H3RALD: RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs

RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs

h3rald — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 14:05:00 -0600

Logging your daily activities is important. If you don’t believe me you’d better check at least these three posts on LifeHacker, which feature different scripts and applications:

I had a look at each one of them, and I believe they are quite useful, although I didn’t really find what I was looking for. Why? Well, for example:

I don’t believe a GUI is necessary—you’d better off with just a shortcut key or command to run from Launchy or QuickSilver, that’s much faster.
They just log timestamped messages on a file, there’s no real way to search through them and display them except by using a test editor
They are Windows only—not that it matters for me, but others may not be happy about it.

That’s why I thought I’d roll out my own: meet RedBook. Let me say it’s nothing fancy: I’m not a full-time programmer but I do like playing with Ruby during my lunch breaks at work, so that’s why RedBook is just a humble, tiny Ruby script. This automatically makes it cross-platform: you can install Ruby very easily on Linux & alikes, Mac OS X and Windows. Furthermore, if you are on Windows and for some weird reason you don’t want to install Ruby, you can just try out the packed EXE file (made with RubyScript2Exe)—it’s about 2MB, but you won’t need anything else.

How It Works

The program uses two YAML files, one for configuration, which must reside in the same directory as redbook.rb (or redboo.exe) and one for the log itself, which you can place anywhere, provided that you edit the configuration file accordingly. For information on how to install RedBook and how to configure it, you can check the manual.html (powered by TiddlyWiki) file provided with the program or browse it online.

When started, RedBook will load both the configuration file (config.yml) and the whole log file into memory—it’s not a big deal, considering that they are only text files after all. I did a test with a log of quite a few MBs, and it was fine.

You can then start input commands right away, following a few sample rules. RedBook has a (very) rudimentary parser which is able to detect keywords, i.e. alphabetic strings prepended with a colon. RedBook commands look like this:

:log This message will be logger :tags tag1 tag2
:select :last 15 :since January
:save /home/h3rald/backup.yml

If everything goes OK, RedBook will reply with some sort of response, an acknowledgement, a list of messages, etc.

Simple.

Here’s basically what the program can do:

Log any message to the main log file. Messages can be tagged with one or more tags and will be automatically timestamped.
Load/display a list of logged messages on the screen. It is possible to filter messages by specifying a time span, a string to search in the message text, or a list of tags.
Dump loaded messages to a TXT, CSV or YAML file (you can even backup your log saving it to another YAML file in this way).
Calculate the time elapsed between two or more tasks. Time will be displayed in years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and/or seconds as necessary.

How? Here’s a short tutorial…

A Quick RedBook Tutorial

Let’s assume you are able to run RedBook on your system by now (if you can’t find some of the gems which are required for it, you can download them packed in a ZIP file from here).

Here’s what happens when you start the program:

-
RedBook v0.1 – Copyright© 2007, Fabio Cevasco
-
>> Loading config file…
>> Config file loaded.
>> Loading log file…
>> Log file loaded.
>> Ready.
RedBook >>

Good. Let’s start logging something then. Just use the :log keyword, followed by a message, and then you can also add the :tags keyword followed by space-separated tags, like this:

RedBook >> :log My first message :tags test
>> Logged.
RedBook >> :log This is another message
>> Logged.
RedBook >> :log This is another message :tags test another_test
>> Logged.

Try waiting a few seconds between each message. These three messages will be appended to the log file. You could open it in an editor, but it’s normally easier to display them directly inside RedBook, like this:

RedBook >> :select
1 Sat Sep 29 2007 – 09:09:32 PM My first message [test]
2 Sat Sep 29 2007 – 09:10:51 PM This is another message
3 Sat Sep 29 2007 – 09:11:45 PM This is another message [test][another_test]
>> 3 messages loaded.

Easy. What if you have hundreds of messages? Well, the :select operation can take an optional search string, or you can tell RedBook to load only those messages tagged with one or more specific tags, like this:

RedBook >> :select :tags test
1 Sat Sep 29 2007 – 09:09:32 PM My first message [test]
3 Sat Sep 29 2007 – 09:11:45 PM This is another message [test][another_test]
>> 2 messages loaded.

Or you can use the :from and/or :to keywords to specify a certain time frame, like this:

:select :tags test :from ten minutes ago

:select :from last week :to 2 days ago

RedBook includes a very nice “natural language date/time parser”, Chronic which is able to convert sentences like the following into Ruby Time objects:

6 in the morning
friday 1pm
sat 7 in the evening
today
yesterday at 4:00

It’s not perfect (and it’s in pre-alpha as well), but it does the job, for what I can see, and it makes it very easy and fast to specify timeframes.

