Cool open source .NET charting component

I’ve been looking around for a decent free (as in beer) .NET charting component that I can use from ASP.NET for my current website project. At first I tried WebChart, but it didn’t seem to want to work under mono. I could have probably figured out the problem with a little bit of effort, but I’ve got better things to spend my time on at the moment. So a little more digging and a search of the Mono mailing list uncovered zedgraph. This component is awesome. Take a look at some of the sample graphs – it produces really professional looking results.

Now I haven’t delved into the guts of it yet, that’s tonight’s task, but I just wanted to let people know it’s out there.

A fun weekend.

Well another work week has begun but I had quite a fun weekend so am OK about getting stuck back into it at work. On Friday night Bruce and I watched Alien and Aliens back to back. These are possibly two of the greatest Sci-fi movies ever made. We did Aliens 3 on Saturday night, but didn’t quite manage to complete the set. Well, I guess there’s always next weekend for the Resurrection!

On Sunday afternoon Anthea and I visited the London Zoo. Now I’m a firm believer that Zoo’s not only have their place but are absolutely essential to the continued existence of so many of the wonderful creatures on this planet. It was great to see the breding programmes are having a positive impact and are literally bring a number of the species that I saw back from the very edge of extinction. Hopefully one day those species will thrive in the wild again, but for that to happen their natural habitats must first be protected from deforestation and poaching. I took a few photos although I didn’t have time to look at any of them last night. I might post a couple here if any of them turned out OK.

Been a busy boy

Well, so much for my good intentions to start blogging again pre Christmas. Life has been crazy busy as usual and this always seems to be one of the first things to drop off the list. I am hopefully on my way to being more productive now thanks to my new strategy for Getting Things Done. I’m only really part way towards fully implementing this program but I do feel that it’s already helping me keep more on top of things.

We had a great trip around Paris, Rome, and the Amalfi Coast with my folks for Christmas. I am hoping to get the photos up on www.jamesfitzsimons.com soon.

I’ve been concentrating hard on my secret website project of late. I’ll let you know more about the purpose of the site in the future when it’s ready to launch, but for now lets just say it’s great to get back into web development. I’ve been really enjoying playing with some of the new features of ASP.NET 2.0 (using Mono of course) and have also been discovering the magic of nHibernate. I hope to make more posts about the specifics of that in the future.

One of my recent discoveries while searching for information on some aspect of web development has been http://tropicalseo.com. This guy has some really interesting points to make about Search Engine Optimisation, but also about aspects of web site management in general. Oh, and it probably helps that I “share the dream”!

After a short break

On the train on the way back from a weekend in Stratford-upon-Avon and decided I have been remiss in neglecting my blog for so long. I often get overwhelmed by the pace of life in London and things like blogging seem to quickly drop of the list of priorities, however the other day while reading back over some of my past entries I realised that it is an important record for me as well as a way of keeping in contact with distant friends and family.

Anthea and I have certainly been very busy this year, and when I reflect back on what we have done this year I realise it has probably been the most social year of our lives, combined with the most travelling we have ever done – and for me at least – one of the most challenging working years of my career. I am very proud of what we have achieved this year and although I am very tired and desperately looking forward to our Christmas break I wouldn’t have had it any other way. My goal now is to try and figure out how to fit more into next year!

I have been neglecting my vision project over the last few months. Making small progress by picking at it whenever I’ve had some spare time. What hasn’t helped is that a couple of months ago I decided to build a Mythtv box to record the hockey (since most of it is screened in the middle of the night). This has turned out to be a far far more challenging task than I anticipated and has consequently stolen time from my other projects. The good news is that the end is finally in sight and I will hopefully have a stable system running in the next week or two.

I have spent some of this weekend reading the chapter on Structure Computation in my computer vision text. Essentially working out how to reconstruct a 3D scene from stereoscopic information. I think I understood most of it on first reading – which testifies to the fact that a lot of the revision work I have been doing on linear algebra has paid off. My plan is to implement a naive algorthim first, and once that is working refine it with an optimal (and much more challenging) solution. It is still my hope that once I have the reconstruction phase working the rest of the project will progress along very quickly. I am still amazed at how difficult the elementary concepts of computer vision are. I really had no idea of what I was getting myself into when I started this project.

