Tuesday, March 29, 2011

A take on good, reusable Java design

This is just too amusing not to pass on.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Spring time!

It's that time of the year again here in Denmark.


The crocuses started flowering, and I managed to sit outside for quite a while in a short-sleeved shirt without freezing to death. There's no doubt. Spring arrived this weekend.

It's been a busy winter. I...

... managed to fall sick with flue-resembling symptoms and fever three times in 6 weeks, beginning with the Christmas holidays.

... shoveled a great deal of snow away, like last year.

... closed probably around 100 issues in the Flot issue tracker (and had the misfortune not to discover a well-meaning fork until a month after).

... mapped a big bunch of roads in OpenStreetMap, mostly centered around Janne's parents home. Thanks to the effort of volunteers, we've got aerial photos of almost the entire country and will, I think, within this year have a complete free street map of Denmark. I found out mapping is a fine hobby; it's a nice way to relax while gaining the usual open source feeling of contributing to something greater than yourself.

... read 16 books on local history of Vendsyssel and Himmerland, the regions where I live, told by old people that recount their youth around 1900-1930, mostly with farming, quite an eye-opener, really, and a great complement to the things we were taught in history lessons in school. I also read the Arthur trilogy by Bernard Cornwell (it wasn't quite as good as his Saxon book series, although maybe I'm just biased because I prefer the brought-up-as-a-Dane protagonist from those).

... wasted some time with Tremulous 1.2pre after having stopped playing Tremulous for a long time. It is a surprisingly difficult multiplayer FPS. I mostly play the alien side because I like the speed, but since I'm still not very good at it, this means I have to trick other players into coming close enough to be vulnerable.

... and annoyingly failed to get into the habit of regular piano practicing again.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Flot 0.7 released!

I just released Flot 0.7! Highlights are multi-axis support, area charts and a pie chart plugin, and a big bunch of bug fixes, including an IE 9 fix and reworked replotting support that reuses the canvas elements to put an end to the memleak troubles. The complete list of changes is here. There are some API changes from the axis rewrite.

In related news, I've moved the source code repository to github to make it easier for other people to contribute.

It has been clear to me for some time that more of the things that are currently inside core Flot needs to move to plugins. As time goes, more specific things turn up on people's wishlist, and right now it's just not possible to satisfy them all without bloating the core. Having specific feature sets in a plugin also makes it much easier for people to customize them a bit by hacking the plugin code without having to maintain a delta with the whole of Flot.

Fortunately, some people have expressed interest in helping out, partly due to me taking a hiatus from the mailing list for some time last year, so with a bit of luck some of these things may happen in a not too distant future. Maybe we'll even get a better hyperlinked format for the documentation, something that has never really managed to climb to the top of my list of priorities so far.