lab 8 - treemap

By

NAME

lab 8 - small update to treemap.

DESCRIPTION

Tmap is a small util that takes the output of du and presents a treemap using algorithms from UMD HCILab tmap

To make it a bit more useful I want to zoom into the treemap and zoom out again. Button one selects a rectangle highlights it and it's path and presents information about the path and file sizes. Button two zooms one level into the selected area, where the mouse clicked. Button three zooms out one level.

This was easy to add using Tk. I bind a command to the mouse events and send a message down a channel. On receiving the message I change the root of the tree, regenerate the layout and redraw the rectangles.

CONCLUSION

I find this a useful tool to find patterns in disk usage, such as large or duplicate files. Often the file hierachies are very deep, and so drilling down interactively is great.

I should re-implement this by drawing directly on an image instead of using Tk. I seem to be running out of memory using Tk because I am not keeping track of the Tk tags when creating new rectangles, and I'm creating so many of them. It may also be faster, but I don't know.

There is a bug in the squarified view where the directory is rendered as if it is a file, using the totalsize of all sub elements. I haven't found what causes this. The other views seem okay.

I think the treemap is a beautiful view of the filesystem. I'd like to put it to more use.

In a collaborative environment the treemap of a filesystem is a shared map of the system. The rectangles, which represent files, are color coded for the users who have them open. This could fit in as an engine to spree, or collab. We'd need to monitor all styx messages, similar to Styxmon.

The prog device shows all files open and process activity. Processes might also be presented as a treemap.

The treemap could then be made more interactive. Files are plumbed, to open and edit them. The files are annotated and new annotations are seen by all users of the treemap.

This looks like a good excuse to play with spree. I'm thinking along the lines of VisitorVille and Plan9's faces.

FILES

tmap.b treemap.b treemap.m

REFERENCES

UMD HCI Lab HCIL

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

lab 110 - inferno archive edition

By
I've been occupied recently with archiving my digital media. I've been copying home videos on DV tapes to hard-disk, ripping audio CD's to WAV files, gathering photo collections, and trying to copy documents from Iomega disks, floppies, and my dusty old Acorn RiscPC. The plan is to have a copy of this data to give to each of my children. My Dad recently scanned and sent me all his photographs of me and my siblings growing up; he also included pictures of himself and my Mother when they met in Africa. With technology today each generation can build a digital library of family history to hand on to the next generation. In the past a family album may have been passed on to only one person. The accumulation of digital data still presents problems. It requires discipline to store files that are open and not locked into devices or proprietary formats. With digital preservation in mind I've tried to use file formats recommended for long term archiving. WAV files for audio, D...
Read more

lab 111 - wavloop

By
Image
WAV file format contains audio sample data and optionally meta-data that describe the offsets of sample loops and cue points. The loop offsets are used by sampler software to generate a continuous sound, and the cue points mark the point in the sample data where the sound fades away after the note has been released. A WAV file "smpl" chunk will identify the byte sample offset of the start and end of the loop in the sound data. Using wavplay.b as a starting point I tried to loop a sampled sound. My sample data comes from Virtual Organ software GrandOrgue and the sample sets created for it. In this case I'm using the Burea Funeral Chapel sample set. My first test was simply to treat the sample as-is and loop the sound using the given offsets. This did not give good results with a notable noise as the data from the end of the sample joined with the beginning. I realized nearing the end of writing this post that the mistake I made was treating the offsets as counts of...
Read more

lab 107 - midiplay

By
NAME lab 107 - midiplay NOTES Midiplay plays back MIDI files. It uses the synthesizer I described in lab 62 and the MIDI module from lab 73. The command takes only one argument, the path to the midi file. I've included one in the lab to demonstrate. Bind the audio device before using it. % bind -a '#A' /dev % midiplay invent15.mid The synthesizer has 16 note polyphony. It uses three oscillators, one at the pitch, one at half pitch, one at double pitch. There is also a filter, two delays and a vibrato. The sample rate is 8000hz and there is one mono channel (MIDI channel events are ignored). It performs well enough to work on my laptop without JIT turned on. All the synthesizer parameters can only be tweaked from inside the code at the moment. FILES lab - 107
Read more