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 →
