Bar Charts on the console

I work on the UI action recorder and it has a strict performance requirement. The tool dumps the time it takes to record each action in it's log and that is compared against the maximum allowed value (otherwise the system will seem sluggish). To do this obviously we need fancy charts, as everyone likes them, other than of course the alpha-geeks :).

However, I like the console chart. Way back my mom used to work on Main-frames that ran COBOL on them and dumped out business data on paper at the end of the day. These reports had these printed bar charts.

I wrote a small ruby script to dump these charts on the console. The output looks like

D:\MyStuff\Code\Ruby>perf c:\logs\Recorder_20071118_144855.843.log
c:/logs/Recorder_20071118_144855.843.log ===============================>
  640 ********************************************************************************
    0 *
  109 *************
    0 *
   46 *****
    0 *

Serves the same purpose as their fancier counterpart but manages to look uber geeky.