only the wind 2007-04-09T05:04:29Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2007:/mt//1 Movable Type Copyright (c) 2007, sombrero koalaRainbow kinda reborn as visophyte 2007-04-09T05:04:29Z 2007-04-09T04:59:07Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2007:/mt//1.46 2007-04-09T04:59:07Z In the off chance anyone ever comes here in the future looking for visualization-related things, you may want to head over to the kinda-successor to koalaRainbow, visophyte: http://www.visophyte.org/blog/ visophyte is a Python visualization library which I am currently using to... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org koalarainbow In the off chance anyone ever comes here in the future looking for visualization-related things, you may want to head over to the kinda-successor to koalaRainbow, visophyte:

http://www.visophyte.org/blog/

simple-graphito.png

visophyte is a Python visualization library which I am currently using to develop a (Python) Mozilla Thunderbird plugin that will visualize your email, clean your kitchen sink, etc. Some day it may even do blog visualization too, but not for a while.

]]> Spam! Glorious Spam! 2005-01-08T15:03:13Z 2004-12-19T00:14:08Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.45 2004-12-19T00:14:08Z There is a lot of spam about now. Frankly, it gives KR something to visualize, so I shall keep it. However, it did make a bug in the front page visualization more obvious, so I fixed that. (Comments for entries... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org moveabletype There is a lot of spam about now. Frankly, it gives KR something to visualize, so I shall keep it. However, it did make a bug in the front page visualization more obvious, so I fixed that. (Comments for entries not visible on the main page
would get the same boring default hue.)

If anyone is concerned that this may affect the utility of this site, then you are kidding yourself. Enjoy the colors!

UPDATE
Now content with the colors, I've gone and purged most of the spam and disabled non-typekey comment posting since I probably shouldn't be encouraging the spammers by letting their posts accumulate pagerank or what have you. The slowness of the deletion rebuilding really underscores the slowness of KR, sadly.

]]> KR apparently requires Class::ISA. Install it! 2004-11-16T05:38:10Z 2004-11-16T05:29:06Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.44 2004-11-16T05:29:06Z In a comment on the last post, Twyst indicated that problems were experienced when Class::ISA is not installed. I had not realized that it was possible to have a Perl installation without this file, but clearly you can. Anyone experiencing... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org koalarainbow In a comment on the last post, Twyst indicated that problems were experienced when Class::ISA is not installed. I had not realized that it was possible to have a Perl installation without this file, but clearly you can. Anyone experiencing sadness with KoalaRainbow is advised to ensure that Class::ISA is present. Er, and to elaborate on sadness, I mean absolutely nothing will work. At all.

Thanks to Twyst for providing this helpful feedback.

]]> busy, logging still on the horizon 2004-09-11T07:18:52Z 2004-09-11T07:15:21Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.43 2004-09-11T07:15:21Z If anyone is actively waiting for the logging functionality I have talked about to hopefully diagnose KR issues, I am regrettably going to be working 70 hour weeks for the next 2 weeks (and am on my way for this... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org ranting If anyone is actively waiting for the logging functionality I have talked about to hopefully diagnose KR issues, I am regrettably going to be working 70 hour weeks for the next 2 weeks (and am on my way for this week) which does not leave a lot of time for hobby efforts.

If anyone skilled in the ways of Perl does install KoalaRainbow and notices any bugs, please do let me know, as putting out a patch release isn't so bad time-wise.

]]> Viva el Hot Fuss 2004-09-04T18:32:53Z 2004-09-04T18:30:51Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.42 2004-09-04T18:30:51Z I recently picked up a copy of Hot Fuss by The Killers. To my synth-pop biased ears, it is truly excellent.... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org music I recently picked up a copy of Hot Fuss by The Killers. To my synth-pop biased ears, it is truly excellent.

