does the documentation imply that I should accomplish the task of counting records?" rather than "Where's the syntax for that stupid count() function?"

At that point, I quickly decided that a really great thing to do would be to get the app (well, my practice copy) running on these database model plugins rather than calling straight to the database via SQL queries, since I knew that was our eventual goal. (Pardon my ignorance of the proper terminology. I'm still pretty fuzzy on just what it is I'm doing.) At that point, I could probably do my "counting" very easily. I think this would be a great thing to have done when Nate gets back, so that is where I am focusing my efforts right now.

Andy generously offered to let me use a database he had set up for testing, so that I wouldn't have to experiment like this using the live one. I set up some tables there and invented a little sample data for them. We were going to try to dump the live database straight to the test one, but it's huge, and we realized there could be privacy issues associated with the transfer of real data.

I just realized that after all that, I forgot to point my code to the test database instead of the live one. It should be all right, though; I've only tried to do reading-type commands, nothing that should write to the database. Just the same, I'll try to hook it up to the test db (database) tomorrow.

I dug through some documentation and mailing list archives, and got the code put in that I think should let the plugins talk to the database. I tried a sample command, and can't get it working. I'm really stuck, so I've sent out a request for help to the wonderful Catalyst mailing list.

Also today, I updated my list of favorite Firefox extensions. There are a couple of new ones, and there are descriptions of the extensions now, so that the page could possibly be useful to somebody besides the author. 

Oh, and I learned about syncing the portage tree and updating emerge and its config files! 

So, notes for tomorrow:

• Check on Tuesday's schedule
• Handy command: "su -" instead of "su" -- it's safer
• Change over to call to the test db instead of the live one
• Once I get replies from mailing list, keep working on getting plugins/models implemented
• Look at "todo" list doc
• Could the count() be a perl thing, not a Catalyst thing? Not that it matters at this point, or solves it.