April 08, 2007
koalaRainbow kinda reborn as visophyte
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 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.
Posted by sombrero at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2004
KR apparently requires Class::ISA. Install it!
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.
Posted by sombrero at 12:29 AM | Comments (0)
September 01, 2004
Isometric abstraction for KoalaRainbow?
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 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.
Posted by sombrero at 03:11 AM | Comments (3)
KoalaRainbow 0.10.1 released
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.)
Posted by sombrero at 02:57 AM | Comments (1)
August 02, 2004
KoalaRainbow 0.10 Released
Faster. Also, auto-scaling made slightly better. I think. Sadly, no new visualizations. Download it here.
Posted by sombrero at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)
July 31, 2004
Major KoalaRainbow speedup for next release
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.
Posted by sombrero at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)