Day 2

Continuing work on my data collection project. Yesterday finished the core of the first feature — a click heatmap. Today was mostly polish and fixing the structure to make shipping easier when the time comes.

Changes

Organisation

Instead of having everything in one big ugly python file, I created a module and separated all each part into it’s own file. This will make things much easier as I continue to add new features.
As well as organising the python code, the project uses a JavaScript script to get the position of the mouse, and a bash script to run it. Neither of these can be packaged, so I updated the code to generate the JS file in the user’s share directory and run it directly from python.

Compatibility

The original code was highly specific to my setup, and couldn’t be shipped. The fix came in two parts.

• I previously had my exact model of mouse hard-coded, so I added the ability to detect what mouse the user has
• The code only worked for my specific Window Manager. This is still the case, but I added the structure to detect the WM and adjust for it. I plan on adding support for other’s in the coming days

Storage

All data is now stored persistently in an SQLite database. In the future this will be read and displayed by the dashboard program.

What’s Next

• Create the dashboard to start displaying data
• Expand compatibility to other Linux systems (might take a while)