Don't take shit from computers

(Sometimes or pretty often) I find myself taking shit from computers. Something is not working quite like how I want it, or I end up having to do a bunch of trivial, manual work that is tedious, will happen once or twice and doesn't warrant time to automate. Maybe it is something more subtle, like a something happened and you can't explain why; logs files are clean and no usual suspects.

It's time's like this I remember the Terminator. The movie in which computers from the future send a robot to kill humans, or maybe the Matrix; where mankind is enslaved by the machines. My blood boils with rage and I get that extra zeal I need to finish whatever the shit that pissed me off in the first place, just to say "Suck It!" to the computer.

So remember, don't take any shit from them; they work for us. Terminator and Matrix probably started with people taking a bit more and more shit from the computers every day. I am telling you, it's a slippery slope, first it's java script error handling, the next thing you know they are sending someone from the future to whack your ass. 

Sunburst panel in Banana

When I saw D3 for the first time, it was love at first sight. Being a relatively new developer, but fluent in imagining applications and use cases I immediately saw the possibilities. Kibana and eventually Banana made some these possibilities a reality by providing a standard system that you can run multiple visualizations on; along with all the bells and whistles of a search platform.

One thing that impressed me in Kibana 4, but lacked in Banana was a sunburst panel that can take a pivot of facets and visually display it as a series of slices on a nested pie chart. So I got to work, learned some D3 and Javascript and (drum roll please) ... you voila. My first real JS/D3 code and an open source contribution. The sunburst panel parses nested facet output from Solr's facet pivot and creates a series of nested pie slices. Feel free to check out the pull request here, it should be included in the next release of Banana. 


I look forward to future enhancements in Solr to stretch my D3 expertise a bit more. Generating a chord diagram or Sankey would be cool, anyone got any bright ideas of how to store the data for something like that in Solr that would easily retrievable Banana style?