Post #2098605
2026-03-27 17:45 UTC
So, xv had a special "polling" mode that you could use to make it continuously watch a file. If you were viewing the file and the file changed, then xv would update the displayed image.
This was the secret sauce for making real-time dashboards.
You'd have your physics code dump some kind of output file every so often. Then, you'd stick pgplot or some other tool on a crontab to make an image. Have xv poll the output file.
It worked great and involved almost no coding. 14/n?
Replies (1)
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@dabeaz@mastodon.social 2026-03-27 17:50
It was generally understood that no workstation would ever be idle in the group--someone was always solving differential equations somewhere. Usually for tens to hundreds of hours at a time. So, when I say you'd sometimes see someone running 20 copies of xv, they were often running it as a dashboard. Spin up your physics code on 20 machines and then spin up 20 copies of xv to monitor progress. It was pretty hacked together, but it worked decently well. 15/n?