LogDog, the Timelog Guardian

Disclaimer

This software is provided "as is", without any guarantee. If you loose your entire paycheck, please do not blame me.

Purpose

This piece of software tries to serve as a portable, plug'n play Drucker Analysis Tool. For more information about the Drucker Analysis and it uses in the everday life of the modern knowledge worker, please refer to [1].

Installation

Copy the files in the "bin" folder to a location in your disk, then add a line in your crontab to call the crondog script.

Optionally, you can add this (or equivalent) lines to your .vimrc to access the two most common operations

map <F2> <Esc>:wq<cr> map! <F2> <Esc>:wq<cr> map <F4> <Esc>:r! date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S<cr> map! <F4> <Esc>:r! date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S<cr>

How it works

This software is composed of a set of scripts, each one with a defined function:

crondog: Call this script from your crontab to provide the reminder function and automate the log entering
editdog: Call this script manually in order to enter a new log for the current date/time. If there is an open editor for a given day, this script will not open another instance.
transformdog (pending): Convert the LogDog log files to several formats
POSTdog (pending): Post the logs to some time-logging services

Log files

The logdog files are simple plain-text files. The files are partitioned by timestamps, with the format:

Between a timestamp and the next (or EOF) there is the description of the work done between the first timestamp and the previous one.

Given a file with:

mar ene 1 00:02:17 ART 2013 [a] I do bla

mar ene 1 10:02:17 ART 2013 [b] I also do blabla

mar ene 1 13:02:17 ART 2013 [c] Last thing I did this day EOF

The text between [a] and [b] tells the story of the work done between the start of the day and the moment [a]

The text between [b] and [c] tells the story of the work done between the time [a] and the time [b]

The text between [c] and EOF tells the story of the work done between the time [c] and the end of the day.

Script guide

Description of each script

crondog

This script is called from the user's crontab every a user-defined number of minutes. By default calls editdog with default params.

Call crondog with the DISPLAY variable setted to something like :0 or you will not be able to view the editor screen.

Example: */15 * * * * DISPLAY=:0 ~/proyectos/logdog/bin/crondog 2>~/logdog.log

editdog

It will open the log file for today in your favourite text editor, after appending it with the current timestamp.

cjbarroso/logdog