Spark

https://github.com/holman/spark

by lrvick • 15 years ago

568 95 15 years ago

github.com

jmah• 15 years ago

Ah, as inspired by Edward ttyfte.

huhtenberg2• 15 years ago

That ^ is why HN needs a LOL button :)

http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/264/hnlol.png

(edit) Ah, the downvoting frenzy! 4601 karma points to go. Bring it on, fellow HNers. Don't forget to quote the guidelines and to lecture me too as no bashing is complete without showing some smug superiority with a hint of righteousness.

zyfo• 15 years ago

I was about to upvote compensate you before I read your edit.

pg• 15 years ago

Would you please not do this?

etanol2• 15 years ago

The script is not a proper POSIX bourne shell script, as it uses arrays.

For starters, it won't work in dash (Debian and Ubuntu /bin/sh implementation). So the shebang line should be changed to #!/bin/bash (not sure if it would work in Zsh either).

willvarfar• 15 years ago

Fork and fix please!

imrehg• 15 years ago

... and send a pull-request, so everyone can share the happy.

VMG• 15 years ago

Maybe this shouldn't be a shell script. A C implementation would be quite portable and also pretty fast.

thechut• 15 years ago

Holman never fails to impress

jvoorhis• 15 years ago

I hooked this up to my homebrew cohort-analysis script and saw a gratifying terminal hockeystick :D

premchai21• 15 years ago

I'm curious: is there a reason U+2584 LOWER HALF BLOCK is missing from the character set, which otherwise contains the progression from U+2581 to U+2587?

Edit: U+2588 seems like an obvious candidate as well.

tome2• 15 years ago

No idea. Here they are for everyone's use:

ticks = " ▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█"

I've included SPACE as well. That's an obvious missing one.

bodyfour• 15 years ago

At least in my OS/X terminal using the "Monaco" font (which I think is the default), the final one (U+2588) doesn't descend as far as the rest of the characters. It really produces some ugly output with that one included.

Including the space character means that you lose a nice baseline if the input is fairly sparse, so it looks less like a bar graph and more like just some random blobs.

scottyallen• 15 years ago

Hmm, I get the following:

  [scotty@Scotty-Allens-MacBook-Air ~/bin]$ spark 1,2,3,4,5
  ▇\c
  ▇\c
  ▇\c
  ▇\c
  ▇\c

I suspect this has something to do with my terminal settings, but I'm not sure quite what...

Nifty idea, regardless.

Chirono• 15 years ago

Try changing line 120 to

  echo -e $"$(print_tick $number)\c"

And it should work fine.

rnadna• 15 years ago

I found it necessary to escape the backslash

         echo -e $"$(print_tick $number)\\c"

enduser• 15 years ago

add a '-e' after 'echo' on line 120

woof• 15 years ago

https://github.com/Omnipresent/spark/commit/43e4de4bfc69093a...

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

The "\c" escape sequence makes the -n unnecessary (as I discovered while reading "help echo").

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

https://github.com/holman/spark/pull/4

(in addition to line 120, there are some "\n"s in the help)

kablamo• 15 years ago

Cool. I also like that he set up a wiki where people can contribute interesting spark one liners:

https://github.com/holman/spark/wiki/Wicked-Cool-Usage

kvermeer• 15 years ago

All involve awk or sed. That cuts out a large portion of the potential userbase...

Perhaps common uses could be wrapped in options to the script? For instance, an option to graph numbers on separate lines, to graph all numbers in the input in order, to graph a specific column of information (like passing through cut first) or to graph commonly graphed sources?

Oompa• 15 years ago

I feel like they're examples of really awesome use cases, so it shouldn't matter if people can't use them. Not to mention, I feel like this tool is targeted for terminal junkies who likely already have awk/sed.

mfukar2• 15 years ago

What would be really interesting is finding out which decent programming fonts can show block elements. I mean, beyond the DejaVu Sans Mono fiasco.

gurraman• 15 years ago

http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

icebraining2• 15 years ago

This is what I've been using (after more than a year with DejaVu Sans Mono) and I sometimes still stop to admire my terminal ;)

Using #e8e8e8 instead of pure white for the text color helps too.

mfukar2• 15 years ago

Doesn't seem to be able to display the block characters neither on PuTTY, gvim on Windows or my Linux terminals/editors. Am I missing something obvious here?

andrewcooke• 15 years ago

schumacher clean works (i can cut + paste the title of this post to my shell) - it's a bitmap font that's been in X forever.

