Today I am only writing a short comment: with WinDirStat there is a further alternative/successor of SequoiaView. The tool itself is a clone of KDirStat, but who cares. The only important thing is, that the great visualization of space consumption on your hard dist is available in one further tool for all of us to use.
Data set file formats are a real running gag in the context of scientific visualization. Often the file formats are rather useless and there often are no established standards. Most of the time ASCII-text files greet you as the results for simulations. These are large, bulky and a pain to parse.
With MegaMol™ we tries to tackle this problem several times, with limited success I have to say. We nicely extended the list of file formats we need to be able to load due to our project partners with a whole bunch of file formats of our own. These, however, have proven themselves to be similar useless in the long run. This year the need for a solution to efficiently load larger data (not yet big data) arose, once again. The best way we found was the MMPLD file format. It basically is a binary memory dump of the simplest data structure MegaMol has to offer.
What can I say? It works. Of course this is no solution with sustainability or scalability. The huge number of failed attempts to create a good file format raises the questions if such a file format can be defined at all. I don’t want to abandon hope. We—CGV-TUD, VISUS, HLRS, ThEt-PB, SCCS TUM, and TLD-KL—at least agreed that we all have this problem, and that we all are interested in a solution. We will see…
Software is a product. At the same time it is a service. For one, it is the service providing executable machine code for algorithms, which might even be free accessible knowledge. In addition, it is the service to maintain this machine code, meaning both, removing errors and adapting to changing environments.
Especially the last is a reoccurring issue with open source software. I am not opposing open source software, far from it. But, really, get your act together! Have some ambitions and strife for high quality of your open source software; especially when talking of non-functional aspects like usability and quality of service. The usual excuse “but it is for free” reduce the whole concept to absurdity.
The reason for this post is me finally switching from qtranslate to mqtranslate.
This week I was attending the annual meeting of the Boltzmann Zuse Society in Paderborn. It was fun and interesting, like always. The main topic is molecular simulation using molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo methods. Of course, there are also ab initio computations, but these are not that important. With this topic my visualizer-colleagues from Stuttgart and I myself are a perfect fit. Thus, there were man great ideas and actual plans for upcoming joint research projects.
As promised, here my impressions on this year’s EuroVis conference in Swansea, Wales.
First about the location: Wales offers beautiful landscapes and literally shined with perfect weather during the week of the conference. Several locals assured me that this much sunshine and this little rain was not normal. It’s fine with me. I enjoyed it. I booked a family-managed bed & breakfast. That was a good idea. The room was clean and well furnished. For sure that B&B was not a top-tier accommodation, whatever that means, but my hosts were very nice and I got the feeling, that I was welcome. The only downside was traveling to Swansea, which seems to be far far away. When booking my travel someone did not pay attention to traveling comfort. Thus, I spent one Sunday and the next Saturday in one tram, two trains, two airplanes, one bus, two (delayed) British trains, and one taxi, each. I have no problem with long travels, but changing vehicles eight times is a pain.
Now for the conference itself. It was held at the University of Swansea in four rooms in three different buildings. Due to the large number of visitors, it might have been necessary, however it was tiresome.
Before the main conference, there were several smaller workshops. Although I was part of the program committee of the EnvirVis 2014, a workshop on “Visualization in Environmental Sciences”, I visited most session of the EGPGV, the Eurographics Working Group on Parallel Graphics and Visualization. “Big Data” is one of the major buzzwords in scientific visualization at the moments. Therefore, some of the talks were very interesting, especially the key note given by Valerio Pascucci. The other talks were good quality. For example, one nice idea, although not completely new, was the work “Freeprocessing Transparent In Situ Visualization Via Data Interception” by Thomas Fogal et al.. Preloading for the win. :-) But the approach is good and can be useful.
There was much to see on the main conference. As always, the talks were of good quality. If I write it like this, I mean that these talks were not ground breaking, but that they were good to listen to and to follow. The large conferences always claim to have a higher quality than smaller workshops. In my opinion it is more like that percentage of good papers is higher, like 95% on the large conferences, while smaller workshops have a ratio of 2/3 to 1/3 of good papers and … others. But the quality of the good talks is not different between the large conferences and the smaller workshops. Two talks I liked especially were „Fast RBF Volume Ray Casting on Multicore and Many-Core CPUs“ by Arron Knoll et al. and „Sparse Representation and Visualization for Direct Numerical Simulation of Premixed Combution“ by Timo Oster et al.. The capstone talk by John Stasko also was very entertaining.
The real highlight of this year’s EuroVis, however, were the STAR-Tracks. STARs are State of the Art reports. These are overview reports over a limit sub-field of our science. Good STARs are invaluable and are a perfect starting point to enter a field. This EuroVis gave out a call for STARs for the first time and highlighted them with their own session track. Great! Because of this, some very good STARs were written and presented. I am really pleased. I especially liked “A Review of Temporal Data Visualizations Based on Space-Time Cube Operations” by Benjamin Bach et al.. Not only were the work itself and the presentation of good quality, but during the presentation a lively and constructive discussion emerged with several people from the audience. Many nice ideas were created.
In short, the EuroVis 2014 was interesting and worth the effort. I am satisfied.
I just got back from the EuroVis 2014 conference at the University of Swansea in Wales. I’m still pretty tired from the complicated travel, so this post will be short (again).
The conference was nice, as was the weather. Something you should not expect in Wales, as the locals ensured me. However, I enjoyed the sunlight. Well, for the next post I will prepare some details about the conference.
It is nice when you can rely on technology. I am always willing to pay a “little more” to get stuff that simply does what it should do and that does not make me problems. To carry some private data with me I bought a Kingston DataTraveler USB stick about 1 ½ years ago. I carries it at my key chain to have some important data at home and at work. Maybe you cannot easily spot why I am writing this post in the picture I took from my stick.
Yesterday was the Uni-Tag (open day presentation) at the TU Dresden. What a colossal waste of time. Because of “something” or demo was moved into a different building since last year. When I said, that this is a bad thing because nobody would find us, I got answers like “No problem. We put signs on and we will send people into your direction, blablabla.” The result: giving a three hour demo we were able to show our stuff to something like 20 people. What a joke. I really would have had better things to do with my Saturday.
Not much happened with my private projects. Work still takes up most of my time, including this week’s Saturday. There is so much to do:
It is frightening how few time remains for my private projects. All more important for me to set my priority right. Therefore, I decided to abort another one of my private projects: HexDuel.
I have not written anything about HexDuel on my blog. It was meant to be a smart-phone game focusing on two-player gameplay. It was turn based, optimized for touch input, and had a nice and extendable graphical design, at least in my opinion. Nevertheless, it was the project with the lowest priority. However, it is a pity. It was a good idea.
