Your take on the importance of version control is also right on. I work on keeping several databases up to date and often write papers that have several people contributing. It is amazing to me that so many otherwise very smart people are in the dark ages with versioning. And you would not believe how many times I get called things like “a..l” for wanting to track changes exactly.

I use Google reader as you suggest. The only issue there is the sheer amount of information. I get so overwhelmed by the volume that I tend to ignore it out of fear for days on end. That only makes it worse. I probably have several lifetimes worth of reading bookmarked somewhere.

Thanks again for a great post!

Collect the logs and extract the data to be plotted. For instance, I might want to extract the throughput numbers from httperf logs. Or analyze tcpdump output to extract the timestamp for each packet. I would usually do this in Python.
Plot the data using gnuplot.

With matplotlib, I can combine the two steps together.

Care to give an example and how matplotlib solved it for you? Thanks.