pcplantdb

[Bear Kaufmann <bear@ursine-design.com>]

Hi all,

Accounting first.
John S. wrote:
Last decision I recall was that the rate for paid work on the project 
was to be USD 15.00/hr. (or equivalent in Pounds, Euros etc. ;-) for all 
comers.

OK, I believe I missed that. That's fine. So if I charge $15/hr on the 40 
billable hours I've worked up until this point, would that be OK by yall? Not 
that I'm in this for money, as you've probably guessed by now, but somethin's 
gotta pay the bills.


GBI second.

On to the fun stuff.
I've uploaded the Actionscript based GBI prototype. I thought performance might 
be better, but the physics on these eat up a lot of cycles. I tried a number of 
methods to reduce the computations required, by changing the laws of physics (and 
conditions when it operated), but they didn't produce as nice a layout structure. 
There are other optimizations for this layout method, which prefuse uses, and I 
can implement, so don't treat this speed as the optimum. This method is getting 
me only 7 FPS on a 1Ghz G4 :-(, other methods with worse layout got me up to 
around 21 for this graph.  I hear that the Mac Flash player isn't as fast as 
other systems though. I'd like to know what others get on their system (FPS & 
OS/CPU Stats).

Check it out here:
http://permaculture.info/test/richClient.php

At the lower left:
FPS: Frame rate. Let me know what you get.
OpCount: Number of physics operations per frame (repulsion and springs), some 
other methods dropped this to 130 or so, but didn't achieve as nice a layout.
Tension: The cumulative tension of the springs in the graph. There is a 
timeline graph of this on the right. Helpful when looking at other 
simulations. We can also cut off computations once the tension stablizes (ie 
layout acheived).

It loads in the same GraphML that the Prefuse Java applet uses.
<graph>
<node id="1" label="blah"></node>
....
<edge source="1" target="2"></edge>
....
</graph>

We implement something on the server side to output this, and some action 
(double-clicking) would load up the relations for the clicked node (as in 
visualthesaurus).

We can extend upon the format for our needs. This is also only one form of 
visualization, and I think we may wish to use a few others as well, for 
result ranking, non-networks, etc.
One vision is to also to allow each node to contain a graph. So the circle 
you see now, is actually just a node in the next systems level up.

Have fun.

Cheers,
Bear