PhysStat is a system for recording and monitoring your "physical status". Think of it as an away message for your life that is recorded to a database or as an automatic blogger.
Every time you change your physical status -- say you go to sleep, wander outside, or go to work -- your status can be recorded along with a user-defined message. The system records the time that the message and status were set, so that a permanent record of your life is formed.
You can then browse the database using various tools mentioned below as well as provide your current "status" on your website.
The system consists of a few components. The core of it is the library that unifies all the tools. This is provided in this package. To make the system effective, though, there need to be data sources.
To install the library, see the INSTALL instructions.
The primary data source that I use is a Jabber bot. You can download the presence_bot.pl for use on your own system if you would like. The bot monitors your away status and message, setting your PhysStat status accordingly.
You can set regular-expression-based pattern matching to pair special statuses with messages and a whole variety of other configurations (for example, any away message that I use which has "sleep" or "dream" sets the status to be "asleep" instead of the default "away".
There is a simple command-line client, physstat, that shows you the current status of a given user. You can set messages with it as well.
To use it, just copy the example config file, sample_config.txt, to ~/.physstatrc.
You probably want to:
chmod 600 ~/.physstatrc
as well.
Add in the database string and username/password.
This interface lets you browse your whole database by date. Simply enter in the date you wish to view, and it shows you the day in a color-coded manner. You can view my live version which shows my life or grab a copy of physlog2.pl for your own website.
What a terrible question. Why wouldn't you want to record your life to a database? Geeze, these kids now-a-days.
The system is whatever you make of it. You are free to record whatever you would like to record with it. You can use the system to record whenever you feed your cat, if you desire. You can also restrict the data to whomever you wish to restrict it to.
I personally record as much of my life as I can and am willing to make public. I like to think of it as an auto-blog that gets rid of most of the annoying words in-between the interesting bits. I find it helpful in remembering the order of bits of my life (in the same way that old photos can help you do the same) and neat.
Ultimately, I am in control of all the data. I only let loose what I wish the world to know and can remove the primary source whenever I desire.
Copyright © 2005 Steve Pomeroy
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA