Listing samples which are not matched by any tags?

[Gwern Branwen]

On Sat, Jul 5, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Joachim Breitner
<mail at joachim-breitner.de> wrote
> Have you had a look at the features in 0.8? I believe they (partly)
> address the issue:
>
>  * arbtt-stats can print the actual samples selected, with
>    --dump-samples.
>  (http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/doc/users_guide/release-notes.html)

No, I didn't even know you had added that. (I assumed you had dropped
the issue back in November.)

> What if you have a tag "current-program" that will always be present?
> With such a tag, the feature you describe is useless. I guess you mean
> “show me the data from samples that are not categorized into one of
> these tags:....”. But that is already possible:
>
> $ arbtt-stats --dump-samples --filter '$sampleage < 1:00' -x Web -x Project: -x ...

I expected you to object that and I was going to point out that it
could easily be solved on the UX level by letting the user specify
either whitelist or blacklists of tags (either tags to not consider as
a match or tags to exclude). But I see that's how you solved the
problem anyway.

Trying that out now, it seems to work! If I throw in an "| fgrep
'(*)'" to look at the active window only, it looks even better.

I can see a lot of programs I've failed to classify (eg when Google
Reader shut down, I switched to a local RSS reader, Liferea, but
forgot to add it to arbtt), and I've spotted a few instances where my
rule didn't actually work. (eg I had been matching the program
'FBReader' for tagging time spent reading ebooks, but now that I look
at the samples, it seems the program is actually 'fbreader' and it's
the *title* which has 'FBReader' in it. I don't know if FBReader
changed its X properties at some point or if I simply confused program
with title when I was looking at it in `xprop`, but either way, it's
not working.)

This seems like a critical tool for debugging one's arbtt rules and
expanding them. Has a discussion of this been added to the manual? I
only see a mention that the option exists in `docs/arbtt.xml`.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net