2004-09-08

Tale of a graph

The tale of the graph started like any other: I had some data, and I need it to be plotted, nicely. The data in question is the scalability resport for emma's RSA implementation. One would naturally fall into thinking it would be piece of pie getting it to work... but alas, it was not so. Neither open office nor appleworks would plot this to my satisfaction, and I could not find another suitable tool. In desperation I turned to freshmeat, and behold! ploticus was brought forth to stand trial. Scanning through the concise documentation, the belief this was the one took hold.

After constructing a commandline as mighty as any I have ever constructed, I invoked it through the glory that is bash:
ploticus -prefab lines x=1 y=2 y2=3 data=rsa-scale.txt 

header -png title="RSA implementation scalability"
titledet="align=center" autow=yes
xlbl="Input size (characters)" ylbl="Time taken (ms)"
ygrid=yes name="Time for encryption"
name2="Time for decryption" ylbldet="adjust=-0.1,0"
-pagesize 20,20


In the wake of this spell, a graph sprung forth, and my eyes beheld such beauty the monitored sung in its percuilar high pitched whine (or maybe thats just the high freq filtering caps dying...). I give unto the world, the graph.

Thank god for open source software :)

Cheers,
Steve