Hello and questions..

[Adrian Wilkins]

Hi there.

Having just spent a day in Timesheet Hell I have sworn to automate the 
process as much as possible.

I conceived of something that had three stages

1. Record information about what I was doing
2. Process the log to distil values for each project / task
3. Automatically upload the digests to our time-tracking system
   * We use Redmine

I even got so far as to test some code to do stage 1 on Windows.... but 
lo and behold, arbtt would seem to do stages 1 and 2 already - on both 
the platforms I use. Hooray! This underscores just why I love the Free 
Software community.

So ; questions (and apologies if they are questions that have already 
been asked)

* Can arbtt aggregate mutliple event logs?

The reason I ask is that my typical working day is conducted across two 
machines - my work-issued Windows laptop, and my personal Linux 
installation. The vast bulk of the work takes place on the Linux 
machine, so I imagine it would be a fair representation of my work time 
in the main, but I do sometimes have to switch to the Windows machine 
(for emails, for example).

* Can arbtt sample mouse position?

I switch between the machines via two methods ; one is by using remote 
desktop, the other by Synergy (a network mouse/keyboard sharing program) 
; I can imagine there might be a place for logging the mouse position at 
time of sampling for this reason - ordinarily it would be useless 
information but when using Synergy you could write rules based on 
whether the mouse was actually on the screen of the machine that is 
logging. (can already write rules to ignore all events collected while 
using a remote desktop, or allocate the time out depending on the 
machine being connected to).

* Can arbtt aggregate other sources of events?

I guess this is a corollary to the above - if, for example, someone were 
to write something that rummaged through your Outlook calendar and 
produced appropriate TimeLogEntry objects for the calendar event ; if 
I'm in a meeting, I want to book all the time in that meeting to the 
instigator of that meeting (regardless of what I'm actually doing IN the 
meeting).