hrmcat

2005-04-30 2 min read Uncategorised marco

How Is It?

I called the project hrmcat because I started thinking it would end up being a set of parallel utilities that would complement the existing srd* utilities. Then I found that it made little sense to proceed this way and simply added the capability of reading HRM files to the srd* utilities. Indeed, the change was so minimal that aside from a new C file (for the parsing of the HRM file itself), the modifications to Dave’s code consisted only of a minor change to the file reader. If it fails to parse a file as SRD file, it falls back to HRM. And since the formats are completely incompatible, you risk not one file being mistaken for the other format.

Download

If you want to get HRM files to be read, you need first version 0.12 of Dave’s code. You can find it on his web site, or directly on this one (hope he doesn’t mind) here.

Next, you’ll need to apply a patch. This patch will add the fallback to HRM files as described above. Additionally, it will ensure the hrm.c is compiled and built along with the rest of the files. You can download the patch here.

Finally, you’ll need to download the C file itself and place it in the /src/libs710 directory. To get the file, click here.

Applying the Patch

Nobrainer! You unpack the software:

cd ~/downloads tar xvzf s710-0.12.tar.gz

Now you copy the hrm.c file into its destination location:

cp /tmp/hrm.c ~/downloads/s710-0.12/src/libs710

Finally, you apply the patch:

patch < s710-0.12-hrm.patch

Building

Since Dave is a pro, configuration, compiling and building is really simple:

cd s710-0.12 ./configure make all make install

Running

Now that you have everything compiled and installed, you have three new utilities at hand:

**srdcat**: the utility used to dump the file information to a human readable format
**srdhead**: same as srdcat, but doesn’t spit out the raw data, only the initial summary
**srdplot**: the core utility used to generate the graphs

To run any of them (say srdplot) on an HRM file, you just specify the HRM file as the argument of the call. Say you happen to have a file called /home/marco/.polar/data/2003/01/03012902.hrm. Then to get the graph for the file use the command:

srdplot /home/marco/.polar/data/2003/01/03012902.hrm

Couldn’t be much simpler, huh?

For the Lazy

Well, why do all the work if someone else has already done it? I can get you jump-started with an RPM file for RedHat 9, how about that? Here is the download location.

As usual, feedback always welcome!