Taking Snapshots

[glen e. p. ropella]

Hey!

Well, I got fed up with Sven's needling [grin] and hacked xwd so that
it's callable as a subroutine.  It's relatively painless to compile it
as a library, link it with Swarm, and put a method in, say, the
observerSwarm that is called at whatever frequency you'd like.

It's not in distributable form, yet.  For instance, the xwd package
still tries to do a link when you make it and you have to create your
own libxwd.a with an ar rvs command.  But, if anybody's got ants in
their pants, I can send it to them.

I doubt this is the way we should really go.  XWD files are pretty
large (105583 bytes for 80x80 default zoom heatbugs).  Plus, we're
trying to move *away* from X if possible, not towards it.  So, I've
started looking into HDF and AVS.  Mind you, however, that this is
still not high priority.  The hackish stuff is so simple that it can
never be considered high priority.  And the long-term stuff ties in
with our general data visualization problem and our portability
problem, both of which are superceded by ||-Swarm, the Manual, and the
Alpha port.

glen


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