a fiddler's journal

a break

2012-02-14T05:09:00.000-08:00

"...our thoughts stray constantly and without boundary..." - Pink Floyd (The Division Bell)

And yet, no thoughts venture to stray as far as those that occur when there is serious work to be finished. I title this drawing "A break from writing requirement documents, which on non completion by 7pm can get me in serious trouble"

I'm pretty sure this horribly fails at capturing the 'sober meditation' and the 'battle with powerful internal struggles' that the original represents, but it's got a dinosaur in it!

And here is a much bigger (and much better drawn) collection of geek renditions of classic art works.

bulls on parade

2012-01-13T09:19:00.000-08:00

Mortified matador momentarily mulls over mangled mac mini

the fall of Adam

2012-01-04T22:39:00.000-08:00

There are those who say the apple in the story represents sex.

of mice and men

2012-01-01T20:25:00.000-08:00

'the best laid schemes of mice and men; go often askew; and leave us naught but grief and pain; for promised joy'

self updating dashboards with MS Excel

2011-12-29T00:32:00.000-08:00

Self-updating excel dashboards are extremely easy to create and manipulate, and are very handy when one is required to monitor certain constantly-changing statistics (say conversions, revenue, stock levels) on a continuous basis. Using excel also saves much effort that would otherwise be expended towards creation of relevant visual representations. This post is about how someone with a beginner's level of expertise in programming can poll an online data source, extract data at regular intervals and render it in MS Excel.
Let's say 'foo' and 'bar' are two parameters that require hourly monitoring of growth rate :

The first step towards creating an Excel dashboard is to render this data (with relevant filters - date in this case) as an HTML table. A quick PHP script later, we obtain the max(foo) and max(bar) numbers corresponding to each hour-part of the day :

Excel connects to online sources of data (like the file above) by using 'Internet Inquiry' files (*.iqy), which contain information on path and parameters. The contents of the IQY file are as follows. The square brackets contain the variableName and label that will be used by Excel.

WEB
1
http://localhost/sampledash.php?date=["Date","Date"]
Selection=EntirePage
Formatting=All
PreFormattedTextToColumns=True
ConsecutiveDelimitersAsOne=True
SingleBlockTextImport=False

Once the IQY file is created, a connection can be created from Excel using the 'Connections' button under the 'Data' menu :

Multiple IQY files can be used in the same workbook, and each will form a separate connection. The properties of each connection (refresh rate, etc), can be configured using the 'Properties' button on the Connections popup dialog.

Once these connections have been created and configured, data can be rendered in Excel by selecting a connection from the 'Existing Connections' menu and instructing it to pick up arguments from specific cells.

Et Voila! The numbers and graphs will refresh themselves as frequently as configured, and manual refreshes can be triggered using the 'Refresh All' button under the Data menu.

Though easy to create and deploy, Excel dashboards are not without limitations. Graphic representations will be rendered useless if there are an inconsistent number of rows returned. In this case, since we're monitoring data by hour-part, the graph needs to be rendered for a constant 24 rows of data. Also, Excel has fewer graphic representation options than most graphing libraries, which makes this suitable only for quick, temporary monitoring requirements.

a little bit of vandalism

2011-12-27T21:41:00.000-08:00

I found this tree drawn on a whiteboard at work and decided to make a little contribution.

Dragonball Z voiceovers

2011-12-24T21:21:00.000-08:00

I have a sneaky feeling this is how they were always recorded

a hasty introduction

2011-12-24T21:17:00.001-08:00

I hope to publish clinical, well-researched notes on topics I find interesting in this space. If I'm unable to manage that, doodles will be published.