Sparklines are described in Edward Tufte's book Beautiful Evidence (2006) as “small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images”. In one of our projects we needed sparklines and one option was to use this open source package by Larry Ogrodnek . Just out of curiousity I was wondering how far we would come if we would use the Google Chart API .  That was until I ran into this article where I saw sparklines created with the Google Charts API and without the x- and y-axis. How the hell did he do it? Well ... it seems to be an undocumented feature also used by Google on their financial site. Instead of using cht=lc (chartype is line chart) you can use cht=lfi (charttype is financial line chart). Grab the code: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=80x20&cht=lfi&chco=0077CC&&chm=B,E6F2FA,0,0,0&chls=1,0,0&chd=t:27,25,25,25,25,27,100,31,25,36,25,25,39,25,31,25,25,25,26,26,25,25,28,25,25,100,28,27,31,25,27,27,29,25,27,26,26,25,2...

Today I was figuring out how to integrate the Hibernate search API in one of my projects. At a certain point the docs referred to the Lucene documentation. My old pal Google provided me the link to the Lucene homepage and when I opened it up I saw something very weird in the upper right corner: "Search the site with Google"  Yep, Lucene seems to be using Google as a search engine! At first I was a bit astonished about it. But why bother about it, the Google service is out there and it just works. After all Lucene is a great tool and I hope to tell you more about it in the near future.

My first steps in the world of Google API's and services. A few weeks ago google anounced the complete coverage of the Netherlands. Now I would be able to translate a street address into a longitude/lattitude pair. The last barier for not using the maps api in my application was gone. It was amazing how quickly I had my first integrated map. Most of the effort was not in learning the api and using it but finding the right hooks to integrate it in our cms viewbox. A first draft of this integration is now being used as a demo in our office. Curiously I am waiting for all the brilliant ideas that will pop up the next week.