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#847 - 03/08/03 02:29 PM Ramblings & Other Assorted Musings
NGOwner Offline


Registered: 03/08/03
Posts: 1
Pete,

I adore this program. I unabashedly recommend PingPlotter to all my gamerserver clients. In fact, if they even attempt to submit a latency issue without a traceroute, I send them a response with a link to your site admonishing them to get the proper tools to diagnose the problem!!

I encourage my colocation clients to "become one with PingPlotter" knowing full well that your program is virtually a prerequisite for getting into the gameserver hosting arena.

All this evangelizing has a reason. Soon I hope to have the word traceroute (and tracert) simply replaced in the dictionary (and OSs) with PingPlotter. That's my ultimate goal.

Now on to the beta.

First off, the beta addresses most of the things I'd like to see added/changes. Kudos to you for that. The only comment I have is the implementation of the summary from Copy as Text is still a little dicey for the simple reason that the column headers don't in most cases line up with the actual data that's copied into the email, or Word Document, making the chart difficult to understand. Now on to my suggestions:

1) So everything lines up nice and neat, is there a way to make the Copy as Summary copy in a table format right out of the gate?

2) Can you include a configuration screen under Advanced Options for Copy as Summary so we can select what we would like to ex/include in the Copy as Summary output?

3) To get around the copy as text issue in the last version (way too much data for long traces), I'd generally just open a new instance of PingPlotter, change the # of times to trace to 1, then copy as text the result into an email. Howabout just adding a copy option to the menu to just copy the last full single trace set (not the summary, not the whole data set, just the last complete trace)?

Thanks again for the great work.

[NG]Owner

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#848 - 03/08/03 03:11 PM Re: Ramblings & Other Assorted Musings [Re: NGOwner]
Pete Ness Offline



Registered: 08/30/99
Posts: 1106
Loc: Boise, Idaho
Thanks for the encouragement! Although we have started spending a tiny bit of money on ads lately (just in Google, really), the success of Ping Plotter can be almost entirely tied to word-of-mouth referrals, and we *really* appreciate it.

I'd love to hear suggestions on how to make the *text* export a bit better. Looks like the "Sent" and "Err" column headers could probably move over a space or two (note that these column headers are centered on the 999999 number, so if you have a lot of data, they look pretty good). What else would you like to see moved around a bit? I'm wrapping up the beta version this weekend, so any tweaks that will make it into the 2.40 release have only another few hours (and they'd have to be as easy as moving column headers around) to get in there.

<pre><font class="small">code:</font><hr>
Target Name: www.pingplotter.com
IP: 216.92.151.75
Date/Time: 3/8/2003 12:57:44 PM to 3/8/2003 12:57:57 PM
.
Hop Sent Err PL% Min Max Avg Host Name / [IP]
2 13 0 0.0 46 143 56 cboi04.boi.micron.net [206.207.109.1]
3 13 0 0.0 46 56 48 bigi2-f0-0.lan.spro.net [204.228.224.231]
4 13 0 0.0 46 60 48 boi-edge-02.inet.qwest.net [65.121.130.33]
( ... snipped ... )
15 13 0 0.0 125 168 131 gbr1-p10.phlpa.ip.att.net [12.122.12.98]
16 13 0 0.0 124 134 127 gar1-p360.phlpa.ip.att.net [12.123.137.21]
17 13 0 0.0 130 138 132 [12.118.191.18]
18 13 0 0.0 135 178 140 pingplotter.com [216.92.151.75]
</pre><hr>

Of course, this doesn't work at all with proportional fonts. Your suggestions of copying as a table and allowing options are both good onces - but won't make it in to the 2.40 release. I've got it logged in the enhancement request system, though. A difficulty with the table format is exactly what to put in the clipboard so that it can be pasted. If you're pasting into Word, it's going to be one thing - into a HTML web page (ie: message board system), it's going to be something else - into a plaintext file, something else. This adds some complexity to this problem, although suggestions on how to handle it are welcome.

As for the ability to copy just the most recent sample set into the clipboard, just change your "Samples to Include" to 1 - and only one sample will make it in to that text. I think that the "copy as summary text" option will probably reduce the need for doing a single data point copy, but it's pretty easy to change your samples to include for the copy, then change it back. The good thing about this is that you can change the focus(/size) in your time-graph to hit just the datapoint(s) you want, and then do the "Copy as text" to grab the output for that.

- Pete

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