<div dir="ltr">On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 9:27 PM, Joachim Breitner <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mail@joachim-breitner.de" target="_blank">mail@joachim-breitner.de</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi,<br>
<br>
Am Samstag, den 15.06.2013, 18:16 +0100 schrieb Waldir Pimenta:<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> As I mentioned in my previous message, here are a few ideas/questions<br>
> that popped up as I used arbtt recently, about which I'd like your<br>
> opinions:<br>
<br>
</div>First of all, thanks for your feedback; it is very much appreciated.<br>
<br>
> 1. It would be nice to have an index page at<br>
<div class="im">> <a href="http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/" target="_blank">http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/</a> so that it would work as the<br>
> main home page for the project, instead of<br>
> <a href="http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/doc/users_guide/" target="_blank">http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/doc/users_guide/</a>. If this idea<br>
> is supported by others, I'd be willing to make such a page,<br>
> including some nice design :)<br>
<br>
</div>A proper homepage for it would be nice. At some point I planned to<br>
extend <a href="http://www.joachim-breitner.de/projects" target="_blank">http://www.joachim-breitner.de/projects</a> to have separate pages<br>
for every project, with more content, but never got around to do so. And<br>
maybe it is a good idea not to bind it too much to my personal homepage<br>
and let it live on its own.<br>
<br>
But I’d put such a homepage on a domain of its own (say,<br>
<a href="http://arbtt.nomeata.de/" target="_blank">http://arbtt.nomeata.de/</a>). If you’d enjoy creating a homepage for it,<br>
I’ll definitely put it there! Just create a new darcs repo and give me<br>
access to it, and I’ll set it up. For that purpose, you can assume that<br>
the user documentation is also accessible at<br>
<a href="http://arbtt.nomeata.de/doc/users_guide/" target="_blank">http://arbtt.nomeata.de/doc/users_guide/</a>.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div style>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?</div>
<div style><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
> 1. Some window titles aren’t decoded properly with arbtt-dump;<br>
<div class="im">> Special characters appear as escaped sequences -- for<br>
> instance, \226\128\162, (which corresponds to a bullet, •<br>
> in html), \226\132\162 (which appears at the end of the name<br>
> of skype windows) and \226\128\148 (which is the character<br>
> between the document title and the filename in the evince pdf<br>
> reader). Is this done on purpose, or could arbtt-dump output<br>
> the corresponding unicode characters directly?<br>
</div>> 2. arbtt-dump seems to use True/False for indicating which window<br>
<div class="im">> is the top one. Since the output of arbtt-dump is plain text<br>
> anyway, would it be a good idea to use a more explicit marker,<br>
> such as an Active/Inactive string? Or, if the format that the<br>
> command outputs is a Haskell data format (say, like JSON),<br>
> maybe formatting that part as a named variable then, like e.g.<br>
> { active=True }, could work for the same effect (making the<br>
> output self-explanatory).<br>
</div>> 3. Speaking of JSON, it would be nice to have an option to dump<br>
<div class="im">> it as JSON! It is already a quite similar format, and would<br>
> make parsing by other programs much more accessible (I<br>
> believe). Thoughts?<br>
</div>> 4. Could arbtt-dump have some options for filtering how many<br>
<div class="im">> entries to dump? e.g. last hour, last day, last n entries,<br>
> etc.<br>
<br>
</div>All these related to arbtt-dump, which is not meant to be a user’s tool.<br>
It main purpose is to debug and to convert the binary format to a<br>
non-binary format. I’d like to see arbtt-stats the main user tool to<br>
interact with arbtt.<br>
<br>
On the other hand, maybe I should revise this opinion. So far,<br>
arbtt-stats only reports that somehow aggregate the data; there is no<br>
way to view the raw data directly, and the name arbtt-dump really sounds<br>
like it should do that.<br>
<br>
So maybe arbtt-dump should get new options: The same sample-selecting<br>
options that arbtt-stats supports (--filter, --exclude, --only), and in<br>
addition a --format parameter that allows to switch from the „internal“<br>
format to some human-readable format or some programming-accessible<br>
format (e.g. JSON).<br></blockquote><div style><br></div><div style>Yes, all that sounds great, and would be very useful to me (see below). </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
An option to more easily select the last n samples or the samples of the<br>
last n minutes/hours/days/week/months/years would probably be handy as<br>
well.<br>
<br>
Do you have a concrete usecase in mind? I prefer to develop features<br>
when there is a need for it, rather than adding features that are only<br>
potentially useful (and otherwise just add bloat).<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div style>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:</div>
<div style><font face="courier new, monospace">YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm [program-name] "Top window title"</font></div><div style>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).</div>
<div style><br></div><div style>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: <a href="http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/">http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/</a>). 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 :)</div>
<div style><br></div><div style>Waldir</div></div></div></div>