Well, last night I gave a talk at one of the ever-brilliant Oxford Geek Nights, and in case you’re baying for the slides I used (all seven of them), you can find them at this wonderful OGN7 LastGraph Slides link. If you live within punting distance of Oxford, you should really try to come to the next one on August 27th. If not; well, they put videos up on the site…
In a related note, I am enjoying the improvement on my slide-making capabilities via Inkscape. Previously, PDFs exported to massive file sizes and tying the individual pages together wasn’t easy. Now, the new Cairo export in Inkscape (the same PDF export library LastGraph uses, yay) makes reasonably-sized PDFs, and pdftk munges them together easily and in record time. One day I’ll give in and use an actual presentation program.
Being a very visual person, I naturally wanted a nice way of visualising the traffic lastgraph gets (especially as I nurse it through the initial round of bugs, most of which have gone). The ever-wonderful gltail always helps, but the same author has gone one further and come up with gltrail:
It draws paths between pages visited, and looks pretty nice when visualising the lastgraph logs. It’s also incredibly tempting to put it on a large screen in my room, the only problem being that I lack a large screen. And enough room.
In a related note, it would be nice if there were some sort of AJAXy, real-time, web-based statistics like gltail; anyone know of any? Someone must have put that <canvas> element to good use by now…
Yes, this is my new official term for the server going up and down. It seems that some part of the system causes 100% CPU usage on the box it’s running on, and in fact is so nasty to the system that it even makes the serial console lag. This, for those who are not server geeks, is Bad.
I’m on the case, and have brought the full force of monitoring tools to bear to see if I can track down the cause. In the meantime, please accept my apologies for any downtime.
After much work, lastgraph3’s beta is now out. Please be warned that it may not work, may explode, and may abduct your cat, dog or goldfish in the process of failing.
Apart from that, please feel free to give it a try at lastgraph3.aeracode.org. Report any and all problems back to me, either here, or at my email or something similar.
Oh, and it’s also very slow at fetching until I re-negotiate fast fetching with last.fm, since I’ve moved IP.
Update: I’ve decided to make this one of those public, neverending betas, so LastGraph is now basically open for anyone and everyone to use. The last feature I added was LastGraph Premium, my new way of soliciting donations (this time, you can donate, and in return get a few extra features). I’m still not sure about it, but I’ve had some emails before from people who would have liked it, so we’ll see how it turns out.
It really isn’t, honest. I’m working on the final part - the graph scheduler, which replicates the previous queued graph functionality - and I’ll hopefully be pushing it all live soon.
I was tempted to just push the live artist browsing part live, which all works currently, but it’s only interesting for, oh, the first few hours…
LastGraph has been given a much needed refresh, including a tweak to the render nodes to stop them running out of file handles/memory/disk space, and the main site so it in fact remembers when it deletes XML caches to free up space rather than wandering around going “I’m sure I put that file somewhere…”.
I may also actually implement expiry soon, as my S3 bill is finally above $5. Yay…
Yes, people of the internet, LastGraph has returned. After over two weeks of beta testing and bugfixing, it’s finally in a useable state, and so I’m pushing it out to lastgraph.aeracode.org as I type this. If it doesn’t work for you yet, wait for the DNS change to propagate.
This version will, inevitably, contain bugs, so I would appreciate it if any bugs could be emailed to lastgraph at aeracode.org.
There have been some improvements, such as much better error handling, reduced PDF sizes, faster rendering (and more render nodes), and detailed progress. There are still some missing features, though, notably the ability to set the plays threshold and to remove a graph from the queue (this will only be possible if you’ve provided an email address).
Plans for the future include custom colourschemes, more notification methods (jabber, and perhaps some kind of twitter reply thing). If you have more ideas, send them in to that address above (or poke me via one of the many methods found on the contact page).
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!
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.
