IECapture Viewer
IE Capture Viewer notes: August 12, 2007
Installation and setup…
Simple. Just unzip the IECaptureViewer and double-click on IECV.exe It's a very small program that uses the .NET libraries. If it doesn't work for you, you probably need to upgrade your libraries to a more recent vintage.
To use IECV:
It will open with an empty window like this. (I usually expand it to the full-screen at this point.)
< namespace="" prefix="v" ns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xml="true">
Click the “Load data” button in the upper right to load in a log.txt file that was created by IECapture. I’ve read in some pretty big log files (the biggest so far was around 9K lines), but let me know if you have troubles loading anything larger.
Once loaded, you can use the log lines window to look at individual log events. I use the up/down arrows to move quickly up and down the list (although you can scroll and select in the ordinary way too).
When a page is selected, it puts the entire logline in the upper left corner. There you can see the date+time of the event followed by the page’s URL (encoded as MMM-dd-yyyy-hhmmss URL).
Visualizations: I’m experimenting with some simple visualizations, so this section is bound to change with each release.
Currently (8/13/07), there are 3 buttons:
“Lines” – does a simple time plot of all the events over the course of the entire data set. Click on “Lines” to refresh that line display.
“4-hours” – puts vertical bars every 4-hours beneath the previous plot. The caret marks ( ^ ) are at noon each day.
“Find” will locate any substrings of URLs and highlight them in either blue or green (depending on the state of the radio buttons). The box below the colors shows how many hits there are. I frequently use this to find out all the instances of Google searches.
Note that you have to first enter the search string, then select a color THEN click on “Find.” I’ll fix that soon. In the example below, I'm looking at 2263 log events captured over 5 days. The "find" has located 26 lines with "precision" in the URL.
(Click on this image to see at full size.)
DMR Aug 13, 2007 10:30AM Edinburgh, Scotland