Figuratively speaking

Just a quick post to make a collective note of some of the few graphing libraries I am attempting to try out over the coming weeks. Base frameworks like D3.js and Raphael.js appear great, but might just be involve too much work if all I want to do is throw together a quick few visualisations.

dc.js
A multi-dimensional charting library built to work natively with crossfilter and rendered using D3.js.

NVD3
Re-usable charts and chart components for D3.js.

Polychart2.js
Graphing library that takes many ideas from the Grammar of Graphics and the R library ggplot2, and adds interactive elements for usage on the Web.

Highcharts
Interactive charting library supporting many, MANY types of visualisation!

Chart.js
Simple HTML5 Charts using the canvas element. Currently doesn't support interactivity, but looks great.

Flot
Plotting library for jQuery, with a focus on simple usage, attractive looks and interactive features.

Rickshaw
JS toolkit for creating interactive time series graphs.

YUI Charts
A charting module based on the YUI library.

xCharts
Yet another D3.js based library. Some of the examples don't appear to work currently.

Flotr2
A fork of Flotr which removes the dependency on Prototype and a few enhancements.

Now it may turn out that most of these end up going unused, but hopefully that means I would have found the best fit library and will stick with it!

Showing the URL protocol in the Firefox address bar

A fair amount of people seem to be using Firefox Aurora.

Unfortunately, the latest Aurora 7.0a2 build (as of tonight - 12th July, 2011) has enabled a 'feature' as part of the Firefox team's efforts to copy Google Chrome's efforts at being different: they have gone and disabled showing the "http://" (the protocol) part of the URL.

I was dreading the day this would come to my beloved Firefox - but fortunately, Firefox retains the ability to make quick, under-the-hood changes using about:config.

Here's how you go about ensuring your URL bar isn't screwed around with:

1. Go to about:config
2. Find the value called browser.urlbar.trimURLs
3. Double-click and toggle it's value to false

And that's that!

Suspicious Gmail IMAP Activity

Quick note for future reference: if your Gmail activity window shows frequent IMAP access from the United States IP 67.220.123.24, don't panic (as I did initially).

It's just your Nokia phone polling Gmail for new mails. That IP resolves to em.outgoing4.messaging.nokia.com.

Just FYI. And FMI.