---
author: marco
categories:
- Uncategorised
date: "2005-01-17T05:19:28Z"
title: Weight Table
---

# A Weight Table?

 Actually, two of them. At some point (actually, at {moscontentlink:How I lost weight|this point}) I decided it was time to record my weight and do a pretty good job at it. I worked on and off at it, perfecting the user interface (laughter appropriate), and ended up with two versions of a program that tells me how fat I really am.

 I started out with a {moscontentlink:Weight Table – TCL|GUI release} in [Tcl/Tk](http://tcl.activestate.com). I had been very successful with that combination, and back then there were neither PyQt nor PyGtk to help me. (To be truthful, I wouldn't have used either, anyway…) This first release was interfacing in German and had a decent set of controls. You could input your weight in a table (just in case you had jotted a set of days on paper). You could switch from a pound to a kilogram view. You could change the number of days used to average out the weight.

 Although Tcl/Tk is probably past its prime, it still is a really easy language to write to, as long as no numeric computation is involved. Nowadays, its slowness is extremely painful, and I would probably use it only for glue code.

 Things started getting complicated with the addition of bodyfat, courtesy of an incorruptibly hones Tanita monitor. After I got over the grief of seeing myself called obese by my own scale, I added many charts to the program:

- daily bodyfat and average
- total fat and average
- total non-fat and average

 Each chart taught me something. The bodyfat chart taught me that I shouldn't ever buy anything I could use to ridicule myself in front of myself. Because I would.

 Total fat is interesting, because it doesn't swing as widely as bodyfat and weight. If you weigh yourself on any given day, there will be a certain amount of ballast you carry with you (the kind you get rid of at a pitstop, if you really needed me to say it). Total non-fat was surprising, because it would rise and fall with total weight. I would have expected to see non-fat matters stay the same regardless of how much fat I carried around. But it turns out that fat cells need considerable amounts of water and other matter to survive.

 After all this work, I started thinking it would be nice to get access to the charts from anywhere on the planet. Hence I started thinking of a web interface to the same data.

 Since the wheel has been invented too many times, I started looking at open source code I could use to make my life easier. Of course, there I stumbled upon [GD](http://www.boutell.com/gd/) and its [Perl interfaces](http://stein.cshl.org/WWW/software/GD/). As a matter of interest, the final {moscontentlink:Weight Table – Perl|web interface in Perl} is a mere 10% of the original code in Tcl, since I don't do any of the computation or graphing.

 As I moved this site to Mambo and later Joomla, I wanted to integrate my weight table with the new infrastructure instead of using iFrames or the like. So I wrote my own [component,](joomla/content/blogcategory/116/205/) which I later turned into a Joomla project. This is the basis for the current graph, which now uses the PHPlot library.

 You can access the current weight chart [here](/joomla/component/option,com_weight/Itemid,175/).