]]> Isometric abstraction for KoalaRainbow? 2004-09-01T08:37:34Z 2004-09-01T08:11:49Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.41 2004-09-01T08:11:49Z Here's some output from a little Python playing from a week or two ago: The blocks on the right are generated by fairly explicit function calls with explicitly named colors. The only abstraction they have is the 3d point transformation... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org koalarainbow Here's some output from a little Python playing from a week or two ago:

pypixart-iso-blocks.png

The blocks on the right are generated by fairly explicit function calls with explicitly named colors. The only abstraction they have is the 3d point transformation function. The blocks on the left are more generic; a generic rendering class takes a list of polygons and renders them using dot-product 'visibility culling' and dot-product brightness determination (the colors are actually HSV, with the hue associated with the object, the saturation always at max, and the V varying with the dot-product of the light vector and the surface normal.) All in all, nothing fancy, and a bit silly given the fact that any 3d engine can easily render things isometrically given the proper camera transform. (The HSV I presume can be implemented with shaders, but one might ask why not just use normal lighting if you've got it.)

Anywho, back on track. I'm considering taking KoalaRainbow and actually introducing some abstractions in the drawing stage, such as supporting things like the isometric magic above. Well, that and bulking up the primitives.

The fly in the ointment is that I don't like working with Perl. Since I generally like shiny things and always want to apply visualization to everything, ideally I could develop reusable code that could be used by KoalaRainbow, and then reuse that code in my other projects. Except all of my other projects are tending to involve Python. So I'm torn. There's the chance that people will use KoalaRainbow, which is always a good thing for a project, but then it's also a dead-end otherwise from my perspective. It seems unlikely that a hybrid monstrosity would fly; I might as well just dump KoalaRainbow and go with a pure-python plugin for PyBloxsom or some other pure-python blog short of plone.

But most importantly, this ranting provides a data point for KoalaRainbow to visualize. Muahaha! Comments appreciated because they are needed for visualization too. And heck, I haven't even tried to visualize trackbacks yet, so they might be fun as well.

]]> KoalaRainbow 0.10.1 released 2004-09-01T08:06:11Z 2004-09-01T07:57:52Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.40 2004-09-01T07:57:52Z The only difference between 0.10.1 and 0.10 is that 0.10.1 is less stupid about setting up its paths in the failover case for krgui.cgi. Additionally, if it still fails, it will print out slightly more information which is of use... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org koalarainbow The only difference between 0.10.1 and 0.10 is that 0.10.1 is less stupid about setting up its paths in the failover case for krgui.cgi. Additionally, if it still fails, it will print out slightly more information which is of use to me. If you have KoalaRainbow installed and can access the visualization lab, you do not need this release.

Files, as always, are at: http://www.onlythewind.org/koalarainbow/files/

If you have any troubles with this new release, please post a comment on this post, and I will attempt to resolve it. Comments are good because I really need actual data to visualize. (I also need posts too, so I'll start posting gibberish again.)

]]> KoalaRainbow 0.10 Released 2004-08-02T07:22:14Z 2004-08-02T07:10:03Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.39 2004-08-02T07:10:03Z Faster. Also, auto-scaling made slightly better. I think. Sadly, no new visualizations. Download it here.... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org koalarainbow Faster. Also, auto-scaling made slightly better. I think. Sadly, no new visualizations. Download it here.

]]> Major KoalaRainbow speedup for next release 2004-08-01T01:07:47Z 2004-08-01T00:52:54Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.38 2004-08-01T00:52:54Z The fancy blurry cross-bar category display (when modified to use older data so I have stuff to look at), used to take just under 12 seconds. It now takes 2.5 seconds. This is thanks to abandoning using the MT builder... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org koalarainbow The fancy blurry cross-bar category display (when modified to use older data so I have stuff to look at), used to take just under 12 seconds. It now takes 2.5 seconds. This is thanks to abandoning using the MT builder to drive the rendering. Instead, the MT builder is used once to populate a primitive in-memory representation. (That shaved 0.5 seconds.) All queries are pre-parsed, rather than parsed every time (that shaves the rest of the time.) The dominant routine (thanks to dprof) is now ImageMagick::Draw, followed by the various AST clone methods. That's probably it for easy efficiency gains.

