Kevin Reid's blog

I’ve uploaded almost all of my published Git repositories (previously hosted on a git-only server on on switchb.org, which is down at the moment) to my account on GitHub. Please update your remote URLs if you have any git clones.

The motivation for this change is simply that GitHub offers better visibility — an automatic web presence for each project, including viewing repository contents. I am not intending to depend on GitHub’s continued existence, of course; I still have local copies of each project, and additionally I plan to arrange so switchb.org automatically mirrors my GitHub repositories.

What I've just uploaded to GitHub also includes a project which I have not previously mentioned, timeline-ui:

A user interface experiment. Multiple types of time-series data, variously static/interactive, historical/future, etc. are displayed in a single view. (This was an idea I had floating around and which I used in 2010 for a class project; there is a lot more that could be done with it.) Written in Java.

I was going to write more about the concept, but I never got around to it; this will have to do.

List of projects just moved to GitHub:

• E-on-Java (personal git-svn mirror, not the official repository)
• E-on-JavaScript
• E-XML
• Fire Worms From Outer Space!
• Tile Game
• Timeline UI

I thought I knew better, but it took someone else to point out what was wrong with this display of times available for appointments:

If it happens not to leap out at you: which color indicates available, and which indicates unavailable? I knew perfectly well, of course: I drew shaded boxes to indicate the times of interest, i.e. the available ones — but the interpretation that the unavailable times are blocked off is equally plausible.

This could be solved by a legend, but that is less readable at a glance and unaesthetic. What I did — after printing several copies and then having the problem pointed out — was hand-draw arrows-to-bars (⇤⇥) vertically over the available spans. But what would have been a good clean solution to start with? What comes to mind is to eliminate the grid lines in the unavailable areas, so that only the gray-is-available interpretation provides definite start and end times.

What would you do?