dimitris kalamaras

math, social network analysis, web dev, free software…

Tag: SNA

SocNetV 0.51: changes, new logo, and RPM packages

Last Friday, I released version 0.50 of Social Networks Visualiser (SocNetV) and version 0.51 followed already (yesterday), fixing an important (and yet embarrassing) bug in Graph::createDistanceMatrix() method.

IMHO, this new version is the first really usable version of this little application. With it you can draw mathematical graphs (social networks, to be precise, since the focus is more on Social Network Analysis than on Graph Theory), by pointing and clicking, load existing networks of most popular formats (Pajek, GraphML, GraphViz, UCINET, etc), create random networks (Small Worlds, Erdos-Renyi, Ring Lattices, etc), compute actor centralities (Betweeness, Closeness, Graph, etc) and clustering coefficients, select a different network layout based on these centralities (or Spring-Embedder models), and finally export your work to PDF, BMP or PNG file formats, without crashes (unlike earlier releases). A complete workflow, that is!

I am really proud of this progress (if not amazed) since I didn’t expect it to come this far 5 winters ago when I was playing with Qt toolkit while I was on army service in Evros 🙂 Yet, this application has really evolved in my spare time, and seems to be useful to some people (mostly academia).

To celebrate this new release, I prepared RPMs for both Fedora 10 and openSUSE 11.1 distros. Serafeim Zanikolas maintains already an older .deb package in Debian ‘experimental’ (and soon in Sid), while Markos Chandras just added SocNetV to qting-edge overlay, which also houses all new Qt4 and KDE4 software. Ubuntu users may add my Launchpad PPA (older version) to their repos or opt to compile from source (it’s really easy!). Meanwhile, 0.51 is the first version for which we provide a Windows zipped archive with executables (although I cant say I really tested it :P)…Oh, and we now have a much more polished and ad hoc logo (handmade with Gimp/Inkscape of course):

Nice, isn’t it? 😛

SocNetV 0.49 & Ubuntu packaging

Found some time today to finish another SocNetV release — after three months of development, SocNetV 0.49 sports a redesigned dock with tabs (statistics, edit, layout), new supported social network formats, weight numbers on edges and, as usual A LOT of bug fixes :P… But, the funkier feature of this release is that I finally managed to build decent SocNetV packages for Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. Thanks to Canonical’s Launchpad, my very own PPA (Personal Package Archive) can be used as a third-party repository in your Ubuntu installation. All you have to do is to add these two lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/dimitris-kalamaras/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/dimitris-kalamaras/ubuntu intrepid main

Then, update your package list and install SocNetV with this single-line:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install socnetv

To run it, just go to Applications > Education > SocNetV,  et voila!

SocNetV 0.49 in Ubuntu 8.10

SocNetV 0.49 in Ubuntu 8.10

Unfortunately, it seems I can’t figure out what is going on with my older RPM .spec file, although I did try some mods, which is why the openSUSE Build Service refuses to build even plain openSUSE 11.1 packages. The funny thing is that the same .spec file builds the RPM ok in my local openSUSE install… And, unfortunately I have no more time to spend on it. 🙁

New day – new SocNetV release…

Four months after 0.44, a new release of Social Networks Visualiser is ready. Version 0.45 fixes a thousand (short of…) bugs, and adds new features, such as initial support for GraphML, four new node shapes and new widgets for network rotation and zooming. My plan is to have GraphML as the default format. At the moment, only loading is supported, though 🙁

Version 0.45 brings a more polished GUI with new icons and a new layout for the left dock.

SocNetV 0.45 screenshot

Also, I finally managed to update the documentation and make it look nice. You can take yourself a look at
http://socnetv.sourceforge.net/docs/manual.html

The same documentation is available both online and locally, when running SocNetV. HtmlViewer class renders the manual with the help of QtWebKit, so the latter is a new dependancy. In openSUSE you need libQtWebKit-devel whereas in Debian the package is libqt4-webkit.

Finally, Serafeim Zanikolas made a package of SocNetV 0.44 for Debian Experimental and made a couple of bug reports/fixes. Most of them have been fixed in version 0.45.

I plan to stick with version 0.45 for a while, waiting for Qt 4.5. If the developers are right (they talk about speed-ups of up to 40 times faster), QGraphicsView will be much impoved in Qt 4.5.
SocNetV needs that.

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