I'll make a release sometime on Sunday. It will probably include some new example visualizations and whatever infrastructure is required to implement them.

]]> KoalaRainbow 0.9 released 2004-07-26T00:56:12Z 2004-07-26T00:26:06Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.37 2004-07-26T00:26:06Z Here you will find the first public release of KoalaRainbow, version 0.9. It is released under the LGPL. Please see the readme for installation instructions. The only difference between 0.9 and the version submitted to the contest (0.8) is support... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org moveabletype Here you will find the first public release of KoalaRainbow, version 0.9. It is released under the LGPL. Please see the readme for installation instructions.

The only difference between 0.9 and the version submitted to the contest (0.8) is support for auto-sizing images and maintaining image aspect ratios. The VU-display is now fully autosized on this page.

]]> Hello, World 2004-07-23T14:18:58Z 2004-07-23T14:08:01Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.36 2004-07-23T14:08:01Z It appears that I have come in as one of the second place entries in the MovableType plugin contest. This is actually what I was shooting for, so I'm quite pleased. From what I saw of people's plugins linked from... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org moveabletype It appears that I have come in as one of the second place entries in the MovableType plugin contest. This is actually what I was shooting for, so I'm quite pleased. From what I saw of people's plugins linked from the dev mailing list and what not, there were a lot of excellent plugins, so my only disappointment is the (somewhat cliched (I have no idea how to get the accent, sorry)) one that there weren't more prizes to go around. On the upside, I know that possibly the best thing about the contest for me was getting off my ass and actually implementing something I'd wanted to implement for a while. Of course, I never thought it would be in perl...

Anywho, for those of you who followed the SixApart link to this page, I've been somewhat lazy in updating my blog to keep the visualizations pretty, so you might just want to look at the documentation's example page. Keep in mind that the client-side image maps only show up on the actual generated visualizations (like on the VU-style display on the main page.)

I'll be making some form of public release this weekend, although there is still more to be done in the near future. It will be released under the LGPL.

Again, congrats to all who entered.

]]> Playing video games is a lot of work 2004-07-11T19:04:42Z 2004-07-11T19:04:01Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.35 2004-07-11T19:04:01Z Let it not be said that it was never said.... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org ranting Let it not be said that it was never said.

]]> Xenosaga 2004-07-09T05:38:59Z 2004-07-09T05:37:21Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.34 2004-07-09T05:37:21Z Just began playing xenosaga last night, and I was shocked by how it played right into my stereotyped view of spaceship anime, even though I'm not sure if the people are on a spaceship right now. The cut-scene interspersed people... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org games Just began playing xenosaga last night, and I was shocked by how it played right into my stereotyped view of spaceship anime, even though I'm not sure if the people are on a spaceship right now. The cut-scene interspersed people in what my stereotype-recognizer might think could be a bridge (but also a research lab somehow?) with shots of spaceships driving around. I suppose I shall see.

]]> KDX-125 2004-07-09T05:34:59Z 2004-07-09T05:33:13Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.33 2004-07-09T05:33:13Z The gem of Relentless, of Very/Relentless fame, for those who didn't know what I was talking about from the title of the post. Actually, the rest might be good, but I haven't really listened to them save for "Forever In... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org music The gem of Relentless, of Very/Relentless fame, for those who didn't know what I was talking about from the title of the post. Actually, the rest might be good, but I haven't really listened to them save for "Forever In Love" which doesn't count because I already had the version with vocals from the "Very" Extra Listening disc.

]]> Gonna add imagemaps 2004-07-02T21:36:45Z 2004-07-02T21:33:54Z tag:www.onlythewind.org,2004:/mt//1.32 2004-07-02T21:33:54Z I shall add image map support, the better with which to make visualizations useful as opposed to, uh, bitter eye candy?... sombrero sombrero@catgufu.org moveabletype I shall add image map support, the better with which to make visualizations useful as opposed to, uh, bitter eye candy?

]]>