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.

In thinking of how news propagates through an information network, Dyfrgi and I came up with the (perhaps not original, but new to us) idea of distributed, pluggable RSS filter modules. Somewhat like what Localfeeds is, except with optional control lines. I like to think of them in the way that Galan thinks of LADSPA plugins: a network of connected modules with separate control lines.

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steve@warehaus:~% grep -ce '^feed' ~/.rawdog/config
38

Yes, 38 RSS feeds. I'm starting to feel a slight tingle in a certain corner of my brain, like the buzzing of 1,000 humming birds somewhere very far away. You know they're there, doing their timeless dives into the center of a buttercup; you can see it in your minds eye, buzzing like that little region of my mind. Thirty eight feeds, 21,600 words, news of the world and the metaworld.

So much signal, but with so much more noise.

Now if someone could only invent a way to turn these feeds into food. I'm at Java's still and all the restaurants that Compusfood has have already closed. I guess that leaves vending machines, ordering out for pizza, or taking the 30 minute hike over to Subway.