View this article in Belorussian provided by fatcow. [ Translated by Uta Bayer ]

I recently had a project that needed to do a whole lot of number crunching, and then create a PDF to present those numbers and a line chart as well. This presented two problems for me - how to create a PDF from code, and how to create a chart for use within that PDF. I can say that I have had some success and wish to share with you the process. I'll talk about the PDF side of things in this article, and post another soon with details on how I handled the chart. But an overview of the chart solution is included below.

This weekend my web server was suddenly not accessible. But not just the webserver - I couldn't connect to the box directly at all, so all the other services (like the virtual machine that was running email) were also down. The culprit turns out to be the hard drive. After a couple of forced reboots, the box came back, but reported some SATA errors. It's running right now, though I no longer trust that drive. I have a replacement drive ready to go, but decided this was THE opportunity to do up my server the way I've been meaning to.

I'm having a restless night and felt the urge to jot down some of what was going through my mind. For a change, this is a non-technical post. I tried to be brief, but well, here:

I am sitting here restless
feeling the need to be doing something,
lacking the focus to determine what.

Thoughts of reflection flowing through my mind
As I try to find something to distract me
long enough to fall asleep again.

Regrets of the past and present,
wondering if the right choices were made,
where I would be if another path were followed.

Lost or abandoned loves,
what could have been,

I write a fair bit of JavaScript. I also run into situations frequently where I need to pass data to or from a server to the web page via Ajax. jQuery helps a lot with this, but there I keep running into one tiny little snag with JSON that frustrates me no end.

Internet Explorer (6 or 7) doesn't like this JSON code:

 { "name": "bob", "phone" : "555-5555", "age" : 55, }

UPDATE : Esteban Acosta Villafañe from Argentina sent me an updated script that handles linking/importing files with your CSV data, and will dynamically determine the mimetype of those files. You can see his modified script here in the blog posting I made when he sent this to me.