and has anyone worked out how to get recent cpu load into their bash prompt yet?

jablan• 15 years ago

Liberation Mono and Terminus both work.

seabee• 15 years ago

You'll have difficulty on Windows if you use PuTTY, since it doesn't do font substitution.

davidjhall• 15 years ago

Are there any Windows SSH programs that display? I get nothing but garbage or "." characters for any of the symbols.

spektom2• 15 years ago

This reminds me of another useful utility from the childhood:

alias updick='/usr/bin/uptime | perl -ne "/(\d+) d/;print 8,q(=)x\$1,\"D\n\""'

derwiki• 15 years ago

You cracked my office up. Deploying to production immediately.

reledi• 15 years ago

The dick grows depending on how long the system has been running?

spektom2• 15 years ago

Exactly. Kinda measure of how strong is sysadmin.

sktrdie• 15 years ago

This is sort of useless. Giving visual meaning to a bunch of numbers means nothing. It's just a bunch of numbers.

skeletonjelly• 15 years ago

Blogs on swearing are so last week. This week is Holman week.

Just an observation.

0xdeadc0de• 15 years ago

https://github.com/bitly/data_hacks

philjackson• 15 years ago

I would rather it took a number, one per line from stdin. Great idea though.

icebraining2• 15 years ago

Try this:

    alias spark='tr "\\n" "," | xargs spark'

gwern5• 15 years ago

Everyone want a different delimiter... Hence, I filed https://github.com/holman/spark/issues/23

adaml_6232• 15 years ago

Sparklines are cool. This is just a bar graph and not nearly as useful.

knowtheory• 15 years ago

So, because you can't deviate below the x axis this is really that much less useful?

abrowne2• 15 years ago

This also doesn't meet the high resolution part of Tufte's definition ("a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolution"[1]).

[1] http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

adaml_6232• 15 years ago

You must admit the horizontal resolution is quite low as well

Mgccl2• 15 years ago

Just did a Haskell version of spark. It supports in 9 lines of code (exclude comment + empty line) Double instead of just Int. Negative numbers.

https://github.com/Mgccl/mgccl-haskell/blob/master/random/sp...

tome2• 15 years ago

I really like your version. Very neat!

jcromartie3• 15 years ago

Same features. 4 SLoC of Ruby :)

https://gist.github.com/1367091

silvestrov• 15 years ago

'floor' on last line should be changed to 'round'.

  ▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▃▃▃▅▅▅▅▅▅▆▆▆▆▆▆▇ = floor
  ▁▁▁▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▃▃▃▅▅▅▅▅▅▆▆▆▆▆▆▇▇▇▇ = round

jodrellblank• 15 years ago

And here's a PowerShell version. (Use PowerShell ISE as PowerShell normal prompt doesn't support unicode).

http://pastie.org/2867807

[edit: updated, careless variable rename, thanks jcromartie]

jcromartie3• 15 years ago

$stats should be $minmax

Mgccl2• 15 years ago

Updated. thx to gwern. Now I know the existence of hlint.

Now, without the type declaration, white space, comments, it's only 6 lines, and looks even better. :)

ocharles2• 15 years ago

Here's a Haskell version that uses a single loop to do the normalizing, and has a main that doesn't use do syntax. This was mostly a nice little brainteaser:

https://gist.github.com/1367709

mapNormalize takes a function, and produces a function that runs that function with the normalized input. It runs in a single iteration, rather than 2 maps. Credit to `dylex` for much hand holding on a single iteration normalizer :)

ddfisher• 15 years ago

Because Haskell is evaluated lazily, two maps doesn't imply two iterations over the data. In this case, I would expect only one pass through the data for both of the maps. Out of curiosity, I did a quick criterion benchmark for both functions. Here's the result on a list of 100 elements:

  benchmarking spark_mggcl
  mean: 49.29483 us, lb 48.77776 us, ub 50.25594 us, ci 0.950
  std dev: 3.495423 us, lb 2.140951 us, ub 6.373469 us, ci 0.950

  benchmarking spark_ocharles
  mean: 60.12347 us, lb 58.95586 us, ub 61.48084 us, ci 0.950
  std dev: 6.434853 us, lb 5.529613 us, ub 7.824865 us, ci 0.950

The simpler version appears to be faster.

