I've never really blogged about difficulties in running certain software/utilities however I am finding myself scratching my head and going in a circle on this particular one.
Maybe someone can shine a beacon of light into my dilemma.

Code Swarm

code_swarm: Organic software visualization of project repositories.

I have been recently trying to get Code Swarm working at my current co-op, because I though it would be a nice exercise and interesting to see the results of a very large Perforce depot. The Wiki at the source's repository has excellent information on getting it started for a few different repositories and digging through the comment, I found that someone had updated the parses to even parse the Perforce activity log (by running P4 command).

All is well up until that point. However after parsing and running code_swarm is where things take an unexpected turn. I am first hit by a slew of UTF8 conversion errors of my activity log (XML). I then resave the file from ASCII to UTF8 to make the errors go away.

The screen starts up, things are looking good!

Nope. It just parses the first event and then no more. I am unsure if this is because my XML file is really really large. I am suspicious of this, because I have seen videos of hopefully larger projects such as the Perforce source itself. The only reason why I consider this a possibility is because when I delete the majority of the events and cut it down to something reasonable (like 1000 events), then the video plays flawlessly.

Does anyone have any advice or have seen similar issues?

The code is open source and available at http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm.

[caption id="attachment_323" align="aligncenter" width="389" caption="Depiction of me at work because of this."][/caption]

Note: I can edit my post or comment additional info depending on whether I get any meaningful feedback (or rather any feedback at all).

I love you all platonically.

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