News:

6 Aug, 2008
It has been very quiet here for a while, but I have actually been doing something with my time. As you know, the charts here have been broken for way too long, I'm worried about the downtime and a few other cobwebs have been creeping up.

In order to fix all of this I've rewritten the tracker for Google App Engine. You can find the new version at http://diettracker.appspot.com. It is still in beta, so the may be some bugs, but everything seems to be working. If you do find something or have a suggestion, email me. The new version adds support for metric units, and should be easier to update. There isn't, yet, a good way to copy your old data over, but I am working on it.

A few more notes-

10 March, 2008
Charts are currently broken, but should be back up Real Soon. Everything else is ok, though you may get the occasional error message.

26 June, 2007
So... I've patched in a fix for a bug that sometimes caused the moving average to be slightly wrong. I've also looked into the causes for a bug that was locking people out of their accounts with an ugly error message. I know what is causing it (improperly parsing data when something other than a number is entered into a weight field) but after looking over the code I have no idea how to fix it because not only is the section that handles storing weight data very poorly written, but the data structures are so badly designed that I'm not certain I can really fix it without breaking something else.

There is nothing quite so humbling as looking back at something you designed and thinking, "What idiot did this?"

I'm going to go ahead and just let it go for now so that I can work on a new version. I've started to sketch out a skeleton for version 2, and will start writing it later this week. I'll let you know when a test site is available.

22 June, 2007
I have found some free time, so I'm going to post a bit of news about the development of this site.

  1. We're not going anywhere, so don't worry. I still keep thinking about moving to a dedicated server somewhere with a real domain name, but my alma mater is just too convienent.
  2. I'm going to be doing a bit of work fixing up some small bugs that a few people have pointed out and even provided code for the fix. Thanks!
  3. A new, upgraded 2.0 version is in the works and the following features are planned:
Enjoy!

12/19/2006
We're back! After a horribly long outage by my provider, we are back. If you think you lost any data, let me know.

9/8/2006
Wow, its amazing how long it has been since I updated here. Yes, I'm still alive, and so is this site. Anyway, I have some news:

Several people have very politely asked me to release the source to this and I have ignored them. I'm sorry. I can come up with several excuses, such as changing jobs, moving, complicated personal life, but the main reason I haven't is rather simple. I'm embarrassed. Seriously. The main script that runs this site is bad. Really bad. Really, really, really bad. It has duplicated code, poorly thought out structures, stupid mistakes, needless sorting, poor scaling, obvious lack of understanding cgi concepts and more. The only thing that it really has going for it is that it works. It was my first real Python program, my first cgi script, and I wrote most of it while trying to stay awake at 3AM while watching over telescopes looking for Earth killer asteroids. Seriously.

If you still want the source, you can get it here. It is released under a MIT license, so do what you want with it. I don't really have the time to work on it myself, but if you feel like working on making it better I would appreciate hearing from you and will gladly accept patches. The main areas to work on are:

  1. General code cleanup
  2. Moving to a real database for user info
  3. Adding metric support
  4. Fixing the "Chart doesn't always appear to update" bug

Included in the tgz are the major dependencies, pychart and PythonUtils. Assuming that you are running Apache on some form of *nix with a mail agent running and ghostscript installed, installation should be as simple as extracting the tgz into whatever public_html directory you feel like.

12/14/2005
Fixed the main page so that it really is completely valid 4.01 Transitional. This should fix some display issue in certain browsers. Over the next week or two I'm planning on cleaning up the source, adding a linear regression function to properly calculate the statistics box info and writing a FAQ. Once it is done I will be releasing the source and registering a domain. How does www.hackersdiettracker.net sound?

12/05/2005
The chart has been changed to look a bit nicer and show a connecting line between the daily and average weights. Also, there is now an option to display/edit more history.

11/18/2005
Sorry for the outage today. Someone clipped the OC-3 that my host uses with a backhoe. Things do seem to be back up and running now.

11/15/2005
Wow! I'm on the first page of Google's search results for "Hacker's Diet". I guess this means I need to put up a bit more info for newcomers.

11/09/2005
Basic statistical info is now being claculated. This leaves adding rung info to the chart as my only TODO.

11/08/2005
Date gap issue has been fixed and the charts should be looking a bit better now.

11/05/2005
Welcome to the first public release! It does not currently handle days without a weight entry particularly well and the charting could be made prettier, but it is ready to use. For more information check out the Hacker's Diet online.

TODO:

11/04/2005
John has given me copyright permission, so things are looking good.

11/03/2005
All there except for graphing and more testing. John emailed for copyright permission.