Installing and Using Highstock

Posted on Thursday, August 23, 2012



This is going to be a bare bones how to install and use Highstock.
But first of all what is Highstock?

To quote the site
Highstock lets you create stock or general timeline charts in pure JavaScript, including sophisticated navigation options like a small navigator series, preset date ranges, date picker, scrolling and panning. [1]

The site for Highstock is located here http://www.highcharts.com/products/highstock [1]

It is highly compatible with different browsers even going so far back as to support IE6.  Its free to use for non-commercial work.   For a commercial license you can go to this page http://shop.highsoft.com/highstock.html [3]. I think their licensing is very reasonable and gives you a lot of control.

Database Keys

Posted on Wednesday, August 22, 2012



I recently had an interview where I was hit with a lot of questions on different types of keys within a database.   I deal with databases a lot but I would not consider myself a DB admin.   But, it’s always good to learn some new things, so I decided to dive in and do a little research.


Some of the web sites I visited to gleam information


CSS and making things invisible

Posted on Tuesday, August 21, 2012



Visibility


I recently had an interview where I was asked in CSS how do you make something invisible in CSS.  I recalled using Opacity, which has the issue of not working in older versions of IE, but was ignorant of visibility and display.   So I took some time and did some research,  hopefully next time I get this question I do better :). 

In CSS there are three ways to make an element invisible.


Installing Git server on Ubuntu 12.04

Posted on Wednesday, August 15, 2012



Installing Git server on Ubuntu 12.04


I am familiar with using subversion, but my new job calls for using Git so I this is my attempt to set us a Git server on Ubuntu and use it.  First the main site for Git is http://git-scm.com/ [1] 

If you are new to Git, like I am, the Git folks have a wonderful free online book at http://git-scm.com/book [2].   And if you want to get right to it the section on setting up a server is at http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-on-the-Server-Setting-Up-the-Server
(I took a of information from this guide)

Starting from a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 server with openssh
installed.

First create a git user

Quick ZeroMQ Round Robin (push-pull) with Python

Posted on Friday, August 10, 2012



Before I get too far into this one I finally found the documentation for PyZMQ API at http://zeromq.github.com/pyzmq/api/index.html [1].

This has been very helpful to me in figuring some of this stuff out.

… Now onto the problem at hand, how do you do round-robin with ZeroMQ?  For those unfamiliar with the concept of round robin you can see the Wikipedia page about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_scheduling [2].  In short you can have a group of workers and a foreman handing out work.   Think of your machines as the workers, let’s say there are 10.  The foreman gets a job and hands it out to the first worker, the second job to the second, and so on until he gets the last worker (the 10th).   After he has run out of workers to hand jobs to he starts the process over again handing the next job to the first worker…