[drats_users] "statistics"

[Dan Smith]

> Two things:

I know better than to believe something like this at the beginning of 
any of *your* emails :)

All joking aside, these are really good questions and observations...

> During testing on Sunday night, we noticed that the sending station 
> (using Windows 0.2.6) in the "sessions" tab was always seeing 
> "negotiating 0%") for their "statistics" until a entire long 
> transmission (pipeline - we were set to 4 on both ends I think) was 
> completed, then the percentage of file transfered would jump to a
> large number (depending on file size), say ... 54% or something.
> Then one more long transmission and it would say "closed".

Yeah, there are some places where I don't update the status until quite 
a bit of stuff has happened.  I need to be better about that, for sure. 
  The problem is, putting the status updates into the code is (a) boring 
and (b) uglifying.  Thus, I tend to put it off in favor of more fun stuff :)

> Couple of thoughts here.  At the end of a transfer (pipelined or
> not), could D-RATS give some feedback to the user as to how many
> packets the file was, how many it had to re-try, etc?

Well, it does display this information in the main chat window, does it not?

> Also, I guess I'm wondering if that status thingy could update a
> little "smarter" during the transmissions -- but I kinda understand
> why you can't... it's sending and the software is just waiting on it.
> Maybe it could say "sending 4/35 packets, waiting for confirmation"
> or something?

Well, there is definitely more I can do to make it more responsive. 
There is a practical limit, as you suspect, but there's definitely room 
for improvement.  It sounds like even just some tweaking of existing 
messages could help a bit.

> Some people were a little confused that it always said: "negotiating"
> and stayed at 0% for so long during the initial sending of packets.

Yeah, every time I see that it irks me too.

> Finally, the "closed" thing at the end was a bit ambiguous... does 
> "closed" mean "successful" or does it mean just "closed".  (Closed to
> me tends to make me think the session got "closed" before it really
> completed.)

Understood.  From the perspective of the designer of the session 
negotiation logic, closed is completely unambiguous.  But yes, agreed :)

> Final question: I know D-RATS usually filters out messages and
> traffic not directed at a particular station.  It may already have
> this feature but I missed it... is there a way to see "raw" data from
> the serial port?  I saw the "treat plain text as messages" checkbox,
> or something like that, but I'm thinking more along the lines of... I
> just fired up the rig and the laptop, and I see that there's two
> other people already engaged in a data transfer... is there some way
> D-RATS could tell me (maybe in the session tab) that it's X and Y
> callsigns sending D-RATS data ... kinda a "channel monitor" type of
> thing that would "prove" my station is working on receive, since I
> can "see" them sending stuff back and forth?  (And maybe if it "sees"
> the initial conversation, it could show the filename they're
> transferring, etc?)

Well, there is and isn't.  If you have the debug log turned on, you can 
watch that file and see all the packets go back and forth.  However, 
having a mode to decode this (to some degree) in the chat window is a 
very good idea and not very hard at all.

I always run D-RATS from a terminal (which, in UNIX, gets all the debug 
traffic in realtime), so I sometimes forget that "normal" people don't 
get to see all that I do when diagnosing a problem.

Thanks Nate!

-- 
Dan Smith
dsmith#danplanet.com, s/#/@/
www.danplanet.com
KK7DS