In order to successfully send your sensor data to a Hackystat server and perform analyses upon it, you must register with a server. To do so, simply use a browser to retrieve the home page of the server. Your organization may provide its own internal Hackystat server, or you can always register with the Hackystat Public Server.

Figure 3.1, “ User account registration form ” illustrates the home page of a Hackystat server, where a user has typed in their email address to the Registration field.

Figure 3.1.  User account registration form

After clicking on the "Register" button, the server will attempt to create an account and send email back to you with the 12 character key. If successful, a message will appear as illustrated in Figure 3.2, “ Successful account registration ”

Figure 3.2.  Successful account registration

Within a few minutes, you should receive an email from the server that provides you with your 12 character key. Figure 3.3, “ Registration email with user key ” illustrates this email.

Figure 3.3.  Registration email with user key

Now that you have your user key, use HackyInstaller to save it and to download sensors. Please note the following features of Hackystat user keys. First, there is no way in Hackystat to change your user key to something more easily remembered. For easy access to your Hackystat home page, we recommend that you create a bookmark in your browser corresponding to the URL in the email to your home page. Second, if you forget your user key, you can retrieve it simply by re-registering with the Hackystat server and using the same email address you supplied originally. The registration process always checks to see if there is already an account defined for the provided email address, and if so, it will send the original user key to you.

Finally, now that you have your user key, you can actually log in to the Hackystat server. Figure 3.4, “ Initial user homepage before Workspace and Project configuration ” illustrates the Analyses page from the Hackystat Public server for a newly created user account.

Figure 3.4.  Initial user homepage before Workspace and Project configuration

This screen shot illustrates two of the analyses available on this page (Project Active Time and Project File Time), as well as links to other pages available on this server (Preferences, Alerts, Extras, and Help). The actual analyses available to you on a server may be different, depending upon how the administrator configured the server.

One important thing to note from the home page of a newly created user: the two analyses require you to specify a "Project", but there are no Projects listed in the pull-down menu. In fact, the most useful analyses on the Hackystat public server all require specification of a Project. So, until you have Projects available to you, you will not be able to exploit the capabilities of many analyses. The remainder of this chapter shows you how to specify Workspaces, and after that, Projects. At the end of the chapter, we will return to this page and show you how to invoke these analyses on one of your Projects.