(Sorry this is late!) 18 people came to last Wednesday's tech meeting, for our look at graphing with Perl.
As we waited for people to arrive, Bill Ricker mentioned that he had seen an interesting JAPH on Perl Monks. We took a look, and it turns out it was written by liverpole, aka John Norton, who also created the SpiroJAPH I presented at an earlier meeting. Token Abuse JAPH: <http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=529445> Alex Brelsfoard had asked the list about creating graphs for a specific project, inspiring the topic of this meeting. He demonstrated the use of GD::Graph, including several different styles of graphs. He also explained why his requirements led him to go with a Java-based solution in the end. I talked about creating graphs for one of my scripts that works with the scoring data from <http://www.ricochetrobot.com> (see my earlier talks :). My main requirement was having an arbitrary number of data sets with two separate y axes. I considered GD::Graph and Chart::Graph::Gnuplot before deciding to shell out to `gnuplot` directly. Finally Jeremy Muhlich showed us how he turned spreadsheets of complicated experimental data into graphs that are both informative and easy to understand, using Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, PDL, and GD. He also introduced us to Edward Tufte's work on information design concepts. Thanks to Alex and Jeremy for their presentations, to MIT for hosting, and to everyone who came to the meeting! Next month's meeting will be on Tuesday, March 14. Please email me if you'd like to give a presentation. If you're looking for inspiration, here's our list of proposed topics. Topics not on that list are welcome too, of course. <http://boston.pm.org/kwiki/index.cgi?TechMeetingTopics> Ronald _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
