Andrew E. Bruno

I’m a big fan of Xplanet and every year during the hurricane season there’s no better way to liven up your desktop than to download the latest cloud maps and watch the path of the storm. Here’s a screenshot of my desktop showing hurricane dean (larger view):

I cron a script to download the latest cloud maps every 4 hours or so. The xplanet command I run is as follows:

xplanet -origin sun -north orbit \
        -config xplanet.conf -label \
        -marker_file brightStars \
        -target earth \
        -latitude 22 \
        -longitude -78 \
        -radius 30 \
        -labelpos +30+30

Here’s my xplanet.conf:

[earth]
cloud_map=clouds_2048.jpg
magnify=20

[moon]
magnify=20

When creating a chart that has rather long labels for the x-axis it is sometimes desirable to rotate them a bit so they fit on the plot. The method to use is setCategoryLabelPositions(..) on the CategoryAxis class. Here’s a quick example:

And the code..

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

import org.jfree.chart.ChartFactory;
import org.jfree.chart.ChartUtilities;
import org.jfree.chart.ChartColor;
import org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart;
import org.jfree.chart.plot.CategoryPlot;
import org.jfree.chart.plot.PlotOrientation;
import org.jfree.chart.axis.CategoryLabelPositions;
import org.jfree.chart.axis.CategoryAxis;
import org.jfree.data.category.DefaultCategoryDataset;

public class RotateLabels {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        DefaultCategoryDataset dataSet = new DefaultCategoryDataset();
        dataSet.addValue(51, "series", "Colonel Forbin");
        dataSet.addValue(92, "series", "The Lizards");
        dataSet.addValue(33, "series", "Wilson");
        dataSet.addValue(77, "series", "Rutherford the Brave");
        dataSet.addValue(37, "series", "The Unit Monster");
        dataSet.addValue(97, "series", "The Famous Mockingbird");
        dataSet.addValue(67, "series", "Poster Nutbag");

        JFreeChart chart = ChartFactory.createBarChart(
            "Gamehendge",
            null,
            null,
            dataSet,
            PlotOrientation.VERTICAL,
            false,
            false,
            false
        );

        CategoryPlot plot = (CategoryPlot)chart.getPlot();
        CategoryAxis xAxis = (CategoryAxis)plot.getDomainAxis();
        xAxis.setCategoryLabelPositions(CategoryLabelPositions.UP_45);

        chart.setBackgroundPaint(ChartColor.WHITE);
        try {
            ChartUtilities.saveChartAsPNG(new File("chart.png"), chart, 400, 300);
        } catch(IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}