As I mentioned before, after writing a python script to read in Kada’s data files on the rifle club shooters’ scores and calculate new ladders, the next step is output that’s a bit fancier than the straight ASCII text dump:
Novice Air Ladder
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 1        Joe D'Plumber   45 91.833   94
 2        Joe D'Plumber   36 87.500   91
 3        Joe D'Plumber   18 87.167   92
 4        Joe D'Plumber   16 85.833   91
 5        Joe D'Plumber   26 85.167   92
 6        Joe D'Plumber   31 81.167   87
         Tito D'Builder    2 76.000   76 *
 7        Joe D'Plumber    7 74.000   82
         Tito D'Builder    2 69.000   75 *
         Tito D'Builder    2 67.000   68 *
         Tito D'Builder    2 66.000   70 *
         Tito D'Builder    1 64.000   64 *
 8        Joe D'Plumber   10 63.167   78
         Tito D'Builder    1 62.000   62 *
 9        Joe D'Plumber    4 61.750   76
         Tito D'Builder    2 61.500   72 *
         Tito D'Builder    1 60.000   60 *
         Tito D'Builder    2 55.500   71 *
         Tito D'Builder    2 55.000   58 *
10        Joe D'Plumber    3 53.667   62
         Tito D'Builder    1 52.000   52 *
         Tito D'Builder    1 50.000   50 *
         Tito D'Builder    1 49.000   49 *
This does the basic job that the original system did (actually, it does a bit more – the asterisks mark out those shooters who haven’t yet shot enough cards to get on the ladder, but they’re still listed as an incentive for them to shoot more cards – the current system doesn’t do this). It’s not really doing all that can be done, however, and it’s certainly not all that fancy-looking. Especially in a scripting language, where the whole point is to do fancy stuff quickly through toolkits. So, what I wanted was PDF output (because these are printed off and posted up in the club), graphics like logos and so on, but also some graphs and charts with some meaningful data.
One of the graphs I wanted to include was one of Edward Tufte’s many good ideas, sparklines. Small graphs which summarise the state of play of a variable in an easy to read, inline format (meaning that it’s in the flow of the text itself as if english had suddenly become a pictographic language for a moment. They seemed perfect to show a high-level view of how the shooters were doing over the course of the year. Also, it would be nice to display the various breakdowns and analysis of membership (by gender, experience, college year, etc) in a graphical form – there’s nothing wrong with the raw data, but it’s almost always easier and faster to take in analysis that has a graphical expression. So pie charts and such would be an improvement. Continue reading →
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