Chuck Vose's dashboard

Man, you guys have complicated needs. I would be happy with a provisional fix that allows me to track based on whether a file ends in .rb. Hell, I'm surprised that you guys can even know that.

So lets get some provisional stuff in and see how it goes over. Something simple like tracking by file extension would be a start and we can work our way up to regexs, metadata, etc.

Seems like most people can track based on filename or directory name if I'm reading the thread correctly?

Can we get something like a regex engine for this? We should be able to track activity based on file path, page title, file type, time of day, etc. Frankly, everything you can think of I would like to regex on.
I would like to know how much time I spend during the period of 10-3pm on processes that have PIDs less than 1024.
I would like to know how much time I work on files that end in .css and live in a certain client's folder.
I would like to know how much time I spend on a particular subdomain or domain folder as well as how much time I spend on the entire domain.

You have all this info but no tools for us to use this data. If you let us play we'll do your work for you but you have to give us the tools or the access to do so.

Aren't developers wonderful? Simultaneously pushing you in new directions and wanting to do work for you because we realize that you will never have the same values as us. We have to make our own creation to truly be happy.

Are you caching all the dots for today or for all time. If you're caching for all time isn't that against the purpose of caching? I can tell you that I never actually scroll back in time (partly because for a while I didn't know how) so I would wager that 99% of people don't look at anything other than the dots that are currently on the screen.

I propose three things:
1) Don't cache the things we aren't going to use. Certainly don't cache multiple days worth of data.
2) Don't cache activity dots that are not long dots or cache less info. I never look at the little dots because they aren't useful to me and I can't consistently get my mouse on them because they're so tiny. I also don't care but someone else might.
3) Change your caching format or use a database instead of memory. Using BDB or SQLite shouldn't slow things at all, we should be able to query a million rows in under 300ms (the fastest the human mind can process new information and visual queues).

Optional 4th) Stop using the dots. Almost nobody understands them and they're sucking up a lot of memory for no reason.

I don't think the dots help the app at all. The app is largely a statistical tool so giving access to the raw data isn't actually that helpful except in the rare instance. So it's important that we be able to access the raw data somehow, but the average user and most power users are going to be happy with a pretty picture of some sort instead of all the dots.

Spend more effort making the stats tools good and reduce the memory usage you'll find a lot of happy users.

I see the purpose but like Mr. Rister I'm not sure that it's the best way since it also fails the principle of least surprise. When I look at that graph I'm only interested in two things, long bouts of activity on one webpage and gaps in time.

I think it would be neat to have a graph that looks like a sound wave (the symmetric spikey graphs you see in audio editors) which shows activity or cpu time or something then if there are some recognized long bouts have them floating around on top of the sound wave graph.

Just think it would be cool to have it look like an audio editor with 30 tracks on it. Some really tiny with little peaks of activity, some with constant noise.

I think me web browser is a heavy metal rockstar. But iTerm is piquant, small but very active.