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NAME
lavaps -- a lava lamp of currently running processes
WHAT'S NEW
27-Dec-99 1.9 (the millennial release)
The X resource lavaps.pollInterval now sets how frequently to check
process status. Suggested by Hue-Bond hue@cyberchat2000.com.
The licenses on tcl2cc.c and color.c have been changed to GPL (thanks
to Ron Frederick and Jamie Zawinski for releasing their code, and
Tommi Virtanen of the Debian Project for pointing out these possibly
problematic licenses).
Shrinking-on-startup bug fixed with tkstep.
Some standard command-line arguments now work: -display and -
geometry.
Lavaps triggers a memory leak on some Debian systems (see bug #49828
in their database). The problem appears to be in a library, not in
lavaps, so I cannot fix it.
DESCRIPTION
Lavaps is an interactive process-tracking program like ``top'',
but with a much different attitude. Rather than presenting lots of
specific info in digital form, it tries to present certain important
information in a graphical analog form. The idea is that you can
run it in the background and get a rough idea of what's happening
to your system without devoting much concentration to the task.
Lavaps was inspired by Mark Weiser's idea of calm computing in
this paper:
``The Coming Age of Calm Technology'' by Mark Weiser
and John Seely Brown. A revised version of Weiser &
Brown. ``Designing Calm Technology'', PowerGrid Journal, v 1.01,
http://powergrid.electriciti.com/1.01 (July 1996). October,
1996. http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm.
(This program dedicated to the memory of M.W.--I hope you would have
thought it a good hack.)
REQUIREMENTS
Building lavaps requires C++, STL, and Tcl/Tk. Lavaps is necessarily
system-specific. It currently runs under Linux and FreeBSD. Ports
to other systems are encouraged.
AVAILABILITY
The latest version of lavaps should always be available from
http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/SOFTWARE/LAVAPS/.
Mailing lists for lavaps are
lavaps-announce@heidemann.la.ca.us and
lavaps-talk@heidemann.la.ca.us
To subscribe to either, send mail with "subscribe" in the *BODY*
of the message to:
lavaps-announce-request@heidemann.la.ca.us or
lavaps-talk-request@heidemann.la.ca.us.
RELEASE HISTORY
21-Mar-99 1.0
Initial release to a few friends. Runs on Linux and FreeBSD.
29-May-99 1.1
Fix some Linux build bugs
6-Aug-99 1.2
Portability, correctness, and warning fixes for FreeBSD from Ted
Faber. (Thanks!)
I fixed the space leak...previously blobs only got bigger, never
smaller, so eventually the whole lamp filled up with emacs.
Added support for selecting VM or physical memory.
Version now shows up in about.
There's a lingering bug: sometimes I get into an infinite loop on
some blobs. I catch it and break out, but you'll see error messages.
20-Aug-99 1.3
Mailing lists for lavaps are
lavaps-announce@heidemann.la.ca.us and
lavaps-talk@heidemann.la.ca.us
To subscribe to either, send mail with "subscribe" in the *BODY*
of the message to:
lavaps-announce-request@heidemann.la.ca.us or
lavaps-talk-request@heidemann.la.ca.us.
Splash text now stays on top of any blobs.
Fixed some blob ordering bugs (and made all redrawing lazy), but
probably introduced some more bugs.
Changed hash function arbitrarily to make Netscape, emacs, and Vmware
not all be different shades of green.
Preliminary resource support (only xdb, not .Xdefaults): set
lavaps.geometry, .what, .who. (Bug: what/who don't work currently.)
Can display both physical and virtual memory at the same time.
6-Sep-99 1.4
Bugfixes in ``both'' mode: a sev-1 problem with leaking blobs and
a problem where a default resource "lavaps.what: both" didn't work.
Internal process-to-blob API is now absolute, hopefully reducing
gradual blob expansion over time (when the program runs for
weeks). Also, I fixed a bunch of internal places where size could
leak.
Info about processes now includes user names in addition to user ids.
Autoresizing!
Autoresizing revealed a bunch of corner cases with blob sizing.
Hopefully they're all now fixed.
To nail ``any'' remaining bugs, a whole bunch of validation code is
turned on. This makes things run slower and will mostly be turned
off in the next week.
8-Sep-99 1.5
Make install bug fixed on systems where it's not installed
setgid. (Thanks to Mark Yarvis for identifying the problem.)
A work-around for a FreeBSD header bug from Ted Faber.
A debug resource (lava.debug) now enables debugging info. Very useful
if you think real sizes don't match expected.
Clicking for info now makes the splash text go away.
The Tk ``appname'' is now set.
What I thought was lazy in the 1.3 release, wasn't (due to 3
bugs). Things are better now, and lavaps should consume less CPU.
9-Sep-99 1.6
Typo in about window fixed (thanks Ted).
Bug in the splash text repetition suppression fixed (thanks Mark).
Window resize now does sensible things. Horizontal and vertical
orientation is automatically determined.
13-Sep-99 1.7
Fixed a bug created in 1.4 where blobs drift slowly to the left.
Fixed a bug where resizes (after a while) would crash in
blob::redraw_all().
Documentation: a man page, and the README and internal help are all
generated from a central source.
12-Oct-99 1.8
Fixed an inefficiency where resizing happened more frequently than
it needed to.
Fixed several typos in the documentation.
Fixed a bug in using -fpermissive on FreeBSD.
Rolled a RedHat RPM.
Fixed a FreeBSD port.
TO DOS
* known bug: leaks memory under Debian Linux
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/49/49828.html * window shrinks to zero
on startup with tkstep installed * possible license problems with
tcl2cc <http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/49/49787.html> * settable
default scaling of blob size * handle command-line options for
geometry, resources, etc. * should have an option to label things
with the hostname * should verify that blobs can occupy the whole,
whole screen. * flag to force directionality * Show all processes but
those by these uids (root, http, etc.). Also some way to exclude the
(large) mfs image under FreeBSD. * When things are resizing they
should probably maintain some relationship between visual space and
memory that is not affected by odd horizontal:vertical ratios. *
pop-up sliders to adjust scaling. * lavaps steals lots of colors on
a pseudocolor display. I hoped that Tcl would do reasonable color
mapping for me, but apparently not. * A --root option to run in
the root. * The info window should be pinnable (like in OpenLook),
and then auto-update. <http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/49/49884.html>
COPYRIGHT
Lavaps is Copyright (C) 1998-1999 by John Heidemann.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2,
as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307,
USA.
AUTHOR
John Heidemann, `johnh@isi.edu'.
Thanks to two enthusiastic early users (Ted Faber and Mark Yarvis)
for encouragement, suggestions, and bits of code.
Lavaps includes a small amount of code from xscreensaver by M.
Dobie, Patrick J. Naughton, and Jamie Zawinski. Building lavaps
uses tcl2cc by Ron Frederick, from tclcl (see http://www-
mash.cs.berkeley.edu/ns/).
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