My high school, homeless

Last week, my high school, the University of Toronto Schools (UTS), sent out an e-mail concerning the University of Toronto’s rejection of its site redevelopment proposal, effectively thanking UTS for all the fish. Though not entirely surprising, what was surprising was finding an article in the Globe and Mail about it this morning, prompting this off-cycle blog post. Not being half as eloquent as my academic siblings, I will try to keep it brief.

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Like Paper Mario, Paper Inflo

At the request of jp, I have created a version of Inflo that’s more napkin-like. It’s fully compatible with the regular version of Inflo (it has a few known quirks because a) this is a hack and b) we’ll see how popular it is). However, it’s not yet linked in to the regular Inflo, yet. To use it, for any Inflo URL, replace http://inflo.cs.toronto.edu:8888/ with http://inflo.cs.toronto.edu:8888/paper.html. For example, to view one of apsmith‘s graphs in paper form, visit http://inflo.cs.toronto.edu:8888/paper.html?nodeId=215330785548783400729978002751085462383&nodeVersion=1302663272.770201&action=loadView (note the extra “paper.html”); you’ll need to scroll to the top left after the page has loaded.

Inflo macros

Last week, I added support for client-side macros to Inflo. While I had previously reengineered the custom autocomplete widget (used for entering content) in anticipation of additions such as this, I hadn’t really thought about how the macros would actually work. In the end, I was surprised at how simple it was to add, although some of my previous changes were helpful (most notably the parser I had written the day before); it took just under one hundred lines of new/changed code. Also nice is how everything is falls back when a macro hasn’t been defined.

register_macro(
    "stopping time", // Name of the macro
    "stopping time ( <i>velocity</i> , <i>deceleration</i> )", // Autocomplete help
    // The function itself; its parameters come in directly from Inflo and one needn't worry about nodes;
    // they're automatically converted to their values.
    function (v1, decel) {
       /* Assumes velocity in m/s and deceleration is in m/s^2 */
       return (v1 / decel).toString() + " s";
    });

The macros behave exactly like a built-in Inflo function, except they’re all currently prefix notation, don’t support sub-expressions in their arguments, need to be user-loaded when viewing the graph (easy with Creammonkey and Greasemonkey), and, for simplicity, ignore units coming into the macro. Anyone that knows some Javascript can write an Inflo macro!

Populating Inflo with data

One can fairly simply write a module to dump data into Inflo.  The first thing I populated the database with was with some population data and then surface area data.  I’m currently thinking of adding GDP data.  Any ideas as to what other easily mineable data I ought to include?