don@CS.UMD.EDU (Don Hopkins) (05/30/90)
As an example of how to use the "mapper" program I just posted, I have made available for anonymous ftp the animation that I ran as part of the "Empowered" performance at CHI'90. It shows an animated spinning zoom around an extremely detailed pseudoscientific visualization of the class hierarchy in X11/NeWS. The uncompressed file is 44,910,000 bytes long: 499 300x300 8 bit frames. The compressed file that you should fetch is 9,312,254 bytes, and you have to uncompress it to view it since "uncompress < spin/zoom.raw | mapper - ..." doesn't work for some stupid reason. I hope you can get a good ftp connection and have lots of disk space. Just ftp to tumtum.cs.umd.edu (128.8.128.49), set binary mode, and get the files "NeWS/spin/zoom.raw.Z" and "NeWS/spin/startspin". Put them in a subdirectory called "spin" under where you started the X11/NeWS server, uncompress zoom.raw, compile "mapper" and put it into a directory on your path, then run "spin/startspin" from the directory where you ran NeWS. I think it should work. For extra cheap thrills: run the color wheel, and rotate part or all of the color table during the animation!!! Under SunOS 4.0.x, the "mapper" program has the annoying tendancy of paging everything else out by reading through the input file sequentialy (vadvise doesn't quite work). I have been told that under 4.1, vadvise() can be used to cure this behavior. (I might have to mmap the input file as well as the shared file, and vadvise sequential access on the input file's range of memory.) -Don