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Visual Analysis of Binary Files

binvis.io

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11–20 of 29 posts

Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files

#11

Post by andai »

dejobaan wrote: post #2

Pretty neat. It tangentially reminds me of when we used to be able to hear HDDs clatter away, or waaaaay back when we used be able to hear EM interference from whatever was going on in a computer. There was an episode of Cowboy Bebop, where a mechanic held a wrench against an engine cowling to see how much it vibrated (likely a real thing people do with real engines?) and, of course, the computer sounds in the Enterp…

I forget where I read this (maybe PG's blog?) but I read some early 2000s startup had some kind of mechanical device that responded to website visitors, so everyone in the office could hear the traffic in realtime.

I also heard stories of professors who would know a program had a bug based on the sounds the computer was making. (Back when they were slightly slower!)

Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files

#12

Post by andai »

cowthulhu wrote: post #7

Does the uniformity indicate that the files are space-inefficient, and would benefit from compression?

Binvis has different color modes. One of them shows entropy. Compressed or encrypted data shows as very bright in the entropy mode, and repetitive data as dark.

Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files

#13

Post by andai »

Jare wrote: post #5
bflesch wrote: post #3

It looks neat but I have no idea how the clustering works or why uniform colors are assigned to large areas, e.g. the color blue in the pdf example.

open one and inspect the two ways to view it, one is horizontal scan, the other is a peano curve which leads to natural square-ish areas.

Interesting I thought it was a hilbert curve? (I don't know much about either of those though.)

Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files

#17

Post by poslathian »

andai wrote: post #11
dejobaan wrote: post #2

Pretty neat. It tangentially reminds me of when we used to be able to hear HDDs clatter away, or waaaaay back when we used be able to hear EM interference from whatever was going on in a computer. There was an episode of Cowboy Bebop, where a mechanic held a wrench against an engine cowling to see how much it vibrated (likely a real thing people do with real engines?) and, of course, the computer sounds in the Enterp…

I forget where I read this (maybe PG's blog?) but I read some early 2000s startup had some kind of mechanical device that responded to website visitors, so everyone in the office could hear the traffic in realtime. I also heard stories of professors who would know a program had a bug based on the sounds the computer was making. (Back when they were slightly slower!)

I’ve heard this about mechanical electronic signage used for team dashboards 30-40 years ago.

You’d sit in the office with your back to it and the clicky clacky sounds would be going every so often when the content updated. but people would know the specific clicky clacky sound that required them to turn around and read the sign based on their job function.

I’ve also heard of day traders mapping stock tickers or other data into sound and having headphones on all day with it

Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files

#20

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

dejobaan wrote: post #2

Pretty neat. It tangentially reminds me of when we used to be able to hear HDDs clatter away, or waaaaay back when we used be able to hear EM interference from whatever was going on in a computer. There was an episode of Cowboy Bebop, where a mechanic held a wrench against an engine cowling to see how much it vibrated (likely a real thing people do with real engines?) and, of course, the computer sounds in the Enterp…

I still have a computer that produces slightly different noise (coil whine?) depending what it's doing. Fascinating behavior.
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