personal info pipe
One of the core directions my personal coding has always aimed for is to simplify the amount of daily information in my "must read" list. The amount of items in that list has always grown -- I don't think it's ever gone down. Well, except when I switched between being a hardware focused geek to a coding focused geek -- but that was only for a month or two :)
When I started using my Powerbook I found that a number of apps had already been written that solve certain info-flow issues much better than my personal scripts, for example NetNewsWire is a much nicer app than my collection of python scripts that pulled together feeds and created html pages :)
Adium is another - it's just a simple (tho it's not simple at all I know) "just works" app that is much better than the basic Jabber client I had coded using Delphi. So it's interesting to find that now I am seeing a need for small programs that help shuffle information around between apps. I don't even want to call it shuffling data - as the items being carried really are info nuggets themselves.
They just need to be shifted from one silo to another. A case in point is Twitter. Twitter is a very nice tool for maintaining contact amongst those you have included as "friends." What it is sorely lacking tho is context - you get all or nothing and it just comes streaming at you in the same manner.
What also is slightly annoying is that when you post something it appears in the Public Timeline but you have no way of knowing if someone responds to your post. Well, you do, but you basically have to monitor it for about 5 minutes after you post and that seriously slows down your day. Last weekend I started a small experiment to see how the flow between little single purpose daemons would be structured to allow for different filters and/or transformations to be applied to the Twitter stream and to see if others would find them useful.
The first test was to see if I could use a basic Python Jabber bot to dump the Public Timeline to an IRC channel -- that turned out to be amazingly simple thanks to two libraries: xmpppy and python- twitter. Of course the basics were easy - getting all of the robustness you need for a long-running internet-facing daemon took a couple of days :)
Once I got that going I quickly found out that others were interested - the irc channel #twitter-public was setup by one of the admins of irc.wyldryde.org just for the bot to dump to. And the #twitter channel is currently receiving any public twitter post that includes "sxsw" in the text. My goal was to do some more work on the parts this weekend but I ran out of energy and time. We went to the Philadelphia Flower Show Friday and that was a tremendous event - I really should write something about it later.
But what wasn't known was how drained I would end up feeling Saturday as I didn't notice during the show Friday how much standing and walking I was doing. Those who have met me in person will know how not in shape I am. Saturday was also "fun" because of a strange mental state my father-in-law latched onto early in the day and we couldn't shake him of it until Sunday. Makes me wish I had taken any courses in Psychology just so I had some inkling of what is going on in his head as his Cognitive Decline worsens.
More on twitter groups and labels Tuesday tho - some simple testing I did with Python to see how much of a load it could take if I shoved a couple hundred users each requesting different words and or tags to filter on showed I'm not too crazy to be doing this in Python.