Mario Jauvin's blog

OK, I said I would continue some other time and if history was any indication, it would have been a long time. But I had the burning urge to say something and my ardent followers were just holding their breath to read it (:-)). I talked about conventions and ignorance. Here is a case in point (and actually this is a really good example of how to do a multiple selection list in Ruby On Rails). Here is how to get started. In a windows command prompt window you type: cd c:\workspaces rails msexample cd msexample ruby script\generate model Movie title:string producer:string ruby script\generate model Category label:string ruby script\generate migration CreateCategoriesMovies Then you edit db\migrate\003_create_categories_movies.rb as follows: class CreateCategoriesMovies < ActiveRecord::Migration def self.up create_table :categories_movies, :id => false do |t| t.column :category_id, :integer t.column :movie_id, :integer end add_index :categories_movies, [:catego...

Ok, it has been long since my last post (as usual) and I thought I would talk about a new different topic. I am currently involved working on a web application and I was exposed to a concept of agile programming about a year ago (maybe more, time flies, does it not) and I looked at it and said "Oh yeah! Just a new fad that will go away" and I continued slugging away on my J2EE application (stuff for real programmers, right?). Well it did not go away, quite the contrary and I am now using it . Just to show you should keep your mouth shut or (as Jean-Jacques Rousseau said: put your work one thousand times on the mill - sound much better in french) I should have thought 1,000 times before saying something. But actually, you did not come here to read my ramblings on my lack of good judgment (or maybe you did, in which case I can suggest a couple really good therapist) so what is this agile programming. Well, pushed to the limit, which in reality is never attained, it's basi...

Yeah, exactly what I asked the first time I started thinking about it. But then I met my buddy Neil at CMG (Computer Measurement Group) in Reno (brrr, was it cold there) and we started talking about hot topics and performance visualization came up. Actually, I don't recall if this happened before or after we had a few beers. This is not that important because most really good ideas came after a few beers. So, back to the topic at hand. Visualization is not a new concept. It has been used in several fields. Here is a list of web site with various applications of visualization: digg labs Parallel coordinates Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies Edward Tufte sparklines John Tukey Gallery of Data Visualization Earth Simulator Center Here is a technical article on visualization as it applies to computer and network performance. Performance Visualization May 2005 Article by Neil Now the big complaint from my good friend Neil is that people in the performan...