I wrote this script a few days ago to plot real-time / streaming data with gnuplot. The motivation was that I needed to test a piece of code for a touchscreen driver that I had written at work. The issue was that the UI wasn’t quite ready yet, so I wanted to test just the driver to be working fine. Now, the very first thought for the software to use that came to me was “gnuplot” but I found that it can’t really do this in an easy way. A colleague suggested me to use “replot” command with gnuplot. I whipped out my perl hat and a few hours later, voila!! my very own real time data plotter was ready. Now, I can stream data from any program to this script or provide the data on STDIN and can see the data being plotted continuously. BTW, it was awesome to see all the shapes that I drew on my target board’s LCD touchscreen to come alive on my PC monitor almost instantaneously.

This is a script to plot streaming / real-time data (i.e. plot the points as the data comes in) with gnuplot. The script is written in perl and works in windows as well as linux. Please read on to see the requirements, installation, usage and download link. I should also thank my colleague Rabindra Mandal, who gave me the initial idea and Thanassis Tsiodras, whose script I looked at before creating mine (though mine is quite different in nature. Tsiodras’ script is for “moving” data like things with limitless ranges, while mine is more for data that has limitless occurences within a limited range as my main motivation behind it was to plot touchscreen data)

If you can’t get tail command to continuously monitor a file, then read on. I was working on a script yesterday, a part of which depended on continuous monitoring of a text file. I had used our trusty old “tail” command for this but while testing by manually putting in some data into the file, it was failing but curiously it was working fine when used in actual scenario. Befuddled, I did a simple test. I created a simple text file “a.txt” with a few lines of data and then ran the following command.

This is just to let you know that a few of my friends have started Overclocked, a haven for PC enthusiasts in India. Overclocked is an online store for the people who like to stretch the performance of their machines to the maximum. They store a lot of high end computer stuff that isn’t easy to find in India and that too for a reasonable price. They also assemble mean gaming machines while giving you quite a bang for your buck with gauranteed satisfaction, shipped anywhere in India, and that’s not all, they can personalize it too with a variety of custom modifications (I really like their laser engravings).

I generally move from LTS to LTS releases of Ubuntu but reluctantly had to update my system to Karmic when my old HDD gave in. I also thought of trying out Kubuntu (KDE based) this time as I had heard that its doing a lot of interesting things (Akonadi/Nepomuk etc) and that with 4.3.1 it is stable as well. The installation went fine, all over within less than half an hour and then the problems started. Here are the 2 main issues that I faced along with their solutions, in the hope that if someone else runs into same issues does not have to waste time (and hair) on it :)