Fwd: Evaluate RDV for P-3 deployment
Paul Hubbard
All -
A detailed RDV eval from Erigo. I'll quickly note that
1) Multichannel updates - this is an odd bug. I had this happen when I
was doing the PutDataAs call wrong, but it sounds like that's not the
issue here. I wonder if its an issue with Request?
2) PNGs work on some platforms but not others; JPanel seems to be the
culprit there. Can you try on a Mac client?
3) JNLP does behave differently sometimes; I don't know why. I know
that things like loading bitmaps have to be changed for JNLP, and
there might well be bugs either in our code or the Java code.
Not a great set of answers, sorry. I'm trying right now to recreate
the PNG issue to verify that it does work on mac; we hit this for the
world clock feed. I'll repost RSN on this one.
Larry, Jason - any help here?
Cheers,
Paul
Begin forwarded message:
> From: "John Wilson" <john....@erigo.com>
> Date: May 20, 2008 11:41:20 AM PDT
> To: <lawrence.c...@nasa.gov>
> Cc: "Paul Hubbard" <hub...@sdsc.edu>, "Matt Miller" <matt....@erigo.com
> >, "John Wilson" <john....@erigo.com>
> Subject: Evaluate RDV for P-3 deployment
>
> Larry,
>
> Matt and I took a look at how RDV performs as an INDS/IWG1 data
> viewer.
> My understanding is that RDV is being considered as a data viewer tool
> for the P3B/DC8 onboard environments. In general, RDV has many nice
> display features (including excellent time zoom control, plot
> configuration options, and XY plot capability) and is packaged as an
> aesthetically pleasing, professional application. RDV could be a
> useful
> tool to examine INDS data, and its use could be a positive step
> bridging
> the gap between INDS and the greater RBNB community. A few potential
> issues were encountered, all of which I think could be overcome (Paul,
> please feel free to comment on these or other issues I raise in this
> email):
>
> 1. Problem updating multiple channels in realtime mode.
> 2. RDV does not currently support the display of PNG images.
> 3. User interface refresh problems (might occur when RDV is launched
> over the web using Java Web Start?).
>
>
> INDS setup:
> I didn't have a saved archive of P3 IWG1 data, but I did have a DC8
> IWG1
> data archive. I ran our DC8 simulator on a Mac Mini and streamed UDP
> packets to it from my laptop using rbnbPlayer.
>
>
> Execute RDV:
> Ran RDV using two methods:
> 1. From the website (http://code.google.com/p/rdv) using Java Web
> Start;
> 2. Installed as a local application.
> I ran RDV on two different platforms: my laptop (using Java 1.6) and a
> Mac Mini (not the same Mac Mini as the DC8 simulator; using Java 1.5).
> The RDV website indicates that it requires at least Java 1.5.
>
>
> Notes:
> Between Matt and I, our RDV experience has been somewhat limited.
> Matt
> used RDV quite a bit during a Creare SBIR to view video data. We have
> both played with RDV in the past as a data viewer, but it is not one
> of
> our common viewing tools.
>
> An excellent RDV feature is the dual (global/zoom) time bar control at
> the top of the interface. This allows the user to zoom into a
> region of
> data with better control than is afforded by rbnbPlot (which just
> has a
> single time control slider). RDV has many configuration options - for
> example to set a plot's labels and colors. RDV supports XY plots and
> has a very nice tabular data display with programmable threshholds.
> JPG
> video streams can be displayed. Data displays can be viewed within
> the
> RDV window as a grid, or displays can be "detached" (popped out into
> their own window). A single graph can display multiple plots. Nice
> mouse controls are supported, such as double clicking on a channel to
> display the data in a new plot or drag-and-drop a data channel onto an
> existing display to add the data to that graph.
>
> Limitations/issues:
>
> 1. Image display is limited to JPG images (ARCTAS/MSFC image products
> are in PNG format). If desired, support for PNG images could be
> investigated. It may be nice, for instance, to be able to play
> through
> satellite images for the duration of the flight, or sync the display
> of
> these images to other data channels.
