pstax - GUI with a Perl Centre

At OSDC^* in Melbourne last week, I unveiled 'pstax' – a GUI tool for building machines to process data.

The annotated slides from my lightning talk (follow the link above) use screenshots to give a flavour of what pstax does. There's also a movie showing pstax in action (beware, the movie probably doesn't work on Windows). Of course the code is also available for download at that link too.

Help wanted

Name this project. The name 'pstax' was only ever meant to be a working title. It probably conflicts with a commercial product too. Please help by suggesting a name, ideally related to the theme of gears, machines, stacks or pipelines. Once I have a project name, I can get set up on SourceForge with CVS, a mailing list and a project homepage.

Fix the video. I made the video using xvidcap capturing at 4fps and then added the audio track with ffmpeg. I've tried converting to AVI and MOV and they all play under Mplayer (no surprise, it uses ffmpeg) but nothing works under Windows. If you can convert it to a form that works on Windows then please let me know.

* OSDC - the Open Source Developers Conference

Comment on pstax - GUI with a Perl Centre

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Re: pstax - GUI with a Perl Centre by castaway (Parson) on Dec 07, 2004 at 08:33 UTC
That looks kinda fun.. Quick Programming for umm.. Dummies? (or something) It really reminds me of the programming kit delivered with the Lego Mindstorms package, have you seen it? (It's also building blocks - start motor, stop motor, etc) I assume that's what its for, anyway - I don't quite see how a name relating to gears and machines etc would fit though. C.	[reply]
Re^2: pstax - GUI with a Perl Centre by grantm (Parson) on Dec 07, 2004 at 08:46 UTC
I don't quite see how a name relating to gears and machines etc would fit though Other suggestions are welcome too :-)	[reply]
Re: pstax - GUI with a Perl Centre by lwicks (Friar) on Dec 07, 2004 at 11:39 UTC
Looks really good, especially as an easy way to introduce programming & Perl in an educational context. I could imagine an expanded version being popular to introduce Perl and program structure to highschool age students. (perhaps this is the goal of your efforts?) Kia Kaha, Kia Toa, Kia Manawanui! Be Strong, Be Brave, Be perservering!	[reply]
Re: pstax - GUI with a Perl Centre by simonm (Vicar) on Dec 07, 2004 at 21:36 UTC
Nice work! As the application name, I'd suggest "Gearbox"; a saved collection of gears could be called a gearchain. A quick Googling failed to turn up any obvious conflicts with proprietary tradenames; the "gearbox programming" references are almost all about cars. Unfortunately SourceForge does already have a project named gearbox -- a Java visual debugger. More features for the vapor-ware list: add support for gears with multiple inputs -- like one that takes two incoming files and returns either all the lines, or only those that appear in A but not B, etc, etc -- or multiple outputs -- so that you can tee some intermediate version out to a WriteFile gear and also run it through further processing. Consider adding a property to some or all gears that cause them to be interactively re-configured each time the gearchain is run; for example you could build a gearchain that performed a type of log file analysis, and every time you clicked "run" it would ask you which file to read from. For what it's worth, the video also doesn't work on Mac OS X's Quicktime player, nor do the slides render on most of the Mac browsers I tried: OmniWeb 4.2, Safari 1.0, or MS IE 5.2; luckily the Mozilla browsers did the trick.	[reply]
Re: pstax - GUI with a Perl Centre by zentara (Cardinal) on Dec 08, 2004 at 13:37 UTC
I've tried converting to AVI and MOV and they all play under Mplayer (no surprise, it uses ffmpeg) but nothing works under Windows. If you can convert it to a form that works on Windows then please let me know. Maybe this link will help? I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh	[reply]
Re: pstax - GUI with a Perl Centre by jplindstrom (Monsignor) on Dec 08, 2004 at 19:15 UTC
Refer your Windows friends to VLC. /J	[reply]
Re: pstax - GUI with a Perl Centre by McMahon (Chaplain) on Dec 07, 2004 at 15:27 UTC
Nifty. I sent the link on to the agile-testing mail list. It seems to me that this framework could easily be part of a testing environment.	[reply]