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Comment by brendangregg | Hacker News Reader

binvis.io is pretty great!

So I was more interested in core dumps, which gets tricky since they can be 10s of Gbytes in size. Probably the most useful thing I figured out was this palette type:

  x86		grayscale with some (9) color indicators:
    green = common english chars: 'e', 't', 'a'
    red = common x86 instructions: movl, call, testl
    blue = binary values: 0x01, 0x02, 0x03

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Building more understanding of file formats into binvis is perpetually on my todo list. This would let you interpret different segments of files differently, and correctly interpret instructions and other higher-level structures. It would also help with things like entropy calculation over sliding windows (where you don't want this to span file segments). There are so many interesting avenues to explore here.

While I'm thinking about it, you're of course quite right that spotting periodic patterns in a Hilbert curve layout is really hard. However, I've found that being able to spot them in a scanning layout is highly dependent on your column width matching/resonating with the period of the pattern you're looking for. Another thing on my todo list is to combine Hilbert layouts with Fourier transforms. There's a very suggestive paper on this that I'd love to explore:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.03817.pdf

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