Rendering an AJAX Pager with Custom PHP
Drupal is a great tool, with its customizable templates. However, there are some things you just can’t seem to do with those .tpl.php files – and one of them seems to be rendering out an AJAX pager. Background For our new blog layout, we wanted to have a block of all the names and pictures […]
Improved Waterfall Chart in Tableau
A waterfall chart is visualization that helps illustrate the cumulative effect of multiple data elements. The waterfall chart isn’t my favorite visual, but I’ve softened to it lately. It’s hard to not like a chart that is sometimes called the Mario chart due to the suspension of the columns. Before using the waterfall, there are other alternatives […]
Coldfusion 9.0.1 Secure JSESSIONID Cookie
We are running a couple Coldfusion 9.0.1 servers with all the latest hotfixes and updates. We also needed secure cookies for these particular servers and we are using JSESSIONID instead of the CFID and CFTOKEN cookies. However, the JSESSIONID cookie was not secure by default and setting it as such isn’t so obvious as the […]
Dashboard Failure
Nobody blogs about failure, right? In meetings and during training sessions I often talk about both failure and success. Specifically, I often mention my definition of dashboard failure which is if the user asks: “Can I download this data into Excel?” This will, of course, happen but your role as a designer is to identify what […]
Three Points to Remember for Success With Tableau and OLAP Cubes
From time to time, clients create proof-of-concept dashboards in Excel or other relational data source and then hit a wall converting it to an OLAP cube. I’m never surprised to see it happen. What most people don’t realize is that Tableau behaves much differently when reading from a cube. This requires careful thought beforehand. Unlike […]
Using the Firefox Tilt plugin for an unconventional purpose
Tilt is self described as a “Firefox extension focused on creating a 3D visualization of a webpage, drawn using WebGL. Since the DOM is essentially a tree-like representation of a document, this tool layers each node based on the nesting in the tree, creating stacks of elements, each having a corresponding depth and being textured […]
Custom Table Calculations Part 2
This is the second post on Table Calculations in Tableau. The first post covered the Groundwork, pill types, a worksheet layout, and the basics of the TOTAL() function. This post will look at what I consider the functions: INDEX(), FIRST(), LAST(), and SIZE(), partitioning vs. addressing, and the advanced compute using dialog. I think of […]
Groundwork for Custom Table Calculations
Custom Table Calculations is one of the most advanced concepts in Tableau. The main resources Tableau provides can be found at On-Demand Training – Table Calculations (requires sign in) and Top 10 Tableau Table Calculations where you can find a variety of examples and a white paper with additional details. The capability of custom table calculations goes beyond the information provided in […]
Will Google’s New BigQuery Make an “Analytics-Style” Dent in the BI Market?
As a general Google fan, BigQuery looks like it could be an interesting project to monitor for the data crunching and BI geeks among us. The project could flop entirely due to lack of marketing or a partnership foundation — or they could really do it right as with Google Analytics. Not knowing their long […]
How to install Server 2008 R2 directly to a SAN with Intel 10 gigabit nics.
This can be regarded as a continuation to my previous post: “How to boot from iSCSI on an Intel x-520 mezzanine card (Dell Blades).” Pretty much the only reason you want to boot from iSCSI is so that you can install an operating system directly to the LUN that it attaches to. Well booting to […]