Spoon progress 2007-03-13: Nexus reference visualization

Hi--

     Well, I broke down and wrote some code to calculate a non-cyclic
spanning tree for an object memory reference graph, so now I can use
Walrus[2] for visualization. It's nice! Check out the demo movie I made
(in small[3] and original[4] versions).

     This could be the basis of an extremely powerful extension to the
interpreter simulator; I assume it'd be a fun Croquet project. Alan
Lovejoy suggested the name "Nexus"; I like it. More to come...


     thanks,

-C

[1] http://netjam.org/spoon
[2] http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/walrus
[3] http://tinyurl.com/2akd83 (movedigital.com)
[4] http://tinyurl.com/33gah7 (movedigital.com)

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:54:31 -0700, Craig Latta <[hidden email]> wrote:

>      Well, I broke down and wrote some code to calculate a non-cyclic
> spanning tree for an object memory reference graph, so now I can use
> Walrus[2] for visualization. It's nice! Check out the demo movie I made
> (in small[3] and original[4] versions).

That is really cool...

The big movie requires the narration .AIF file in order to play.

One thing I found that was really useful when I did a graph analyzer is to
include the names of the references (inst var name or index).

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      [hidden email]      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot)
           http://www.huv.com/blog

Hi Jon--

> The big movie requires the narration .AIF file in order to play.

     Oops, fixed.

> One thing I found that was really useful when I did a graph analyzer
> is to include the names of the references (inst var name or index).

     Yes indeed; just like all the nodes can have labels, the references
can as well. It's certainly essential, I just haven't written them out yet.

     Oh: the data file for the movie's graph is available[1]. If anyone
wants to explore around it in Walrus and tell us of interesting stuff,
I'd be delighted. :)



     thanks again,

-C

[1] http://netjam.org/spoon/objects.graph.gz

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

     Just FYI, for easier reference I've added the Nexus stuff to the
Spoon visualization page:

     http://netjam.org/spoon/viz

It includes a link to a YouTube version of the Nexus demo movie.


     thanks,

-C

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

Thanks for sharing, that's a beautiful video.

I remember Ralph saying that some of his students were interested in  
3D programming interfaces; this could be a very nice tool.  How long  
does it take to compute the spanning tree?  How long does it take for  
Walrus to visualize it (did it have to do much precomputation before  
viewing)?

Best,
Josh


On Mar 13, 2007, at 4:54 PM, Craig Latta wrote:

The YouTube video doesn't do it justice, as it's somewhat small. Downloading
the full movie to the desktop and seeing it in Quicktime is amazing.

Chris Cunnington

Hi Josh--

> I remember Ralph saying that some of his students were interested in
> 3D programming interfaces; this could be a very nice tool. How long
> does it take to compute the spanning tree?

     A long time. :)  About 90 minutes in the interpreter simulator on a
1.25 GHz Powerbook G4. I haven't done anything to make it faster yet,
though.

> How long does it take for Walrus to visualize it (did it have to do
> much precomputation before viewing)?

     Walrus takes about ten seconds to parse the data and a minute to
render it (but after that the animation is very fast, as in the movie).
So again, a relatively long time. It'd be fun to adapt the H3
visualization algorithms it uses to Croquet, and cut out the
file-writing step.


-C

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

I agree!  It is amazing!

Very cool Craig!

Ron


> From: Chris Cunnington
>
> The YouTube video doesn't do it justice, as it's somewhat small.
> Downloading
> the full movie to the desktop and seeing it in Quicktime is amazing.
>
> Chris Cunnington
>
>