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=head1 LAVAPS
Copyright (C) 1999 by John Heidemann.
All rights reserved.
Comments to C<johnh@isi.edu>,
latest version at F<http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/SOFTWARE/LAVAPS/>.
=head1 NAME
lavaps -- a lava lamp of currently running processes
=head1 SYNOPSIS
B<lavaps>
=head1 WHAT'S NEW
=head2 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 F<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.
=head1 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:
=over 4
=item Z<>
``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,
F<http://powergrid.electriciti.com/1.01>
(July 1996).
October, 1996.
F<http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm>.
=back
(This program dedicated to the memory of M.W.--I hope you would have
thought it a good hack.)
=head1 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.
=head1 AVAILABILITY
The latest version of lavaps should always be available from
F<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 I<BODY> of the message to:
lavaps-announce-request@heidemann.la.ca.us
or lavaps-talk-request@heidemann.la.ca.us.
=head1 CONTROLLING LAVAPS
Basic lavaps is quite simple.
Blobs live and grow corresponding to processes in the system
(see L<"BLOBS">).
Clicking the left mouse button on a blob shows information about
that process.
Clicking the right mouse button pops up menus that let
you control lavaps (see L<"MENUS">).
=head1 BLOBS
Lavaps is all about blobs of virtual, non-toxic lava.
Blobs in lavaps correspond to processes in the system.
When a process is started, a new blob is created.
When a process exits, the corresponding blob disappears.
Blob size is proportional to the amount of memory the process uses.
Blob movement is proportional to the amount of time the process runs
(if the process never runs, the blob will never move).
Blob shows several things.
First, the basic color (the hue) corresponds to the name of the program
which is running. Emacs is always one color, Netscape another
(on my system, blue and yellow).
Second, blobs get darker when the process doesn't run.
Over time, the process will become nearly black and only
its border will remain colored.
Finally, if both physical and virtual memory are shown,
then the part of the process will be a slightly different color
showing what percentage of the process is not in physical memory.
Please don't ask me about the chemical composition of
the virtual lava.
=head1 MENUS
The right mouse button pops up menus which control lavaps, including:
B<Who>: track processes by I<me> or by I<everyone> (including root, httpd, etc.).
B<What>: track process physical or virtual memory or both.
Most modern operating systems can keep all of a process in RAM
(physical memory), or can let pages that aren't currently used
float out to disk (virtual memory).
Virtual memory is always a superset of physical memory.
You can track either one, or both.
When tracking both, virtual memory appears as a different colored strip
down the middle of the process blob.
B<How>: controls blob sizing.
Putting too little or too much lava in your lava lamp
would make it boring or overflow.
Lavaps therefore usually runs with patent-pending
lava I<autosizing> where blobs fill about a quarter of the lamp.
This feature can be turned off (at your peril) with
the How menu.
You can also control the desired size of the blobs
(when autosizing is enabled)
or the absolute size of the blobs (when it's not)
with the I<Grow> and I<Shrink> options.
B<Help>: you'll have to figure this one out on your own.
B<Quit>: this one's even harder than Help.
=head1 RESOURCES
Lavaps can configured from X resources (only if they're loaded with xrdb)
or with the file F<$HOME/.lavapsrc>.
In both cases, the format is like:
lavaps.autosize: false
setting whatever resource you want (in this case autosize)
to some value (false).
In the F<.lavapsrc> file, the ``lavaps'' before the period can be omitted.
The following resources are supported:
=over 4
=item geometry
(default none).
Specifies the initial window location and size
in X-style (see L<X(1)>).
=item who
(default me).
Whose processes should we be watching, anyway?
My processes (set to ``me'')
or everyones (set to... ``everyone'').
Can also be the process id of a single process if you're
very single-minded.
=item what
(default both).
What kind of memory should blob size correspond to,
either both, physical, or virtual.
=item autosize
(default true).
Keep the blobs at a reasonable size?
=item debug
(default false). Enable debugging messages.
=item checkInterval
(default 2000). How frequently (in milliseconds) should we check to see
who's run? Defaults to 2 seconds which seems ``reasonable'' on my
computer; shorten the interval if you want more frequent updates
and have a faster computer (or are more tolerant than I am :-).
=item clicklessInfo
(default false).
If set, process information pops up without clicking.
(Not yet fully working.)
=back
=head1 RELEASE HISTORY
=head2 21-Mar-99 1.0
Initial release to a few friends. Runs on Linux and FreeBSD.
=head2 29-May-99 1.1
Fix some Linux build bugs
=head2 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.
=head2 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 I<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.
=head2 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.
=head2 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.
=head2 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.
=head2 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.
=head2 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.
=head1 TO DOS
=over 4
=item *
known bug:
leaks memory under Debian Linux
F<http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/49/49828.html>
=item *
window shrinks to zero on startup with tkstep installed
=item *
possible license problems with tcl2cc
<http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/49/49787.html>
=item *
settable default scaling of blob size
=item *
handle command-line options for geometry, resources, etc.
=item *
should have an option to label things with the hostname
=item *
should verify that blobs can occupy the whole, whole screen.
=item *
flag to force directionality
=item *
Show all processes but those by these uids (root, http, etc.).
Also some way to exclude the (large) mfs image under FreeBSD.
=item *
When things are resizing they should probably maintain some
relationship between visual space and memory that is not affected
by odd horizontal:vertical ratios.
=item *
pop-up sliders to adjust scaling.
=item *
lavaps steals lots of colors on a pseudocolor display.
I hoped that Tcl would do reasonable color mapping for me,
but apparently not.
=item *
A --root option to run in the root.
=item *
The info window should be pinnable (like in OpenLook),
and then auto-update.
<http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/49/49884.html>
=back
Z<>
=head1 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.
=head1 AUTHOR
John Heidemann,
C<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 F<http://www-mash.cs.berkeley.edu/ns/>).
=head1 ISPELL
LocalWords: LAVAPS lavaps Weiser's Weiser Seely PowerGrid STL FreeBSD httpd
LocalWords: autosizing xrdb autosize lavapsrc Aug Vmware xdb Xdefaults Sep cc
LocalWords: Bugfixes sev ids Autoresizing setgid Yarvis appname README uids
LocalWords: pollInterval tcl GPL checkInterval Oct fpermissive RedHat Debian
LocalWords: tkstep mfs pseudocolor pinnable OpenLook xscreensaver Dobie Jamie
LocalWords: Naughton Zawinski tclcl Tommi Virtanen clicklessInfo
|
