Update: A beta version is now up at aegis.aeracode.org - it has BUGS, like bad label placement (and inverted labels on some Acrobat installs), as well as rendering VERY SLOWLY while I try new optimisations. Bear with me, please.
Yes indeed, the new version of LastGraph has been mostly written over the past couple of days and should hopefully be ready to go live tomorrow.
Both the frontend and backend have been completely rewritten, and should hopefully be more stable and efficient. The label-fitting code has been drastically sped up (this was one of the bottlenecks), as well.
I’ve moved to Cairo for rendering; it has the advantage of natively outputting both SVG and PDF. Oddly enough, PDF sizes have plummeted now they’re being written fresh rather than converted; a year and a bit of my history is under 200kb, which is a pleasant surprise indeed.
The graphical style has changed a little, mostly due to the fact that I’ve rewritten all the rendering code and so some things aren’t quite how they used to be.
It is also quite likely that there will be some bugs in the first few days; hopefully this can get sorted out.
I’ve moved to using Amazon S3 for storage, so I’ll have no more hard disk space worries, at least.
As a small ‘gift’ to tide things over, here’s a sneak preview of the new graph output, as a PDF.
LastGraph will be down for a few days while I sort out somewhere better for it to run. It’s been using this servers’ resources massively, and there’s about 35GB of data now (over a gig of which is raw XML). The other sites on the server are suffering from the load, and we’re down to Not Very Much diskspace.
I’ll be relaunching with the new rewritten version, and automatic expiry of graph storage, to hopefully keep things more sane. If I can afford it, I may move to using something like Amazon S3 for storage, to avoid these issues.
In the meantime, please hang tight! You will be rewarded with your graphs soon enough (I plan to even spend my time on the coach down to London fixing this). If you’re feeling generous, you may want to consider donating below; hopefully I can get enough funds to invest in more storage and processing power!
If you’d like to help with the costs of servers and storage, why not donate now?
The download queue is back in the hundreds for the first time since the initial launch, and to make things worse the poor Last.fm API server is being a bit unreliable again today.
Still, it’s nice to see it being used! I may have to speed up my plans for lastgraph2, and look into using Amazon Web Services for some more rendering oomph (if the pennies add up, that is). Stay tuned!
My headphones broke last Tuesday, and so I naturally went to buy some more. However, my eye caught this post, and since I actually had some spare cash just begging to be used, I decided to go ahead and buy some Jabra BT620s headphones.
They arrived the following day, and so I followed the instructions and got them working under Maemo using Kagu as the blog posting describes. Performance is only OK; there is skipping once or twice, and if you even tempt Kagu’s interface into moving expect lots of blank sound.
This is, I imagine, mostly because Kagu has an effects-heavy PyGame interface. It’s fine when all the music playing is offloaded to the DSP chip, but a2dp requires a daemon so sit and transcode all the data in realtime.
I may attempt to write a more CPU-friendly GUI to the Kagu libraries, like I was planning to convert Spindle into anyway; we’ll see. For the moment, though, I’m quite happy with the playback overall.
The slides from my talk at Barcamp Brighton 2007 are at aeracode.org/files/lastgraph.pdf; for some reason slide 4’s PDF weighed in at 9MB, so I apologise for the large download size (I am suspicious that Inkscape rendered the raster image in that slide to a pdf pixel-by-pixel).
Inkview seemed to hold up quite well, and was plenty enough for this simple talk. I may start promoting it more now.
As good as OpenOffice is getting these days, I have a personal issue with Impress (and, indeed, presentation software in general, such as the ever-popular Powerpoint).
My slideshows are very often not presentable in a bullet-point format. Indeed, it seems slide after slide of bullet points can get a little tiresome. Thus, for my talk at Barcamp Brighton this weekend, I felt much more like going with Inkscape. Unfortunately, it’s not too easy to load inkscape files as a slideshow… or so I thought.
Enter Inkview. Appearing in the latest versions of inkscape, you pass it a list of SVG files on the command line, and it opens a window with some basic presentation controls. It’s pretty basic, but it’s just what I was after. There’s no real way of sharing a common ‘master’ background among SVG files apart from the traditional copy and paste (well, as far as I can see), and if you want to keep your sanity you’ll want to make the filenames correct so you can just call “inkscape slides/*.svg”, but it works.
I much prefer it to Impress. This is probably because I don’t really do presentations too often, but… that’s not really too important. If you feel like a bit more graphic flexibility next time you make a presentation, you should probably at least give it a passing thought.