>
> 2. When I first launched RDV from the web site, I had problems with
> the
> application graphics not refreshing - to the extent that the interface
> was not usable (the attached screen capture from the Mac,
> "RDV_refresh_problem.png", shows the issue - note that most of the
> controls are not being refreshed). This occurred on both the PC and
> Mac. The problem didn't seem to correlate with the number of
> channels,
> since I experienced the problem on Windows when just one or two
> channels
> were displayed. The problem seemed to come and go over time as I used
> the interface. I wonder if this problem occurs only with the web
> launch
> of the application. Later, Matt and I both launched RDV as a local
> app
> and we didn't experience this issue.
>
> 3. Doesn't support playing backward through data (although the user
> can
> manually scroll backward).
>
> 4. When multiple channels are displayed in realtime mode, data does
> not
> seem to update properly in all the graphs - only one of the channels
> is
> regularly updated, the other channels either get choppy/infrequent
> updates or don't get updated at all. The attached screen dump,
> RT_update_problem.JPG, shows an example of this issue - note that the
> Latitude plot is not being updated even though Longitude is. When RDV
> is playing through data (as opposed to RT mode), this problem does not
> occur.
>
> Best regards,
>
> John
>
Paul Hubbard
John -
Revisiting this now as we start thinking about fall meeting and such,
and wanted to ask a couple of questions:
- On the multichannel display bug, can you give me some more details?
Sample rates, RDV versions, anything that'd help replicate this. As
mentioned before, we had some very similar-sounding bugs in the past
that turned out to be a source error of mine. I've not seen this bug,
so I'd like to fix it.
- On the JNLP oddity, same questions. We *have* seen some really weird
bugs that were from different Java VM versions, and in this case I
wonder about the java webstart version too.
Thanks!
-paul
> <RT_update_problem.JPG><RDV_refresh_problem.png>
Jason P. Hanley
Sorry that I haven't commented on your evaluation of RDV, but I took
the last few weeks off. It's very helpful and I'll comment on the
other issues you brought up in other emails.
I think the PNG support was added sometime after the last release, so
you would have needed to be using the svn code to see this. The image
panel has gotten lots of work lately, with support added for zooming,
panning, and navigation. So any feedback is welcome since it hasn't
seen much use yet.
Jason
On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 11:27 AM, John Wilson <john....@erigo.com> wrote:
> Paul,
>
>
>
> Yes, thank you – my apologies on not carefully checking this out. Not sure
> exactly what I was doing when I dismissed PNG's in my earlier testing.
>
>
>
> By default, it appears that the "image.png" mime type is included in
> extensions.xml file you mentioned.
>
>
>
> Incidentally, the zoom/unzoom feature with the navigation image is a very
> cool feature!
>
>
>
> Best regards,
>
>
>
> John
>
>
>
> From: Paul Hubbard [mailto:hub...@sdsc.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 10:41 AM
> To: Freudinger, Lawrence C. (DFRC-M); rbnb...@sdsc.edu
> Cc: John Wilson; Matt Miller
> Subject: Re: Evaluate RDV for P-3 deployment
>
>
>
>
>
> Gents -
>
>
>
> In playing with RDV now, it seems pretty simple to enable PNG on Mac at
> least. Before you build it, go into the config directory and edit the
> extensions.conf image pane to look like this:
>
>
>
> <extension>
>
> <id>org.rdv.viz.image.ImageViz</id>
>
> <name>Video/Photo Data Panel</name>
>
> <mimeTypes>
>
> <mimeType>image/gif</mimeType>
>
> <mimeType>image/jpeg</mimeType>
>
> <mimeType>image/png</mimeType>
>
> </mimeTypes>
>
> </extension>
>
>
>
> That works for me, although I need to try Windows. I'm travelling and I
> can't get RDV on vmware to connect to RBNB on the host machine....
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Paul
>
>
>
> PS Attached PNG of RDV/Mac showing an PNG:
>
>
>
>
>
> On May 23, 2008, at 2:54 AM, Freudinger, Lawrence C. (DFRC-M) wrote:
>
> Gentlemen:
>
> Is it possible to take a look at fixing the three items noted by John?
