Tuesday, March 16, 2010

I haven't been very active conky wise lately and it looks like I won't be able to spend much time in the future on conky/Lua tinkering either.

I have projects that are going to be keeping me busy. But hopefully I will have a few hours here and there to play!

I've still got lots of good ideas about things to do with Lua/cairo scripts, but as the scripts get more complicated they also take longer to write and test.

I guess I'm entering a mostly retired state as far as conky goes.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Numbers to text conversion functions.
Code available on the crunchbanglinux forum here.



I have written 3 functions for converting various numbers to text representations.
The first function converts any regular 3 digit or lower number into words, so that:
19 becomes "nineteen" and 487 becomes "four hundred and eighty seven"
I have used this function in the third line in the image above to convert the output of $cpu to words.

The second function converts number dates into text, as in the first line in the image above.

The third converts time data to words as in the middle line above. This function takes into account all the changes that occur with displaying the time as words. For example at 6:01, the function will output "one minute past six". At 6:02 it will be "two minutes past six". At 6:00 it will show "six o'clock" etc. You can choose between having seconds represented or not.

I intend to use these functions with my circlewriting functions to create a text only, non-linear display along the lines of this:



here is what it looks like when its working:

Monday, March 1, 2010

UPDATE. I have made the perspective drawing function configurable and posted the code on the crunchbanglinux website here. The code there displays the following graphic.



Because everything is based off of equations (which are themselves based off just a few key pieces of data), you can easily use the settings to alter the look of the bars like so:



In this case the red bar is cpu usage.
The green is memperc.
The blue and yellow bars show the percent used of my hard disk drives.
There is a maximum of 6 bars assignable. For more bars the Lua script would have to altered to add them manually.

ORIGINAL POST

I have also been thinking more about creating more isometric figure drawing functions. I put together this one a little while ago. While it does look cool, it clearly does not reflect any kind of reality of how a 3D shape would look from a fixed perspective (which is what isometric means).

So I thought about trying to create a more realistic looking figure. I knew it would involve the use of perspective, but I had no idea about how to create the effect or the mathematical principles behind perspective.

So I turned to google and one of the first things I came across was this video.
That gave me a basic understanding of how the effect was achieved. But I didn't want to simply draw a figure using fixed coordinates (that would have been far too easy), I wanted to have a isometric figure that could be configured through settings.

I had to rapidly re-aquaint myself with the mathematics of triangles!

This is what I ended up with. It takes the output from the previous cpu recording and averaging function.



The largest, whitest bar is current cpu usage, then the next bar is 1 minute, then 5, 15, 30 and 60 minute averages. The darker bars are all low because the conky had not been running for long before I too this screenshot.

You could feed each bar anything you wanted, the first could be current CPU followed by memperc etc. Currently (and for the foreseeable future) to add or remove bars is a manual process. Perhaps someone with more mathematics and coding skill than me could "automate" the drawing process with "for i=numberofbars do".
A poster by the name of dbro posted a conky config on the crunchbanglinux forum that had an interesting idea about recording data over time and then displaying the data as averages for a period of time via bars.

I took a look at his Lua script but I couldnt work out how it worked :)
I also thought his bars were confusing. I think it was partlly because of the way he was using the Lua script with conky. He wasn't using cairo to display the bars but parsing the Lua script and then creating bars via the $hr conky object.

I liked the idea of being able to compare computer usage now, to avergae usage over a set time period, so I took dbro's idea and applied my own logic and code to achieve this end. This is what I came up with:



The code is here on the crunchbanglinux website. Here you can alse read a little about the evolution of this script and in dbro's post below he sets out a less intensive way to achieve the same result. I have yet to try and implement dbro's method but the cogs are turning as to how I would apply it.