[Chicago-talk] Graphing (plotting) time-series data?

Greg Fast gdf at speakeasy.net
Fri Apr 15 07:42:46 PDT 2005


On Fri, 15 Apr 2005 03:33:17 -0400, Steven Lembark <lembark at wrkhors.com> wrote:
> > The data (this week) is basically a set of {start: timestamp, elapsed:
> > milliseconds, success: boolean} tuples.  I've got a couple of hundred
> > points spanning a couple of months, with various gaps (where I had
> > complete connection failures, bugs, etc).  Ideally, I'd like to flag
> > the points where success=false with a red dot or somesuch (otherwise,
> > I'll drop them from the data set or plot them with a second line).
> 
> Gnuplot handles this gracefully; check for interfaces
> to it on CPAN.

Actually, gnuplot is pretty useless for this.  Gnuplot can be made to
do an ok job with {seconds-since-1/1/1970, value}, but has no way to
understand that X range as time, and create meaningful labels.

PDL is something I should look into some day, but seems like pulling
out the bazooka to get the cockroach.  Plus, I can't tell (after 3 whole
minutes of deep research) if it handles time-series data anyhow.

Tk's right out.

RRDTool looks pretty intriguing, I think I'm going to have to play
with it a little.  But I'm not sure it'll turn out to be applicable to
my job...  it seems to be aimed at real-time status monitoring
rather than historical data.

The hunt continues...

--
Greg Fast
http://cken.chi.groogroo.com/~gdf/


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