Using gnuplot to plot a time-series in text

I needed to review a sizable time-series on a remote host. Since I work at the command-line here having the plot displayed in text would be very helpful. To do this I used gnuplot. The data has the form

2010-11-06T00:00:01  35
2010-11-06T00:05:01  38
2010-11-06T00:10:02  45
2010-11-06T00:15:01  38
2010-11-06T00:20:02  38
2010-11-06T00:25:01  38
...

Note the two spaces between the data columns. The command line & script to plot this data is

gnuplot <<EOH
set terminal dumb
set autoscale
set xdata time
set timefmt "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"
set xlabel "Date & Time"
set ylabel "Count"
set title "Requests waiting on connection"
plot "data" using 1:2 with lines
EOH

which outputs

                          Requests waiting on connection
Count
  160 ++--+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+-++
      +      +      +      +      +      +      +   "data" using 1:2 ****** +
      |                         *****                                       |
  140 ++                  ******    *                                      ++
      |                  **         *                                       |
  120 ++                 **         *                                      ++
      |                 *           *                                       |
      |               * *           *                                       |
  100 ++              * *           *                                      ++
      |               ***           *                                       |
   80 ++              ***           *                                      ++
      |            *  **            *                                       |
      |            * **             *                                       |
   60 ++           ****             *                                      ++
      | *        ******             *                                       |
   40 +***************              *      ***************************     ++
      ***                           ********                                |
      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +
   20 ++--+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+---+-++
    00:00  02:00  04:00  06:00  08:00  10:00  12:00  14:00  16:00  18:00  20:00
                                    Date & Time

Must easier to see the trend in the data.

I found the following helpful in figuring this out http://linuxgazette.net/126/peterson.html.

Update: Use the watch command to turn the graph generation into a dynamic visualization. For example watch -n 60 bash plotting_script will run the plotting_script every minute and update the terminal.

Update: See the bash script timeplot for a useful expression of this posting.