gomesr/timetracker
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Timetracker v0.1
----------------
A simple python utility that can be used to track what you're doing on your
computer at any moment. It can currrently track your activities based on rules
that you have defined in your configuration file and uses the hamster time tracker
tool to track your activity along with the description and tags associated with
each activity.
Sometimes you may leave your desk to take care of something such as helping a
colleague or attending a meeting and don't want timetracker to track the inactivity
of your machine. In this situation you can manually set your activity with the
hamster-applet to whatever activity name you'd like and make sure to include the
tag #ttstop to make sure that timetracker won't update your tracker until you've
stopped this activity yourself. This means that even if your desktop becomes
inactive the tracker that is currently in use will continue to track that same
manually inserted activity.
Requirements
------------
* Python 2.6+
On Ubuntu: apt-get install python2.6 python-configobj
* hamster-applet latest build from master branch at
http://projecthamster.wordpress.com/building-and-running/
Installing hamster:
1. git clone git://git.gnome.org/hamster-applet
2. cd hamster-applet
3. ./waf configure build --prefix=/usr
4. sudo ./waf install
Supported Environments
----------------------
Currently both KDE and Gnome desktops are supported but the tracking tool is the
same hamster time tracking application. On Gnome you can add the hamster-applet
to one of your panels but on KDE you'll have to startup the application
"/usr/lib/hamster-applet/hamster-applet -w" background and then you can put that
window on your desktop and remove the borders and putting it in one of the
desktop corners so you can check on it. You don't need to have the applet
running for the timetracker to work correctly because it will still record
all of your activites to the hamster-service and you can check your statistics
by issuing "hamster-time-tracker" on the command line.
Installation
------------
1. ./waf configure
1. ./waf build
1. sudo ./waf install
You'll now have timetracker installed correctly on your system and you should
be able to execute the command "timetracker" on your command line.
Execution
---------
After checking out the tool it can easily be executed directly from the src
directory. Before you execute you should copy the template configuration file
from timetracker.conf.template to ~/.timetracker.conf. Then you can execute
and daemonize the timetracker utility by simply executing:
timetracker.py -d
A simple way to make sure your timertracker utility never stops running is to
use the ps-watcher application to monitor and make sure it is always running.
More information on the ps-watcher application can be found here:
* http://ps-watcher.sourceforge.net/
A sample configuration entry for the timetracker application would be:
[timetracker]
occurs = none
action = timetracker.py -d
Configuration
-------------
The configuration file for the timetracker utility is located at
~/.timetracker.conf and has a few different options that you can set. The first
section is the "main" section which houses the configuration settings for the
currently used tracker and update interval. It also houses the exact location of
the output and error logs for timetracker.
The "tags" section is where you can associate keywords with the tags that should
be recorded for that keyword. When you specify a keyword that word is compared
in lowercase to the window title in lowercase.
The "activities" section also matches keywords in lower case but in this case
its just choosing which activity name to associate with the currently focused
window.
The main reason to compare keywords in lowercase is that its fast and cheap. We
can easily support regular expressions in the future but for now this approach
works fine.