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

https://www.isi.edu/~johnh/SOFTWARE/LAVAPS/

by ColinWright • 7 years ago

99 22 7 years ago

Eikon• 7 years ago

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.

andai• 7 years ago

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.

mhd• 7 years ago

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.

tjoff• 7 years ago

I agree, but in my eyes the design seems like an homage to what was common in mid-nineties.

kroltan• 7 years ago

One of my favorite websites of this kind is the homepage of Anim8or, a free 3D modeling software. It even has a similar purplish-blue color scheme.

http://www.anim8or.com/

Back then, the home page was an animated "ENTER" GIF button, with a bunch of webrings on the bottom, and a logo fit for a vaporwave album cover.

EDIT: For your enjoyment: https://web.archive.org/web/20050924162818/http://www.anim8o...

siliconunit• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

ficklepickle• 7 years ago

Kind of related, when I run htop on one of my little web servers its own process is often using the most CPU.

jsilence2• 7 years ago

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.

jtwaleson2• 7 years ago

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?

jsilence2• 7 years ago

Would love to use this for monitoring a small private VPS and a couple of SBCs spread in the house. Not sure whether I'd pay for a service tho. Would not like to have someone else get all the raw monitoring information. Self hosted would be better IMHO.

slumos• 7 years ago

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!

outime• 7 years ago

I love process visualizations as it makes a boring static sysadm thing alive.

It’s a good moment to remind about my favorite one which is psDooM: http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

pepijndevos• 7 years ago

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?

Zancarius• 7 years ago

libgnomeui is in the AUR[1]. Does it not work with this version or does libgnomeui also not build?

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libgnomeui/

michael-ax• 7 years ago

use ./configure --with-tcltk ?

smartmic• 7 years ago

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.

ColinWright• 7 years ago

I've done that, but now got this error:

  const_str.hh: In static member function
                ‘static void const_str::safe_free(const char*)’:
  const_str.hh:33:61: error: ‘free’ was not declared in this scope
    static void safe_free(const char *s) { if (s) free((void*)s); }
                                                               ^

I'd love to get this working - currently running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, soon to be updated to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Suggestions?

ExcaliburZero• 7 years ago

Are there any videos of this program in action?

EDIT: User dpedu put up a video of it in their comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853137

ape4• 7 years ago

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.

dpedu• 7 years ago

Here's a video of this running on a Ubuntu 14.04 VM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juQPZER0T7M

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

Related Stories