22 Dec 2010 by Dave.

Since I don’t have full control over the look and feel of this blog, I had a look at userstyles.org. I have downloaded stylish and installed it into one of the copies of Firefox that I use. I then made some changes to my test site and installed a user style locally in Firefox, so it all worked quite well. I need to examine how to upload a style to the internet and allow a page to offer the download, as do some of the style pages in the gallery on their home page at userstyles.org.

The two use cases I was considering were

1. offering you a different user experience while reading this blog,
2. seeing if a user style, embedded in Chrome would make consuming the blog, and static site easier on an Android phone.

I have a feeling that since I control the HTML & CSS for my static site, user styles are not part of the answer and that taking full control of the blog so that I have control over the HTML & CSS is a better answer for the blog.

I  might however write a user style for the NWN Vault, whose visual style, I find old fashioned and cluttered. I was reminded of how bad it is  since I have used some of my xmas break to catch up on some playing time in Neverwinter Nights; I was using the vault to find some new games.

Posted in user styles, technology, blogging | No Comments »

22 Dec 2010 by Dave.

I was reading an article in the Guardian, that was inspired some of the #wikileaks documents relating to the murder of Pat Finucane, a solicitor in Northern Ireland. He came from a Republican family and acted for Republican defendants in the Northern Irish courts.  This happened in 1972 and a lot of time has passed.  Lord Justice Stevens looked into the events surrounding the death due to the persistent allegations that UK security forces were involved in the murder and he said among several things in 2003,

“The failure to keep records or the existence of contradictory accounts can often be perceived as evidence of concealment or malpractice. It limits the opportunity to rebut serious allegations. The absence of accountability allows the acts or omissions of individuals to go undetected. The withholding of information impedes the prevention of crime and the arrest of suspects.”

This is a lesson we can all learn. It is possible to prove (judicial) innocence in all walks of life, if you prepare for it.

Posted in northern ireland, document, audit, innocence, politics | No Comments »

16 Dec 2010 by Dave.

I used an Excell 2007 Pie of Pie chart the other day for the first time. It may be that these are not very sound statistically but they can be powerfull graphics. Here’s how I did it.
I created a data table which occupies B2:C13. This contains all the name value pairs that exist, and I have created a secondary/summary table at E2:I5.  I shall plot the sum of the values in my base data table. The diagram immediately below shows how the summary table is constructed. It uses the=SUMIF function and named ranges. B2:B13 is named “names”, and C2:C13 is named “values”. SUMIF takes three arguments, the test range, the test value and the range to summed. In this case, I have used a relative test value, held in row 2. The Summary table holds the data to be plotted in the Pie Chart.I used the Insert >> Pie Chart to create the Pie Chart at the bottom of the picture below, and used Insert/Format Data Labels to label the Pie Chart. The reason I have gone through this is that a Pie Chart only represents one series of data and in order to make the Pie of Pie charts work, one has to build a new table; a Pie of Pie charts emphasis a sub set of the data plotted, but not by category.

Figure 1: A standard Pie Chart.

Since Dave is my higest scoring category, I decide to explode Dave using the secondary pie chart in the Pie of Pie Chart. As stated I need a new table, which has each entry for Dave as a seperate line in the table. This is shown in Figures 2 & 3 below.

Figure 2: Default Pie of Pie Chart.

The table at the top of Figure 2  is the re-arrangement of the data, which you can compare with the original data set in Figure 1. The Graph shows you what “Insert >> Chart >> Pie of Pie” creates as a default. Now we need to set the labels, change the membership of the smaller pie chart and change the size of the smaller pie chart. You need to use “Format Data Series” to do this, by selecting the included category in the larger pie chart and using the right click pull down menu. This opens the Format Data Series menu.

Figure 3: Format Data Series.

The Format Data Series menu allows you to manipulate the number of members of the second set, and the size of the second plot. The spreadsheet in which I did this is available for download here….

Having written and published this article, I was thinking about it one the way home and came to the conclusion, that if one had a data series with a few very large members, and a lot of similar sized smaller members, then Pie-of-a-Pie could be used to illustrate the distribution because it offers two scales. You could collect the smaller members into the second pie. This would not involve creating a new table, but you would have to sort your data table so that the candidate members of the smaller chart are contiguous. I have created an example, see Figure 4 below, and this is now in a second tab in the demo spreadsheet DL 17-12-2010

Figure 4: Two Charts showing labeled large and small values.

I have tried to import the speadsheet into Open Office, but OO doesn’t support Pie of Pie.

Posted in technology, visualisation, excel | 1 Comment »

12 Dec 2010 by Dave.

I’ve not been to Technorati for a while, and the process of claiming one’s blog and site have changed a bit. I hope that now I am using Wordpress that it’ll be easier; roller, my first blog technology at Sun was a pain, and snipsnap which I used from August ‘09 untill last July was impossible. (It’s one of the reasons I decided to adopt Wordpress, most people develop for it).

Posted in blogging, admin | No Comments »

10 Dec 2010 by Dave.

I have decided, that despite progress towards the resurrection of my now defunct 2nd blog, a Snipsnap bliki,  that I can’t wait until then to start blogging again. So I have started this blog. BTW that blog was available a http://davelevy.dyndns.info and some the posts are available via Google Reader, [RSS/ATOM],

I have created the categories  admin and silly, and shall shortly add Politics &  Technology, which should give you an idea of what I plan to write about, although the silly stuff can usually fit into 124 characters and thus is more likely to appear on twitter, may be with a bit of help from http://www.twitlonger.com. I will probably create a category for my rants on Intellectual Property Law, and also on Economics. If my first blog hosted at Sun Microsystems is anything to go by, I should also create a category on travel, but my current job doesn’t require as much, so it’s what I can fund myself, and I usually post a photo-blog to my photostream on flickr.

This blog is hosted using a canned service from 1&1 and uses Wordpress. The fact that it’s a canned service means that I have limited control over the look and feel which is why I shall be reading in some detail their FAQ article, How do I install WordPress via FTP? . I had come to the conclusion that I was going to move to WordPress anyway.

My experience with Snipsnap, and looking at Alistair Campbell’s blog as he struggles to avoid using it suggested that all the things that I have been saying and listening to about open source are true. The rate of innovation generated by a community of developers outpaces most corporations, and certainly outpaces me. For instance many WordPress blogs are optimised for small screens, mainly Apple IOS devices, but Android is coming. (WTF are Nokia and Opera so slow to get adoption? It’s going to kill them).

Anyway, welcome, or welcome back, hope this is interesting or useful.

Posted in silly, snipsnap, wordpress, blogging, admin | No Comments »