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Comment by cortesi | Hacker News Reader

It looks like we've traveled a similar path. The precursor to binvis is scurve, a (slow, dodgy) command-line tool to do basically what dump2png does:

https://github.com/cortesi/scurve

I have a blazing fast command-line version of binvis in Rust that I plan to release in the next month or so. I really need make some time to turn back to this.

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Wow I haven't seen your name in years, I had forgotten! I just want to thank you for having an incredible blog and visualization tools. sortvis.org was frequently a resource I used to learn sorting and then later as a tutor I shared it with other students to help them learn. I've shared sortvis and the posts you did on hilbert curves with young curious family members to inspire them, and it always did! So thank you!

And Brendans blog has been more recently inspiring and educational, seeing you guys chatting on HN is too cool. Thank you both for the awesome and freely accessible material.

My pleasure! Sortvis is down at the moment, but will be back up soon. I've been swallowed up in other projects, but I have a perpetual new year's resolution to write more blog posts. Keep an eye out in the next few months. :)

binvis.io is pretty great!

So I was more interested in core dumps, which gets tricky since they can be 10s of Gbytes in size. Probably the most useful thing I figured out was this palette type:

  x86		grayscale with some (9) color indicators:
    green = common english chars: 'e', 't', 'a'
    red = common x86 instructions: movl, call, testl
    blue = binary values: 0x01, 0x02, 0x03

Building more understanding of file formats into binvis is perpetually on my todo list. This would let you interpret different segments of files differently, and correctly interpret instructions and other higher-level structures. It would also help with things like entropy calculation over sliding windows (where you don't want this to span file segments). There are so many interesting avenues to explore here.

While I'm thinking about it, you're of course quite right that spotting periodic patterns in a Hilbert curve layout is really hard. However, I've found that being able to spot them in a scanning layout is highly dependent on your column width matching/resonating with the period of the pattern you're looking for. Another thing on my todo list is to combine Hilbert layouts with Fourier transforms. There's a very suggestive paper on this that I'd love to explore:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.03817.pdf

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