The Last Graph

<img id="image41" src="http://aeracode.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/lastgraph_3.png" alt="Ooooh, pretty." title="Ooooh, pretty." />

If you're not aware, I am an avid user and supporter of the last.fm social-music-network-thingy site. Recently, I was browsing the internet, and found Lee Byron's last.fm graphs.

Now, these are things of beauty, and being incredibly shallow I decided I needed one for myself. So, I took to writing a program to generate them, and three days later, here we are.

It's written in Python (ha, surprise), and uses the data to build a wavechart in the SVG format (this is one of the easiest output methods I have found; ten points to SVG for being such a nice format). It then pumps it through Inkscape to get out a PDF, which is obviously much more widely supported (and, more importantly, PDF viewers take up less than eleventy tonnes of memory when rendering these graphs).

I've just finished a somewhat-decent labelling algorithm, and now it is time to actually create a colour algorithm (I have recieved complaints of the graphs being 'too blue' - this is impossible, nothing can be too blue). In the meantime, here are some pretty pictures.

Update: There's a beta version of the online interface to lastgraph up at lastgraph.aeracode.org. Check it out!

Posted 14th May 2007 in General, Python, and LastGraph, with 1 comment