Re: user surveys for the Seul project

["Karsten M. Self" <kmself@ix.netcom.com>]

Roger Dingledine wrote:
> 
> In message <3588F526.1EDD84A4@ix.netcom.com>, kmself@ix.netcom.com writes:
> >Roger wrote:
> >

> >
> >Several hundred is probably off by a factor of ten.  Someone's got to
> >review this stuff, and no, it's not multiple response (especially not at
> 
> Actually, I was picturing that it would be very quantitative. I have no
> idea how to actually implement the video thing in a fair and good way, so
> I was ignoring it. :} My idea would record things things like how many
> windows were open and how often the windows got switched between, what the
> load average was, how much cpu usage there was and what was using it, how
> much usage each of the various servers (sendmail, httpd) got, how much mouse
> usage there was vs keyboard usage vs idleness, number of jobs in a window,
> number of processes active, memory usage, drive usage, interrupt count.

Ok.  This is a way of looking at things I hadn't considered.  My
original idea was screenshots and videos, plus system info.  Your focus
is system info, and probably no video.  I can see just running a
datarecorde and studying the results as being something much easier to
do on a large scale.  I *don't* see statements about privacy or control
of the product in your post.  I really do want to hammer this point --
any watching/reporting device MUST be used in a very controlled, very
open, and very user-aware manner.

OTOH, we seem to be getting toward the realm of an advanced system
admin/analysis tool -- some of this info would come directly from system
logs, much of the rest from /proc, some from utilities similar to
existing X monitoring tools.

> This is all very quantitative: we can figure out how hard people use their
> computers, and what they use them for. This is also very Unix-centric:
> implementing such a thing in windows would suck.
> (Unless it wouldn't. I'm just speculating.)

That covers all the ground <g>
 
> There are no videos to look at, and no question of how to get the hardware
> in place and set up the experiment and stuff. You just get people who want
> to help out to run this daemon in the background, and voila, it keeps track
> of things.

Don't totally discount video.  Timestamped, periodic snapshots could put
a lot of context on system activity.  Small scale => good.

< Substantial agreement with snipped portion >

> I think both ideas are useful. One is simpler to implement than the
> other, but one has the potential to give us a lot more data.
> 
> --Roger

-- 
Karsten M. Self (kmself@ix.netcom.com)

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