Hi,
I've been toying with Timeline for a few hours. Thanks for the terrific
software.
I may have discovered a bug in the software. I am designing a timeline for
both biotechnology and information technology. The timeline has three bands:
top one is for BT and the bottom, for IT. The middle band holds the year.
The timeline goes back to 8,000 BC, around the time when crops were
domesticated and proto-writing was developed. The timeline initially uses
millennia as its unit. As one moves forward in time, the timeline shifts to
centuries (after 500), decades (after 1800), and half-decades (after 1930).
Because the timeline uses date-time units with radically different sizes, I
used the method shown in the tutorial to make hotzones. The tutorial uses a
"nested" approach, with the first zone being the largest (8/1/06-9/1/06),
the next zone (8/2/06-8/4/06) falling within the first, and the third zone
(8/2/06 6am - 8/2/06 12am) falling within the second. Running the tutorial
example worked fine on my computer, but when I applied this method to my own
timeline (described above) the system hung. It may just have been processing
the timeline, but if so the timeline was so compute-intensive as to be
impractical. With millennia, centuries, decades, and half-decades, the last
zone was nested three levels deep. I was able to work around the problem by
using non-overlapping time intervals for zones and only nesting them one
level deep. The behavior occurred with both Firefox and IE.
It seems to me this behavior most likely reflects either the disparity
between time periods (one millennium contains 200 half-decades) or, more
likely, the depth of the nesting. Does anyone have an explanation for this
behavior?
Marsh
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