Some feedback

[Waldir Pimenta]

On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 9:27 PM, Joachim Breitner
<mail at joachim-breitner.de>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Am Samstag, den 15.06.2013, 18:16 +0100 schrieb Waldir Pimenta:
>
> > As I mentioned in my previous message, here are a few ideas/questions
> > that popped up as I used arbtt recently, about which I'd like your
> > opinions:
>
> First of all, thanks for your feedback; it is very much appreciated.
>
> >      1. It would be nice to have an index page at
> >         http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/ so that it would work as the
> >         main home page for the project, instead of
> >         http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/doc/users_guide/. If this idea
> >         is supported by others, I'd be willing to make such a page,
> >         including some nice design :)
>
> A proper homepage for it would be nice. At some point I planned to
> extend http://www.joachim-breitner.de/projects to have separate pages
> for every project, with more content, but never got around to do so. And
> maybe it is a good idea not to bind it too much to my personal homepage
> and let it live on its own.
>
> But I’d put such a homepage on a domain of its own (say,
> http://arbtt.nomeata.de/). If you’d enjoy creating a homepage for it,
> I’ll definitely put it there! Just create a new darcs repo and give me
> access to it, and I’ll set it up. For that purpose, you can assume that
> the user documentation is also accessible at
> http://arbtt.nomeata.de/doc/users_guide/.
>

Sure, two questions about that: First, do you have any software project
page which you think works well and we could emulate (not necessarily in
appearance, but in content and organization)? Second, I was actually
thinking of a single page, i.e. an index.html in the current repo, nothing
too fancy. The url could change (I have no strong opinions on that), but
regarding the content, I don't see the need for anything more elaborated
than a simple page, maybe with some tabs for different sections but that's
all. Would you prefer an actual full-fledged website instead? And if so,
what would be included in it?


> >      1. Some window titles aren’t decoded properly with arbtt-dump;
> >         Special characters appear as escaped sequences -- for
> >         instance, \226\128\162, (which corresponds to a bullet, •
> >         in html), \226\132\162 (which appears at the end of the name
> >         of skype windows) and \226\128\148 (which is the character
> >         between the document title and the filename in the evince pdf
> >         reader). Is this done on purpose, or could arbtt-dump output
> >         the corresponding unicode characters directly?
> >      2. arbtt-dump seems to use True/False for indicating which window
> >         is the top one. Since the output of arbtt-dump is plain text
> >         anyway, would it be a good idea to use a more explicit marker,
> >         such as an Active/Inactive string? Or, if the format that the
> >         command outputs is a Haskell data format (say, like JSON),
> >         maybe formatting that part as a named variable then, like e.g.
> >         { active=True }, could work for the same effect (making the
> >         output self-explanatory).
> >      3. Speaking of JSON, it would be nice to have an option to dump
> >         it as JSON! It is already a quite similar format, and would
> >         make parsing by other programs much more accessible (I
> >         believe). Thoughts?
> >      4. Could arbtt-dump have some options for filtering how many
> >         entries to dump? e.g. last hour, last day, last n entries,
> >         etc.
>
> All these related to arbtt-dump, which is not meant to be a user’s tool.
> It main purpose is to debug and to convert the binary format to a
> non-binary format. I’d like to see arbtt-stats the main user tool to
> interact with arbtt.
>
> On the other hand, maybe I should revise this opinion. So far,
> arbtt-stats only reports that somehow aggregate the data; there is no
> way to view the raw data directly, and the name arbtt-dump really sounds
> like it should do that.
>
> So maybe arbtt-dump should get new options: The same sample-selecting
> options that arbtt-stats supports (--filter, --exclude, --only), and in
> addition a --format parameter that allows to switch from the „internal“
> format to some human-readable format or some programming-accessible
> format (e.g. JSON).
>

Yes, all that sounds great, and would be very useful to me (see below).

>
> An option to more easily select the last n samples or the samples of the
> last n minutes/hours/days/week/months/years would probably be handy as
> well.
>
> Do you have a concrete usecase in mind? I prefer to develop features
> when there is a need for it, rather than adding features that are only
> potentially useful (and otherwise just add bloat).
>

Yes, I actually wrote little shell aliases called arbtt-log-hour,
arbtt-log-day, etc., which get arbtt-dump's output and apply some sed
commands to clean it up for consumption, resulting in entries in the format:
YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm  [program-name]  "Top window title"
This basically gives me a readable log of which windows were the top ones
at every minute for the past, say, hour. I use this to quickly summarize my
recent activities in my personal log. I would love if arbtt would provide
this functionality out of the box, so I wouldn't have to get the full
arbtt-dump output and then remove entries I don't need (which is obviously
slow). Additionally, it would be great to have it merge entries where the
top window remains the same through a continuous set of samples (or the
list of windows doesn't change, if one chooses to view also non-top
windows).

This sort of access would also make it possible to use arbtt to generate
personal statistics and visualizations (Stephen Wolfram has done some
interesting stuff in this vein, see here:
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/).
An open-source program similar to RescueTime would also be possible (to
some degree - actual urls aren't captured by arbtt and that's important
data since a large part of today's digital activity occurs online). By the
way, have you ever thought of using, say, sqlite instead of a
Haskell-specific (I assume) binary format? I think that would open up the
door to even more possibilities :)

Waldir
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