Information Visualization

Since I had done the visualization class at grad school, the world wans't the same anymore. To look at informational illustrations and graphic plots is being a real cool exercise. And when I have to use some software to plot some chart, quickly come back to my mind when our professor were telling us if we went to his office, he will receive us with a box of paper tissue to wipe our tears away...

So, when I read the slashdot article about a Ronald Knief collecting charts of nuclear reactors, originally published in issues of Nuclear Engineering International, I became very curious.

The Wired website brings more details.

But after reading those articles I had reached the BibliOdissey blog, which has much more digitized illustrations, from artistic illustrations, through info charts, to puzzles. It is really awesome... It has lots of illustrations. They are all hires illustrations, the BibliOdissey has a Flickr gallery with them in 5156 x 3244.

Here are some of my favorites:

Comments

More trickery with gnuplot dumb terminal

In my post " Plotting memory usage on console " the chart doesn't pan the data. Now, using a named pipe, the effect got a little bit nicer. First, we have to run the memUsage.sh script to get a file filled with memory usage info: ./memUsage.sh > memUsage.dat & Then we have to create a named pipe: mkfifo pipe Now we have to run another process to tail only the last 64 lines from the memUsage.dat while [ 1 ]; do tail -64 memUsage.dat> pipe; done & And now we just have to plot the data from the pipe: watch -n 1 'gnuplot -e "set terminal dumb;p \"pipe\" with lines"' And that is it!

Replace transparency in PNG images with white background (for lots of files...)

I had to remove transparency from a PNG image file from the command line... and stack overflow came into my help[1]... But I needed it for lots of files... then, adding a "while read line" did the job: ls -1 *.png | cut -d . -f 1 | while read line; do convert -flatten $line.png flatten/$line.png ; done; [1] Replace transparency in PNG images with white background https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2322750/replace-transparency-in-png-images-with-white-background

Pettry rendered LaTeX equations using PHP

When I was writing a simple scientific webapp, during my undergrads studies, I needed to generate some equations to be shown by the app. I was already familiar with LaTeX equation formatting syntax, so I decided to use this nice peace of software. So, after "googling" a little, I found the imgtex , written by Koji Nakamaru , which is a fast CGI script, written in perl. What I did, was port it to PHP. To run it, you must have a LaTeX distribution and the dvipng software both installed on the same machine which you will run the PHP script. Here is the PHP code: To use this code, you just have to pass the LaTeX commands through GET to the PHP. For example, adding the following string to your URL: http://localhost/imgtex.php?res=300&cmd=x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{-4ac}}{2a} The res variable sets the resolution for the generated image and the cmd specifies the LaTeX command. This way, the above URL will produce the following image:

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