
LavaPS: Top, Implemented as a Lava Lamp (1995) - ColinWright
https://www.isi.edu/~johnh/SOFTWARE/LAVAPS/
======
jsilence
There was also a project called peep: the network auralizer
([http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html](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
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?

~~~
jsilence
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.

~~~
jtwaleson
Makes sense, thanks!

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outime
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](http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html)

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

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slumos
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](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!

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

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ExcaliburZero
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853137)

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

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ape4
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.

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pepijndevos
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
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
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?