> RDV will be useful on the P-3 as we fly over Canadian fires this summer.
>
>
> Best regards,
> larry
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From: John Wilson [mailto:john....@erigo.com]
>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2008 11:41 AM
>
> To: Freudinger, Lawrence C. (DFRC-M)
>
> Cc: Paul Hubbard; Matt Miller; John Wilson
>
> Subject: Evaluate RDV for P-3 deployment
>
>
>
Jason P. Hanley
For the multichannel display bug I would ask for a few more things.
When you do this with a tabular display open of the same channels, do
the channels update there? Also realize that RDV is using the monitor
method so it is possible that the server is dropping some of the data
to keep up, but you're not looking at a lot of data in the screenshot.
Also is it consistently the same channels that drop data, or is it
always only the first one working regardless of what channel it is.
Thanks,
Jason
Jason P. Hanley
resource problem. This usually happens when the JVM runs out of memory
or the CPU starts pegging. The JNLP should have the switches set to
increase the JVM memory (to ~256MB) since the default is usually too
small for any significant amount of data. What is the CPU at when you
see this?
Jason
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 12:58 PM, Paul Hubbard <hub...@sdsc.edu> wrote:
>
Matt Miller
Thank you for this info, which I think explains our puzzle...originally,
we must have been using an official RDV release and didn't see the PNG
support; then I checked out the SVN code and ran it and I did have the
PNG support.
I checked into the problem of viewing multiple channels in realtime
mode. It turns out it is an RBNB server problem for a certain type of
multi-channel RingBuffer. A RingBuffer is an internal RBNB data storage
object, with either single or multiple channels (multiplexed) per
Ringbuffer. The former type of RingBuffer has a problem where it will
not reliably deliver the most recent data from every channel in monitor
(realtime) mode. (The problematic ringbuffer occurs when a
multi-channel Source sends one channel per channelMap per Flush. This
type of ringbuffer is actually more efficient for data playback, so we
don't want to simply not support this mode). We will create an RBNB
issue on this topic.
Ideally, this issue would be solved in the RBNB Server code. (We still
need to assess the level of effort required to do this). Alternatively,
instead of monitor mode, RDV could use a "sleepy loop" request mode for
RT display (which is what rbnbPlot does).
While we are discussing RDV issues, let me throw in a "wish list" item:
it would be great if RDV could support sub-millisecond resolution in the
time scale. Within the last year we have come across this issue due to
some 50ksamps/sec data we have stored in an RBNB. The issue boils down
to RDV's use of JFreeChart; the millisecond limitation comes from
JFreeChart's use of Java Date class (which has millisecond precision)
through many of its time classes (see package org.jfree.data.time). In
December I had submitted a question to the JFree forum and only got a
response from a user who was also hoping to get this issue resolved.
You can see the posting at
http://www.jfree.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=66637#66637. Have you run
across this limitation?
Best regards,
John Wilson
Matt Miller
> -----Original Message-----
> From: rbnb-dev...@sdsc.edu [mailto:rbnb-dev...@sdsc.edu] On
Behalf Of Jason P. Hanley
> Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 2:27 PM
> To: John Wilson
> Cc: rdv-...@googlegroups.com; rbnb...@sdsc.edu
> Subject: Re: [rbnb-dev] Evaluate RDV for P-3 deployment
>
> John,
>
> Sorry that I haven't commented on your evaluation of RDV, but I took
> the last few weeks off. It's very helpful and I'll comment on the
> other issues you brought up in other emails.
>
> I think the PNG support was added sometime after the last release, so
> you would have needed to be using the svn code to see this. The image
> panel has gotten lots of work lately, with support added for zooming,
> panning, and navigation. So any feedback is welcome since it hasn't
> seen much use yet.
>
> Jason
>
> On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 11:27 AM, John Wilson <john....@erigo.com>
wrote:
> > Paul,
> >
> >
> >
> > Yes, thank you - my apologies on not carefully checking this out.