Staticfree Blog

In playing around with presence and broadcasting presence information, I've created an RSS feed for my physical status system, PhysStat. Now you can subscribe to my status to find out exactly when I go to sleep, or run off into the world. The usefulness of this is questionable, but it's certainly an interesting idea.

PhysStat is a simple set of tools that I use to provide a form of presence and status information to various parts of my computer systems. Think of it as a global "away message" for your life.

I wrote some utilities to set and query the status from both web pages as well as programs. Perl scripts can query the status in order to act on them. For example, I have an "alert Steve" command that will attempt to get a message to me depending on my status. If I'm "away", it emails me the message, if I'm "online" it will display it on my On-Screen display or speak it out loud (depending on another flag), and if I'm "asleep" it will wake me up and speak the message to me. I've written a Jabber bot that will set the status based on my Jabber status and keyword matching (an away message with the words "sleep" or "dream" in it sets the status to "asleep"). As soon as I redo the main storage mechanism, I'll put up a page and publish it for anyone who's interested.

I just recently discovered a language blog that seems to have some rather wonderful content on it. Mark Liberman wrote a wonderful piece, Divine Ambiguity, that pokes fun at Pat Robertson's recent [mis]use of the word, "like". Mark does well: it is a piece of absolutely hilarious and subtle wit.