jcwren's Stats Page Suggestion

If you've been here any amount of time you know that jcwren has done a ton of work on creating a stats page for the site. Although it is not on the same server as the perlmonks site, it is as much a part of Perlmonks as any Section listed

Because of this, I posted this request here for discussion rather than sending it as a single request to jcwren himself. He has the final say, obviously, but I thought that I would see if it sounds useful to anyone else.

I've noticed as of late, a lot of people are looking for win32 information. These folks are usually new, and I find it difficult to remember who the win32 gurus are to point them to better examples than myself. Usually, I go to jcwren's stat page, and look at the O/S listing to jog my menory. Today, I noticed that there are people who list WinNT, NT, Windows, etc. that cannot be grouped together even though they express the same preference. And with respect to the preferences, I can assume that the 1st listed is the primary preference, or area of expertise.

My suggestion is this: Like Longitude and Latitude were agreed upon as standard, numerical representations of where we are located, can we numerically represent the operating systems, and list them in order of experience rather than preference?

We would have to compile a list of O/S's, but at least You could have all the O/S's grouped together for quicker perusal. For example <OS1 number=preference number, OS2=preference number> OS's being like W1 for Win95,98;W2 for NT,2k;D1 for dos; L1=Linux; U1=Unix; etc.

Any thoughts?

P.S. - I'll cc jcwren

-OzzyOsbourne

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Re: jcwren's Stats Page Suggestion by mikeB (Friar) on Jul 13, 2001 at 18:32 UTC
IMHO, standardized abbreviations would be more intuitive when looking through the listings. WinNT, Win2K, Win9x, MSDOS (or M$DOS :) catch the eye of those who are familiar with that ilk much more readily than W1, W2, etc. I like the '+' indicator for experience. Limit it to \+{1,3}, as (Beginner, Regular User, Guru) is probably fine grained enough for this purpose. Thus: WinNT+++, Linux++, VMS+ Just my $.02 worth.	[reply]
Re: Re: jcwren's Stats Page Suggestion by OzzyOsbourne (Chaplain) on Jul 13, 2001 at 19:03 UTC
I agree, but plusses are very subjective, and can be misleading. With my idea, I assumed that the conversion of numbers to words could take place on the server side. If it can't, the descriptors could at least be standardized in our home nodes. -OzzyOsbourne	[reply]
(jcwren) Re: jcwren's Stats Page Suggestion by jcwren (Prior) on Jul 16, 2001 at 05:19 UTC
The stats pages are about due for some much needed rampant featuritis. Sadly, because of "real work" they have been languishing. Luckily, it's reliable enough that it keeps running day to day without my intervention. Once my current project delivers, I should have time to make some changes. I do like the idea of being able to retrieve XML stats for a single user, or a category (saint, friar, whatever). As far as the O/S implementation, I'm agreeable. There's only one requirement that really has to be worked out (and I learned this from the lat/long issues), and that is that it has to be fool proof. In spite of being Perl programmers, and therefore closer to Dog than most people, some still can't seem to get that right. So it has to be parsable, and unambiguous for a parser to determine that it's not correct. If we can address that issue, I'm all for it. One of the major bugs that needs to fixed is for folks who are located at latitudes or longitudes between 0.00.00 and -0.59.59. Seems yours truly committed a FUBAR there, and it thinks those people in that range are at the abs() of that range. I'd like to see a list of (reasonable) ideas for additions to the page. Either reply to this node, or send e-mail so I can save them off to a folder. /msgs are great, but they're difficult to manage when you have a number of them. Another is to do something about that idiot problem with negative reps. The PHP library I use for generating those plots is payware, and the dude wants $100. I'm hesitant to layout the money unless I know it's fixed. --Chris e-mail jcwren	[reply]
Re: (jcwren) Stats Page Suggestion by pmas (Hermit) on Jul 16, 2001 at 21:31 UTC
Maybe it will be nice to have list of widely used perl modules which perl monk uses and can recommend for others. It will be like instant poll. Maybe with possibility to provide a link with discussion about pro a con usage...I know we have SuperSearch, but just try search for Config. And search results are hard to follow: check node reputation - you need to spend a vote for it, to check monk's level, you need to load another page... I was recently researching module to handle configuration parameters, and spend a lot of time comparing different options. My idea is, that if module is popular, it is possibly for a reason, and I'll try the popular one first. pmas To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.	[reply]
Re: jcwren's Stats Page Suggestion by agent00013 (Pilgrim) on Jul 13, 2001 at 18:58 UTC
Ah yes, new stats page features are always a good idea. I think saying which OS we "prefer" or have most experience on is misleading. I may prefer Windows 2000 and have more experience with it. However, I do all my PERL coding on a Solaris server. If jcwren does decide to impliment a feature like this on his site, I think it should be labeled as "I script my PERL code on _fillintheblank_ OS." Off topic: It'd also be cool if you could grab all the stats for a specific user on the page just by searching for them. I don't mean the stuff you can see in their node at PerlMonks, but stuff more like Birthday, XP changes, etc. Both of these depend on jcwren having the time to make these additions to the page. It'd be nice to know what he thinks.	[reply]


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