Fireball

After London, Its Bangalore. Go book your ticket!

The hack in the site itself looks cool!

Ok, this is one of the products of heights-of-joblessness. GMail Chat History Statistics uses libgmail. It is a python script which crawls through your GMail chat history and creates a Pie-Chart of how many lines (and how many times) you have (wasted) spent chatting with whom(in %). It uses chartdirector for creating graphs. The data is also serialized using cPickle, in case you want to use it for something else.

Sounds good, isn’t it? Definitely not if you try it. When you use the script for indexing just the first page of the list of chats(Around 100 chats), it works fine.

But when you go deep into searching your whole chat history, GMail thinks that you are doing something fishy with your account, and it locks it(Yes, I couldn’t access my GMail account for a day). So, probably you can give a sleep for half an hour once in a 100 messages and keep indexing, or just search one page.

The graph looks something like this and the code is here. It works well for Linux, and can be used in any OS by downloading the corresponding chardirector. Comments welcome!

PS: /me is planning to take a printout and stick it in my room/cubicle.

PPS: /me is not sure about the limit of requests for GMail to flag the crawler as a bot.