Pidgin Activity logger!

Hey guys,

I am really short of time to catch up with my lunch, and hence excuse me for my gibberish English :P. Recently my dear friend came up with this hilarious idea to log the activity of online users on our Gtalk accounts. Hmm, not a bad idea heh!

So I sat down( many though I was doin madness ) and this is the strategy that I blogged down:

1. Use DBus connectivity to access information from Pidgin client. DBus is a server based model by which you can connect to applications running on your Localhost transparently.

2. Use python as the binding to DBus.

3. When first starting the program, get a count of current online users.

4. Trap signals for Signed In and Signed Out, and whenever one happens, just increment/decrement the count.

5. Log all changes to a file.

6. Make a Graph from the Log file using Matlab.

You would like to see the final output first right ? Heh:


It was a nice experience to jot down the hueristics of your Gtalk activity because we use it way too often. The graph starts at 00:00:00 Midnight for 24 hrs so that makes it one full day. And you can visibly see that the Maximum peak is at about 8-10 Pm and the lowest at around 5-6 AM.

Want your own graph, reply to this post.... and btw I might be releasing a Pidgin Plugin named Activity-Logger pretty soon ;)

For the interested if you can manufacture a plugin earlier than I may, have a look at the code urself: git hub code