FilipiVianna

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!

This is just a simple hack to play around with gnuplot set to dumb terminal (character console), doesn't meant to be serious application. First I had written a bash scritp to log memory usage a while ago: So, while running this script in background ( ./memUsage.sh > memUsage.dat & ), logging the data, the memory usage information can be plotted with gnuplot and watched in real time: watch -n 1 'gnuplot -e "set terminal dumb;p \"memUsage.dat\" with impulses"' The chart can be plotted with lines, with impulses or any gnuplot style option .

Considering the " Warning against using pie charts ", I'm needing to produce a couple of jquery/json ajax enabled piecharts within a simple webapp I'm designing. There are some sort of ready to use examples: Using various javascript libraries to create pie chart JavaScript charts | Pie charts

An old friend which is working for an high volume web site just pass by for a short visit. Chatting a little about simple technicalities he gave me a tip about a web site which gives statistics about site performance. http://www.webpagetest.org They access your web site, from a location and web browser of your choice and give back to you lots of statistics about download time of your web site. I have tested this blog, the results are at http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110602_F6_R879/ And the IDEIA's web site restuls: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110603_73_RDWS/

Marco has a nice tutorial showing how to make stacked area charts using Gnuplot. http://freesoftware.zona-m.net/how-to-create-stacked-area-graphs-with-gnuplot/

Looking for some jquery plugin for mind mapping, I've reached a stakoverflow conversation: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1374149/jquery-mind-map-think-map And there is a cool demo here re-written with jquery: https://github.com/kennethkufluk/js-mindmap Last version (pure javascript) http://kenneth.kufluk.com/google/js-mindmap/ And another tool, also interesting which worth a future review: http://thejit.org/demos/

Tobi Oetiker has created two good tools for visualizations, th MRTG and the RRDtool . Both realy worth attention for their performance and in special the RRDtool for its versatility.

Marcus Ritt has a nice tutorial on how to make gunplot graphics a little more Tufte. http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~mrpritt/doku.php?id=tufte And Technolope also has some considerations on Tufte and gnuplot.

I was putting some sparklines at an web app I am designing. I am using the "Sparkline PHP Graphing Library" which is a well written PHP library for generating the famous sparklines created by Edward Tufte . So I was wondering which another advice I could pick up from Master Tufte... I went googling arround for Edward Tufte and a bunch of links came up but, the one which most called my attention was a Tufte-inspired LaTeX class for producing handouts, papers, and books. The samples provided by the web site are really well designed.

Last week I got faced with two very interesting libraries. Protovis Protovis uses JavaScript and SVG for web-native visualizations. Protovis composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots. Unlike low-level graphics libraries that quickly become tedious for visualization, Protovis defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to simplify construction. jStat jStat is a statistical library written in JavaScript that allows you to perform advanced statistical operations without the need of a dedicated statistical language (i.e. MATLAB or R). Read Write Web has also an article about other 20 JavaScript Libraries for Data Visualization

I have to remember to check Grafico , another javascript charting library. References: http://dailyjs.com/2010/02/08/grafico/

I was looking for a way to make a colored logo likes Google's to use for my kid's name. Here is a simple tutorial on how to make the colored 3D effect with inkscape. If I had the Catull type face, used by Google, it would be very cool to write my son's name (Gustavo) as Goostavo ;-) ( done at May 13, 2010 ) Catull Type face (tutorial done with Catull, results at " Done - with Catull type face ")

Hmmm... I am not shy to say I am following Bill Gates on twitter . And he posted a link to Gary Flake talk , in which he demos “pivot”. A very cool tool for info graphics. Here it is:

New tool for interactive data visualization: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/

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 B ibliOdissey has a Flickr gallery with them in 5156 x 3244. Here are some of my favorites:

After 4 years of marriage we will finally have our first kid. My wife is writing a blog with more details (in Portuguese). But which is letting me more exited about this near future is the new excuse to buy toys. The chart below from graphjam illustrates well: see more Funny Graphs And here is one echo scan image made when we were with 12 weeks of pregnancy:

A friend of mine had written an application which communicates with a small microcotroled board and saves data read from this board on a mysql database. He wants to plot these data on the web. He wrote a PHP script using the GD lib. He did a real good job, but he wants it to plot the data dynamically and an http refresh made things a little ugly. He is now trying to plot directly with AJAX + Javascript. He is trying to use Flot , which is a javascrit for plotting data. Another usefull resource for realtime web graphics is the CavasDemos .

Bernhard Reiter had wrote a really nice warning against using pie charts , and he did put it on his plotting tool ;-) Here is a peace: "... Piecharts are generally not recommended to visualise information! Use bar- or pointchars instead if the quantities are important. Studies have shown that piecharts are hard to read if you actually have to answer questions about the numbers they represent. They look very pleasing and are used in a lot of places but they do not help to visualise information that well. Analytic thing person will read the percentages or values given on the legend or the chart itself and analyse them in their head. ... " Check the full text at his web site .

I've been using gnuplot to embed graphics on my scripts for quite some time. And I liked it much. Last month I was asked to maintain a legacy application which generates some live graphics using the JFreeChart class. It has some transparent animated 3D pie charts. So, I was wondering if I could do the same with a couple of scripts and gnuplot, generating an animated gif. After googling a little, I've found these links: Simple pie chart with Gnuplot Another simple 3D pie chart with gnuplot (script included) And, with these new gnuplot features, I will try to do some cool scripts ;-)

Navigating on the silk icons web site , I've found an interesting use of the Prefuse Visualization Tool Kit. “Prefuse is a set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations. The original prefuse toolkit provides a visualization framework for the Java programming language. The prefuse flare toolkit provides visualization and animation tools for ActionScript and the Adobe Flash Player.” They have some nice visualizations on their gallery. I hope to soon use this tool kit on some projects on my job. Bellow is the screenshot of one of the projects which had used Prefuse: This particular screenshot is from the project: Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization by ( Jeffrey Heer , Fernanda B. Viégas , Martin Wattenberg ) . Following Fernanda B. Viégas and Martin Wattenberg web sites, I've discovered that both worked on the Many Eyes project for IBM . Perhaps, Prefuse is the ancestral of Many Eyes... ;-) As is i...