After executing a :select command, two other operations can be performed on the loaded messages: :calc and :save.

:calc calculates the exact amount of time elapsed between two or more tasks. Do you remember the numbers on the far left of each message? Think them as temporary IDs for the actual messages, and you can use them to select specific tasks when executing the :calc operation:

RedBook >> :calc 1 3
1 Sat Sep 29 2007 – 09:09:32 PM My first message [test]
- 2 minutes and 13 seconds.
3 Sat Sep 29 2007 – 09:11:45 PM This is another message [test][another_test]

Similarly, if no IDs are specified, :calc calculates the time difference between each message and the previous:

RedBook >> :calc
1 Sat Sep 29 2007 – 09:09:32 PM My first message [test]
- 1 minute and 19 seconds.
2 Sat Sep 29 2007 – 09:10:51 PM This is another message
- 54 seconds.
3 Sat Sep 29 2007 – 09:11:45 PM This is another message [test][another_test]

Finally, you can save loaded messages to a TXT, YAML or CSV file, as follows:

RedBook >> :save log.txt
>> Saving…
>> Saved dataset to “log.txt”
h If you want to backup your log, you can load all messages and then save them to a YAML file. Maybe in this case you want to append the :silent keyword to the :select command, so that messages won’t be displayed on the screen.

Conclusion

RedBook is just a simple program: it suits my needs for now, but of course there’s roo for improvement. If you have some useful suggestions, or you want to contribute in some way, feel free to contact me!

Home Page | Development | Download

"RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs" by mrnovell.com

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:52:50 -0600

This is great, I am going to have my IT team start using it. Will there be a feature to where we can have central logging.

"RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs" by Fabio Cevasco

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 03:44:11 -0600

Hello James, thanks. Well, actually next week I’ll probably release v0.3, which comes with Readline support (which means history and proper key bindings for mac/*nix users) and quite a few new features. By the way, I don’t seem to be able to find your email address anywhere…

"RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs" by James O'Kelly

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:27:30 -0600

I’ll be trying RedBook out, thanks for the tip Fabio! And I totally agree about the command line, and Quicksilver is just crazy sexy. I don’t even remember how to use my launcher anymore :)

"RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs" by Fabio Cevasco

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 15:27:03 -0600

I scheduled key bindings and support for international characters for the “1.0” release… Or hopefully before, you never know! I’m also trying to plan a few milestones.

"RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs" by bryan

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 14:46:14 -0600

Fabio:

I’m afraid I’ve never used those libraries myself.. I’m a web guy, don’t get into the command line stuff much.. but I’ll keep checking back to see if you or anyone else does anything with it.. I think this looks like a nice logger tool. :)

"RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs" by Dharivs

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:40:29 -0600

Nice!

You are my God! I was just about to implement it, but I couldn’t… Thanks a lot :)

"RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs" by Viktor Nordling

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 05:17:21 -0600

Looks neat!

I think it would be a perfect plugin for Launchy: (http://www.launchy.net/). Then I could just hit alt+space, write log | message and move on!

For similar plugins for Launchy, please see: http://todoist.com/Help/viewLaunchy/

Cheers, Viktor Nordling

"RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs" by Fabio Cevasco

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 05:06:29 -0600

@bryan

Thanks for pointing it out. I’m looking into it, although I think to fix that I’ll have to use either the Curses or Readline libraries, and I was trying to avoid it… I’ll have a look (suggestions are welcome of course!)

"RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs" by bryan

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 03:43:19 -0600

pretty cool.. any idea how to make backspace/delete work correctly on a mac? Im suffering from ^H disease. :)

"RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs" by Fabio Cevasco

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 06:48:50 -0600

We have a time tracking system at work, but I normally tend to use it once a day… I use this script everyday to quickly keep track of what I’m doing while I’m doing it, rather than trying to remember it afterwards ;-)

"RedBook - A simple Ruby program for your daily logging needs" by David Cumps

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 06:16:04 -0600

I’ve always wondered, what do you log in these systems? I already log most of my time at work in timetracking systems, that I couldn’t imagine logging spare time, what’s going to be the benefit?

Ofcourse, a script like this instead of some bloated time tracking system which has a GUI that makes you take ages for inputting something.