Despite all its shortcomings as a programming language, JavaScript isn't a dirty word anymore. A decade ago, most self-respecting developers would refuse to even touch it, so it was left to web designers and junior developers who spiced up a few HTML pages with dispensable functionality. It's amazing how the …
read moreOther articles
Matplotlib: Plotting Bar Diagrams
A while ago we plotted time series data with Matplotlib. This worked nicely, but with the data at hand, a bar diagram would have looked much better. In this article I'll give you a template for using bar diagrams with time series data. This builds on the work we did …
read moreVisualizing Package Dependencies
Managing module or package dependencies is an important design activity that helps to keep a software project maintainable. Visualizing these dependencies is a good way of getting a first impression on a project and for exposing design problems. In this article we're going to create a basic visualization for a …
read morePlotting Time Series Data with Matplotlib
It's been a while since my last article on Matplotlib. Today we're going to plot time series data for visualizing web page impressions, stock prices and the like over time.
If you haven't already, install Matplotlib (package python-matplotlib on Debian-based systems) and fire up a Python interpreter. For the rest …
read moreChanging the Number of Workspaces in Unity
In Ubuntu's Unity, you get four workspaces per screen, arranged in two rows with two columns each. Fortunately, there's a way to get more desktop space, but in Ubuntu 11.10 it takes a bit of searching.
After clicking around for 20 minutes, I finally found a menu in compiz' …
read moreSharing Files Revisited
It's amazing how sometimes problems solve themselves. Since my last article, I got a new home router (a FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7320) that nicely solves the problem of accessing network devices with dynamic addresses even without Zeroconf.
My router also acts as a DNS proxy and provides a few …
read moreSharing Files With Android Devices
Occasionally I want to transfer a file from my Linux desktop machine to one of my Android-based devices via my home network. Shouldn't be a problem, there are lots of networking protocols for this, right? In practice, many solutions you think of aren't convenient enough for daily use.
Services like …
read moreSwitching Displays via Keyboard Shortcuts
When I'm at my desk I use an external LCD monitor with my netbook. I'm glad that switching displays finally works on Linux, but even on Ubuntu it takes a lot of clicks in the Monitors menu. Fortunately, I found a way to map this to keyboard shortcuts.
The following …
read moreA Maven Archetype for Hadoop Jobs
In my last article I showed how to build a Hadoop job that contains all its dependencies. To make things even easier, I created a Maven archetype that turns project setup into a simple 30 second process.
To generate a new project run the following command (on one line):
mvn …
read more