The first two segments of the semester focused on “logging yourself” and “logging your environment.” The most recent segment focused on “logging your computer.” Some of my peers tracked and visualized their mouse movements, some were sniffing packets, and others logged their keystrokes. I fell into the latter group, using a program called logkext to keep a record of my typing. The advantages of the program are that it’s lightweight, free, runs in the background, and encrypts the log file. Still, there is a bit of risk in logging key strokes because of sensitive information including login details and private conversations. Regardless, I installed the client and ran it for about a week. The terminal interface was simple and refreshing to use.
Once I gathered the data, I found the first step in analyzation (word countring) to be tricky, but fortunately our helpful instructors at ITP provide code to move that process along (see Daniel Shiffman – concordance and Dan O’Sullivan – language). Even with the code, getting the raw data into an organized list of counted words wasn’t obvious for a eclipse coding novice, but I got to the stage I wanted. **Note: in Eclipse, there’s an option when you select “run as” called “run configurations,” which allows a user to specify a file path in the “(x)=arguments” tab. You can see the top 500 words here. To get that nice round number, I manually removed noise and cropped off anything typed less than twice. The next step with this project would be to compare this data to other data …