Google Chart

I recently discovered Google’s Chart service, which allows you to query Google with a bunch of parameters and get back a dynamically generated chart. The idea intrigued me, but I couldn’t think of an immediate use for it until I remembered that I had yet to publish the results of a survey I ran on OWF in September. Now was the time, I thought.

After a day of playing with the system, I have to say I’m pretty impressed. You get a wide range of styles, you can set the data in a variety of ways, and you can fiddle with labels and legends. It has some quirks: I couldn’t get the horizontal axis to quite line up with my data points on my bottom graph, and you have to give the data for the bar chart as a percentage instead of a straight value. But once I got the hang of it, the graphs came together quickly and looked nice.

Now I just need an excuse to put a Venn diagram on OWF.

Amusing Grammar Slip

Mediabistro, a paywalled website for writers, recently posted the transcript of a seminar on grammar. I read through it — it’s all stuff I know, unfortunately — and noticed this sentence in the section on pronoun agreement: “The next example is probably my favorite because I didn't make it up. I get silly text messages from Virgin Mobile for their promotional crap, and it had a lot of errors in it. ”

I know it’s just a transcript. It may even be what the teacher said. But that particular sentence in that particular section tickled me.