Some feedback

[Waldir Pimenta]

On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 9:08 PM, Joachim Breitner
<mail at joachim-breitner.de>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Am Sonntag, den 16.06.2013, 17:49 +0100 schrieb Waldir Pimenta:
>
>
> > 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)?
>
> Sadly, no. There is http://sm.nomeata.de/ which is the web-version of
> one of my programs, so quite different, all others have just blog posts.
>

Sorry, I didn't phrase it well. I meant if you know of any software project
page (yours or not) that you particularly like and from which we could
borrow some ideas :)


> > 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).
>
> That sounds a lot like
>         arbtt-stats --intervals=Program: --filter '$sampleage <= 1:00'
> with
>         -- Simple rule that just tags the current program
>         tag Program:$current.program,
> in categorize.cfg:
>
> $ arbtt-stats --intervals=Program: --filter '$sampleage <= 1:00'



(snip)


> Is that not sufficient for your use case?
>

Almost. I adapted that slightly to use window titles rather than just the
program name. It would be nice if the output didn't have underscores, but
apart from that it works well! Thanks :)


> > 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 :)
>
> Of course graphs were on my mind as well, but never got around to
> implement them. Also capturing URLs (or at least domain names) would be
> nice; are there no firefox plugins that set an X property with the URL?
>

No idea. But I wasn't suggesting that as a feature for arbtt, just pointing
out a potential limitation if arbtt were to be used as a backbone to a
RescueTime-like app.


> I like to know that the background program uses minimal resources;
> appending a few bytes to a file is good there. If the possibilities you
> talk about are about other people writing code to use the data, then a
> nicer dumping format can serve the same purpose.


> As more more analysis in arbtt-stats (or arbtt-graph or whatever): There
> are endless possibilities, and so little time :-). I’d prefer to
> implement stuff with a concrete usecase, preferably also with a little
> outline (e.g. a sketch of an graph or of intended output) and some
> discussion if it is not possibly covered by exiting features, or can
> maybe simplified or generalized.
>

Responding to both paragraphs above: Yes, I meant the (imho) improvements
to both the binary storage and the text-based dumping format as ways to
enable others to build cool stuff on top of arbtt. Lots of people are
comfortable with other programming languages and this would expand the
arbtt ecosystem beyond Haskell-proficient programmers :) I think arbtt can
certainly be enhanced, but I don't feel it really needs many more features
on its own. I like the way it does a few things very well (capturing the
data and storing it efficiently is what I personally appreciate the most),
and making it more interoperable with other tools would, I believe, greatly
expand its potential (besides bringing it even closer to the Unix
philosophy ideal ;) )

Cheers,
Waldir
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