The worlds most inconsistent blogger

That’s me! I just can’t seem to get into the habit of blogging on a regular basis. Quite a bit has happened since my last post. I’ve just delivered a pretty major project at work which went well I think. It was a massive amount of work though, and really draining long days which has left me desperately in need of a holiday. Luckily Anthea and I have the next two weeks off to trip around northern Italy! We are both really looking forward to it and have been hearing amazing stories from our friends about places to visit.

I have also returned to my computer vision project. I got talking about it to a mate a few weeks back and found myself getting really enthused again. Of course the reality of the situation is that it is still bloody hard work, but I am taking a much more systematic approach this time and taking more time to try and fully understand the math before coding. My first goal is to reliably find the fundamental matrix. Once I have that nailed, 3d reconstruction shouldn’t be too hard.

I got another LG 19″ monitor this week so I now have a cool dual head setup. I’ll take a pic and post it sometime soon.

bring on the weekend

I think I’ve just about hit the wall. I am feeling really run down at the moment and the last couple of days I’ve been sick with a nasty head cold – which is odd when you consider it’s about 30 degrees outside. I think this is my bodies way of telling me I need some time out. This weekend Anthea and I are planning a very quiet weekend in London. I’ll probably just sit down with my book and take it easy. I might do some hacking – I’ll see how I feel. I should really get my monodevelop patch finished and submitted soon.

Over the last couple of days I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu dapper on my laptop and configured xgl. Man it is really cool! I’m loving the eye candy and am thinking about how some of that cairo/opengl goodness could be used in some other apps like f-spot for example. Maybe one of these days I’ll have a chance to play with it.

life in the fast lane

Been a busy week so far and Anthea and I are off to Porto for the weekend tomorrow. Really looking forward to what will hopefully be a relaxing trip out of London. I’m planning on bringing back more than a couple of bottles of port as well 😉

We went to Ben Harper on Tuesday night. It was a really amazing gig and he played for 2 1/2hrs which is pretty much unheard of these days. I would definately see him again if I have the opportunity.

I got some really good feed back on my MonoDevelop patch from Lluis. I got most of the bugs fixes finished on Monday evening, but he also suggested a couple of cool new features so I probably won’t get the next version of the patch ready until next week now. I’m still hoping to have it submitted before I go to LugRadio live the following weekend. There’s no hope of doing any work on f-spot in the near term though.

The weekends over

And all to quickly. Managed to cram a lot into the last couple of days however. Got up early on Saturday morning to watch New Zealand crush Australia in the rugby. Go the AB’s! It was fun as we had a bunch of friends around and cooked up a massive feed of bacon, banana and maple syrup on French toast.

Saturday afternoon I did some hacking on MonoDevelop and managed to finish my patch to add the class and method combos. I submitted that last night so will be interested to see what people think.

Sunday we went to Box for the day to visit Anthea’s Aunt and Uncle. It was a nice day out and good to see them. I did some hacking on f-spot on the bus on the way up and back, but all I managed to do was frustrate myself immensely. I think I need to jump on to #f-spot tonight and try and catch llewing to see if he can help.

MonoDevelop hacking

Spent the last couple of evenings updating some work I did on MonoDevelop ages ago but never got round to submitting. The internals of MonoDevelop have really changed since I first wrote my code so I had to spend a couple of hours updating it to work with the new version of MonoDevelop from SVN.

I then realised that I hadn’t quite got it right last time as the method combo would only show the methods the class had when the file was opened. i.e. if you added a new method it wouldn’t show up in the combo until you closed and reopened the file. With some helpful pointers from Lluis on #monodevelop last night I think I have just about solved that problem by hooking into the IParseInformationChanged event. This event fires with every key stroke. With a bit of GLib.Timeout goodness to stop the combos being rebound every time the event fires we are almost there…