Binvis.io – Visual Analysis of Binary Files | Hacker News Reader

Binvis.io – Visual Analysis of Binary Files

binvis.io

78 pointsnikolay9 comments

This is using a Hilbert curves to transform a single dimension into a two-dimensional space, isn't it?

(As demonstrated by: https://xkcd.com/195/)

Hilbert curves preserve locality --- points that are close to each other on the curve are close to each other on the map. The human brain has lots of hardware acceleration for dealing with space and geography, so this is a really good way of visualising single-dimensional quantities in an intuitive way. I've always thought there were really cool things you could do with this technique.

On the downside, if you want more information than "these two things are spatially close to one another", the Hilbert curve makes it difficult. Unless you have a map of the curve in your head, could you tell where in the file something in (say) the upper-right quadrant is?

If folks are interested in Hilbert curve visualizations applied to live memory, this is something I implemented in PANDA a couple years ago and demoed at RECON:

https://youtu.be/YGVnpWXtlF4?t=2919

My conclusion was that I had no idea how I'd actually use such a thing, but it sure is pretty to watch values in memory changing on the Hilbert curve!

More info here http://corte.si/posts/visualisation/binvis/index.html

Wonder how they figure out the alignment size.

Reminds me of my favourite piece of vaporware: cantor.dust

https://sites.google.com/site/xxcantorxdustxx/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8--cXwuuFQ

You may want to use capitalization to make it clear if you intend it to read BinVis, or bInvis. At first glance, I wasn't sure why you would use "Invis" to label a visualization tool.

I edited it to the original 'binvis.io' as intended by the author, but some moderator changed it back.

Couldn't find the reference but I have a fuzzy recollection of a discussion explaining that the first letter is always capitalized.

Yes, but they capitalize only on submission - when you edit, you can override it.

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