Show HN: DataFart - easy command line graphing

http://datafart.com

by paulrosenzweig • 14 years ago

114 63 14 years ago

datafart.com

aaronpk2• 14 years ago

This is awesome. Thanks!

hk__2• 14 years ago

Why don’t you use a format like CSV?

paulrosenzweig4• 14 years ago

That's a good idea. My immediate use case only involved whitespace delimited data, but I might as well just scan each line for numbers.

AustinGibbons• 14 years ago

A cool tool with an unfortunate name. I'm not going to send a link to datafart.com/mygraph to someone with whom I only have a professional relationship.

paulrosenzweig4• 14 years ago

This wasn't really intended to share graphs. In addition to the name, each graph is deleted after 10 minutes.

Scramblejams2• 14 years ago

A neat utility. The short-lived nature of the graphs doesn't bother me at all.

But with that name I couldn't even recommend it to a number of people I can think of in my professional circle.

aaronpk2• 14 years ago

Good point. I'd probably take a screenshot with Skitch and send that. Then it would last longer than 10 minutes too.

syassami• 14 years ago

just pronounce it "dataf-art"

bobbydavid• 14 years ago

The name immediately made me think of German. I checked, and DatenFahrt.com is still available.

hxseven• 14 years ago

That actually makes sense in German, it means something like "data ride".

But as I saw it first I didn't notice the similarity to the German words. I somehow thought it's a reference to South Park ;)

wookietrader• 14 years ago

I don't have any output. No url is returned. :( Idea sound pretty cool, I'd use it.

rossj• 14 years ago

Make sure your numbers are space separated rather than comma separated, you could pipe your data through sed like..

cat myfile.csv | sed 's/,/ /g' | curl --data-binary @- datafart.com

niggler• 14 years ago

You don't need cat:

    <myfile.csv sed 's/,/ /g' | ...

tharshan09• 14 years ago

how does the alias work? Are you routing the data from the shell to a certain api end point?

jat850• 14 years ago

The alias employs curl to send data to the server hosted at datafart.com. The parameter @- supplied to curl means, send the data on stdin as the body of the request. So the user, via the alias, sending data to the server where it is processed, and the curl response is a URL to the temporary location of a viewable plot.

joe_bleau• 14 years ago

Super picky FYI: there's no connection to GNU, so it's "gnuplot", not "GNU Plot". (FAQ entry: http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/faq.html#SECTION0003200000000000...)

paulrosenzweig4• 14 years ago

Thanks! I assumed it was part of GNU. I made the change, but the page is cached, so it might take a while to update.

danso• 14 years ago

Don't know if I have a use case for datafart, but it did point me to a new d3 wrapper I hadn't yet heard of

http://nvd3.org/

Will have to play around with it...still trying to find that perfect line between lightweight and convenient

pyre• 14 years ago

There was recent discussion on HN when the company tried to revoke its ggpl license, but then renegged.

joelhaasnoot• 14 years ago

This would be even better if it supported dates. In my day job I'm struggling to find tools for plotting time-based data nicely and efficiently. Splunk works, but only if you have that.

dfc• 14 years ago

Gnuplot?

mikegioia• 14 years ago

HighCharts (http://www.highcharts.com) handles dates pretty well.

mturmon• 14 years ago

Seconded. I'm able to plot thousands of date-tagged points with good responsiveness to zooms, and per-point popups-on-mouseover showing more information about each point.

kingfishr• 14 years ago

You could also do this without a server at all. You could just have a script put your data into the html/js template and open up the page with something like bcat.

http://rtomayko.github.com/bcat/

paulrosenzweig4• 14 years ago

That's pretty awesome. I hadn't seen it before. DataFart has the one advantage that you don't need to pipe the data in locally. If the source data is on your local machine, this is a much better solution.

fellowniusmonk• 14 years ago

Isn't the point not having to worry about presentation and messing the templates? Perhaps I just don't have your command line fu but I don't see how I could do what you are talking about in a single line/simply.

Void_2• 14 years ago

Related idea: Python library that would render graph in Node.js using D3/NVD3 generating an SVG.

Is there any such thing?

yummyfajitas2• 14 years ago

Well, there is a python library that will render nice graphs on your computer in a variety of formats (on the screen, as a png/jpg/svg, etc).

http://matplotlib.org/

I'm not sure what rendering it in Node.js/D3 buys you on top of that.

Void_2• 14 years ago

Dunno, maybe you could make the transition from static file to interactive interface more easily? Or maybe I just find those graphs much better looking.

infinite8s• 14 years ago

Yep - https://github.com/mikedewar/d3py

naftaliharris• 14 years ago

Awesome! I love how cheeky this is. The installation instructions are sweet.

gcmartinelli• 14 years ago

Plenty of downvotes coming my way, but: good job sir, on that startup name.

fragsworth• 14 years ago

The notion that it's the name of his startup is pretty hilarious, but I think it's just a name for a command line tool

tsm2• 14 years ago

The web dependency situation is absurd. Am I unreasonable for wanting a locally-installed program that produces a standalone window all by itself?

philsnow• 14 years ago

like gnuplot?

yummyfajitas2• 14 years ago

Or the following python script:

    import pandas
    from pylab import *

    d = pandas.read_csv(sys.argv[1])
    plot(d[d.columns[0]], d[d.columns[1]])
    xlabel(d.columns[0])
    xlabel(d.columns[1])
    show()

That'll just pop up a window displaying the graph. With 2-3 extra lines of code and more than 30 seconds of effort, I'm sure it would be easy to upload to imgur.

Example output: http://i.imgur.com/m7ooj.png

leephillips• 14 years ago

I don't really understand this criticism. It's perfectly reasonable to want to install, for example, gnuplot to be able to do plots without depending on a networked service. But this is neat, and could be convenient if you're on a machine without plotting software installed. He didn't take away your gnuplot by creating this, so really, what's the problem? (On another note, for these types of graphs the gnuplot command is "plot", so I don't see why the author has trouble remembering that.)

readme• 14 years ago

The web dependency is awesome. It makes it that much easier to share the chart with others. Since you're probably on the internet at all times, what exactly is the detractor here?

tsm2• 14 years ago

I'm now storing my data on someone else's servers, and they promised to remove it after 10 minutes. Not good for sharing. And if the site is down...I'm out of luck.

Edit: And there's not even a straightforward way of saving the graph...it's not a real image. Do I save it as a webpage? That's inconvenient for embedding it elsewhere. Do I screenshot it? That's cumbersome...

jebblue• 14 years ago

No man, you're not unreasonable at all. I think the winner over the next 30 years will be a happy consolidation of web and local storage, let's hope HTML5 get's it right.

dima55• 14 years ago

Not unreasonable at all. Here you go:

http://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot

wazoox• 14 years ago

Looks great, thank you!

gprasanth• 14 years ago

What?? No!! You should always have option to fart silently.

one https, and one make-private-ability please! :P

Nice project.

jbackus• 14 years ago

What an outrageous name for a command line graphing tool. I'm honestly curious, why?

mcartyem• 14 years ago

It's great. I wanted this literally two days ago.

Show HN: DataFart - easy command line graphing

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