WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 21850605

LavaPS: Top, Implemented as a Lava Lamp (1995)

99 points| ColinWright | 6 years ago |isi.edu

22 comments

order
[+] jsilence|6 years ago|reply
There was also a project called peep: the network auralizer (http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html) which would transscribe server load, service events and network events into a natural soundscape like for example the ambiance of a forest with a small creek. Sometimes when load was high, it would rain. On crunchtime the rain turned into a thunderstorm. The reasoning behind it was that the network crew could listen to the nice and calm ambient soundscape all day and would be able to detect when something was off.

Really would like to someone take up that idea once again and implement it as a monitoring plugin.

[+] jtwaleson|6 years ago|reply
I've been playing around with this idea for a couple of years and have built some prototypes. This was mostly triggered by my experiences in running thousands of production servers. Just curious: in what kind of setting would you use it and would you pay for it?
[+] Eikon|6 years ago|reply
I deeply love these old fashioned personal web pages from way back then. When I stumble accross one, I always feel really grateful that the content is still hosted after all the years.

The almost always crazy looking by today standards stylesheets makes the content very personal.

[+] mhd|6 years ago|reply
Really? This page might be older, but it's a pretty "modern" page, no tables for layout, no Gimp-Fu created header, just some text styled with CSS.

Not late 90s Dreamweaver/Geocities, more early 2000s CSS Zen Garden (the copyright notice extends to 2003, so I guess this was written then). If not for the subject matter and its date, this could be a contemporary blog post.

[+] andai|6 years ago|reply
I often worry I don't know enough about web technology, and that it's hard to keep up with, but my favorite websites all look roughly like this one.
[+] slumos|6 years ago|reply
I really recommend the paper referenced and the whole idea of calm technology. I was inspired enough by LavaPS and the paper that I implemented a similar model for a Program Visualization course project back in 2000 or so, and brought the idea back when working on monitoring for my first web ops job in 2008!

The link is dead of course, but it was easy to find another copy (https://people.csail.mit.edu/rudolph/Teaching/weiser.pdf), and in searching I learned that there was even an O’Reilly book published in 2015!

[+] siliconunit|6 years ago|reply
I relish when something gets a thoughtful graphical representation.. would be nice to have it in a more advanced 3d shape...maybe something like that could be done in unreal engine/blender, driving isosurfaces blobs. Too bad software inventions are so emepherals.. won't have it working in 30 years , or less though.
[+] schoen|6 years ago|reply
I wonder how the 3D rendering would affect top's own resource utilization -- for example, if it might cause the visualization to always be present as a large blob inside its own visualization.
[+] ape4|6 years ago|reply
I just installed the rpm on a modern Fedora (Red Hat) virtual machine and it worked ok. Pretty amazing given the age. But it was too small and I didn't see how to increase the size.
[+] pepijndevos|6 years ago|reply
This looks really cool, but on Arch it does not compile because libgnomeui is not a thing that seems to exist anymore. Hasn't anyone made some modern port of this?
[+] smartmic|6 years ago|reply
libgnomeui-dev was available in wheezy sources. But I had an issue with #include<asm/page.h> in src/linux/proc/ps.h. Replace it by #include<sys/user.h> for successful compilation.