10 Years in one Project

For about ten years now I am the CTO at WorldLingo. During those years I have seen quite a few people join and leaving us eventually. Below is a small snapshot of how time has passed. Obviously I am quite proud to be somewhat the rock in the sea.

If you like to know how the video was created, then read on.

I download the source of the code_swarm project following the description, i.e. I used

svn checkout http://codeswarm.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ codeswarm-read-only
cd codeswarm-read-only
ant all

to get the code and then ran ant all in its root directory:

C:\CODESW~1>ant all
Buildfile: build.xml

init:
     [echo] Running INIT

build:
     [echo] Running BUILD
    [mkdir] Created dir: C:\CODESW~1\build
    [javac] Compiling 18 source files to C:\CODESW~1\build
     [copy] Copying 1 file to C:\CODESW~1\build

jar:
     [echo] Running JAR
    [mkdir] Created dir: C:\CODESW~1\dist
      [jar] Building jar: C:\CODESW~1\dist\code_swarm.jar

all:
     [echo] Building ALL

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 6 seconds

Note that this is on my Windows machine. After the build you will have to edit the config file to have your settings and regular expressions match your project. I really took the supplied sample config file, copied it and modified these lines:

# This is a sample configuration file for code_swarm

...

# Input file
InputFile=data/wl-repevents.xml

...

# Project time per frame
#MillisecondsPerFrame=51600000

...

# Optional Method instead of MillisecondsPerFrame
FramesPerDay=2

...

ColorAssign1="wlsystem",".*wlsystem.*", 0,0,255, 0,0,255
ColorAssign2="www",".*www.*", 0,255,0, 0,255,0
ColorAssign3="docs",".*docs.*", 102,0,255, 102,0,255
ColorAssign4="serverconfig",".*serverconf.*", 255,0,0, 255,0,0

# Save each frame to an image?
TakeSnapshots=true

...

DrawNamesHalos=true

...

This is just adjusting the labels and turning on the snap shots to be able to create a video at the end. I found a tutorial that explained how to set this up.

What did not work for me is getting mencoder to work. I downloaded the MPlayer Windows installer from its official site and although it is meant to have mencoder included it does not. Or I am blind.

So, I simply ran

mkdir frames
runrepositoryfetch.bat data\wl.config

to fetch the history of our repository spanning about 10 years - going from Visual SourceSafe, to CVS and currently running on Subversion. One further problem was that the output file of the above script was not named as I had previously specified in the config file, so I had to rename it like so:

cd data
ren realtime_sample1157501935.xml wl-repevents.xml

After that I was able to use run.bat data\wl.config to see the full movie in real time.

With the snap shots created but me not willing to further dig into the absence of mencoder I fired up my trusted MacBookPro and used Quicktime to create the movie from an image sequence.

When Quicktime did its magic I saved the .mov file and used VisualHub to convert it to a proper video format to upload to Vimeo. And that was it really.