About a week ago I was at LinuxTag spreading a word about openSUSE. It was great event and I really liked it. And I was on of the four lucky guys that won Googles Nexus One. Hurray! And now what I want to write today about… I was migrating all my stuff from my Palm Centro to Nexus One. And one of the things I was using my Centro for was tracking how much petrol does my car consume. I was writing in plain text file and I was thinking about writing some script around that… But never had the time to actually do that. But now with Nexus One, my log is synchronized with Google Docs. So I don’t have to take care of the synchronization part. So I sat down and wrote a simple script to compute my cars consumption and I want to share it with you. Originaly I wanted to use googlecl, which is available in openSUSE Contrib, but it had some problems with Google Apps, so I decided to use curl instead.
First of all how do I structure my log. I’ve got currently two types of things I’m tracking – petrol and maintenance. As we are talking about consumption, we are interested only in petrol ones 😉 These lines looks like this:
PET:97644:20100430:12.53l:394.4Kč
As you see, it’s in semicolon separated values format 😀 First field means that it’s petrol entry. Second one is kilometer counter. Third one is the date %Y%m%d and the fourth one is the number of liters. Fourth one is the price, but it’s not really important. My document is named “Auto” but if you want to use the same script, you can name it however you want and just change the $TITLE variable in the script. You’ll need to change email and password anyway 😉 And you might be also interested in changing $RECENT variable, which states how many entries are used in computation.