(As an aside, is there something in particular you dislike about do syntax? I find that it often makes things more readable, though slightly more verbose.)

ranza• 15 years ago

My horrible php version :) https://gist.github.com/1368025

tanoku• 15 years ago

I made my own Sparks in C. They look like Sparks.

https://gist.github.com/1368661

yycom2• 15 years ago

https://gist.github.com/1366875 (python)

rogerallen• 15 years ago

thanks. here's a couple bugfixes. fixed width calc & handles negative #s

https://gist.github.com/1368454

yycom2• 15 years ago

a bit more efficient, and without the comma requirement

https://gist.github.com/1366926

jcfrei• 15 years ago

had basically the same idea a while back - but would have used standard ascii characters and written it in c... still cool though!

hasantayyar• 15 years ago

this should be utf-8 supported.

DanielN2• 15 years ago

This is pretty cool. Unfortunately it's coupled with some of the more obnoxious documentation I have seen recently. While the docs aren't very long, I had to read through a third of it to figure out simply what Spark is.

I'm all for being cute, but it shouldn't come at the cost of a basic understanding of what the program actually does and is useful for.

antics• 15 years ago

This is a totally fair complaint. Sometimes it is a mystery to me why HN-ers downvote things.

bitops• 15 years ago

In all seriousness: some folks on HN (not all) seem to be the guard in the center of the panopticon.

If you could see a list of who downvoted you, I'd bet that something interesting would happen.

I almost expect to come back and see my karma drop as a result of this comment.

gwern5• 15 years ago

In my defense, I did try: https://github.com/holman/spark/pull/34/files

DanielN2• 15 years ago

Excellent. Does a great job of clarifying.

craigkerstiens• 15 years ago

Here's a port of it to Python already live:

https://github.com/kennethreitz/spark.py

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

Here's my effort: https://gist.github.com/1368953

raphman• 15 years ago

Nice: found a sparkline generator at http://sandbox.kidstrythisathome.com/louis/ :

⡠⠞⠉⠙⠦⣀⠴⠋⠉⠳⢄⡠⠞⠉⠙⠦⣀⠴⠋⠉⠳⢄

Groxx• 15 years ago

Needs a lot more characters to handle height progressions and angles better, but that's awesome.

bch3• 15 years ago

I've quickly looked at the link, read the reviews here, and there's actually no description of what spark _is_. I gather is an UTF-8 graph generator.

IgorPartola• 15 years ago

Sparklines Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline

spark, the linked project, is just an implementation of a sparkline generator for the command line.

bch3• 15 years ago

Thanks! First time I've heard of "sparkline". Of course I've seen these items for as long as I can remember, but I just call them "graphs". :P

jongraehl• 15 years ago

cool, but:

$ spark 3,4,9 ▃▇▇

huh?

gwern5• 15 years ago

A fixed bug https://github.com/holman/spark/issues/19 With HEAD:

    $ spark 3 4 9
    ▃▄▇

ieure• 15 years ago

Because I want my shell prompt to be a giant graph.

▁▁▁▁▅▁▇▁▁▅▁▁▁▁▁▂▂▁▃▃▁▁▃▁▃▁▂▁▁▂▂▅▂▃▂▃▃▁▆▃▃▃▁▇▁▁▂▂▂▇▅▁▂▂▁▇▁▃▁▇▁▂▁▇▁▁▆▂▁▇▁▂▁▁▂▅▁▂▁▆▇▇▂▁▂▁▁▁▂▂▁▅▁▂▁▁▃▁▃▁▁▁▃▂▂▂▁▁▅▂▁▁▁▁▂▂▁▁▁▂▂$

Ship it.

smackfu• 15 years ago

Does HN really not have any protection against comments that are very long single words that screw up the page width?

zx2c4• 15 years ago

I rewrote it in C, so it's faster and can work more efficiently on different data sets. It also uses a prettier algorithm for determining heights. Have fun:

http://git.zx2c4.com/spark/tree/spark.c

    $ git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/spark
    $ cd spark
    $ make
    $ ./spark 1 4 2 8 14
    ▂▃▂▅█
    $ curl -s http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/eqs1day-M1.txt | cut -d, -f9 | ./spark
    ▂▃▄▃▃▃▄▃▇▃▄▄▄▅▃▄▄▄▅▅▅▄▄▄▃▃▃▃▃▄▃▄█▅▄▄▄▄▃▇▄▄▄█▄▃▄▄▄▄▃▃▄▅▄▅▃▃▃▃▇▄▅▄▇▃▅▃▄▃▄▃▇▃▃▄▇▃▄▃▄▃▃▃▄▃▃▃▃▃▃▅▃▄▃▃

Spark

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