Nearly there!
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.
comments
Looks great :)
Love the work.
Have you thought it might be easier on the website if people could install this as a program on their computers and run it themselves?
Or if you are planning on trying to keep it web based, you could try to hook up into boinc comunity grid. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
I think people can design their own projects for that but I am not 100 percent sure.
Keep up the good stuff
Sid
Oh, I plan to release both a standalone renderer (i.e. a script you can give dates and a username to, and it spits out the pdf/svg) and also a rendernode client, so you can contribute to the main website in a similar way to boinc (however, the rendernode has quite a few dependencies, which is why it may not be suitable for large-scale generic processing, although I could indeed write it like that if I needed to).
Hi, we might be neighbors some time. I looked at the graph and it looked all familiar, then started noticing a few odd ones: "Hey, when did I listen to... Oh, that's not me.."
Sadly I discovered your site after you've put this graph thing offline :)
aegis.aeracode.org is down :(
Yes, it appears I've triggered something in Apache which causes it to use 600MB of memory, and so it was swapping like mad.
I'll try to get it fixed by tonight.
I'm posting this to find out your time zone and when is tonight ;)
I'm in the UK, although this post refers to an evening a few days back...
For anyone who's trying out the beta version, I might reset it a few times as I fix unmigratable bugs and the database model. Bear with me.
I was actually at the presentation when Lee Byron showed this off for a class last year, and have wanted one of my own ever since. I'm happy to finally have it now, but I was wondering if more attribution to Lee for the original concept on that site isn't warranted. Did you get in contact with him at all?
Hmm, just looked at my graph. Its a bit too detailed now. Too many little artists added in there. Is there a way you can control how many artists are shown in the graph at once?
Great, lastgraph is back! Good job.
But are the previous graphs deleted/lost? Do I need to re-generate the graphs?
I'm working on making all the old features reappear, I really am, and yes, the old graphs will be gone (and the beta may have graphs wiped out randomly).
I did have a credit to Lee Byron on the old site, and I did in fact have a short email conversation with him about LastGraph. The About page is still a bit empty, so I'm working on adding all that back.
How long does it take to render a graph? And I don't know what goes behind creating a graph but wouldn't it be easier and faster to make this a downloadable application where it would then be dedicated to only rendering the end-user's graph?
I've PMed Andy to see if Last.fm could help out by using some of our hardware to run some rendering/whatever. This is an awesome service :)
(my graph is in the queue..)
RJ from Last.fm.
It takes about two minutes for some of the larger, 3-year, many hundreds of artists graphs, as well as some extra time for downloading the data from the last.fm API and uploading it to S3.
Also, people, this is a beta, the labelling is screwy already, there could be other flaws... just a warning :)
Hey Andy http://aegis.aeracode.org/graph/319/ has been in the queue for a while now, can you see if it's stuck or broken? Can't wait to nose around with my graphs :)
any thoughts into adding a "cancel" or "remove from render queue" option? I know I created a graph for the wrong amount of time and it would probably make sense to take that off
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Yup, I need to add a remove option, and I apologise for the delays, but fresher's week here is eating up all of my free time. I'll see what I can be doing over the weekend.