Blog Cleanup - Phase II, "Presence"

Another quick entry tonight; had a big day today driving around down in Silicon Valley today, had a free burger in the Facebook cafeteria, saw some friends, and met up with some node.js enthusiasts. Tomorrow, dinner with more friends, and packing for a short vacation back East!

The other day I wrote about some of the stuff in my sidebar, that's served, in the past, as "widgets" that report on some metric or other about my life. I'm a big fan of these, but the ones here (perhaps they'll be gone by the time you finally read this) are woefully out of date. The front page of ryan.net has more current stuff, like metrics on my recent jogging trails, etc.

Tonight's sidebar re-cap subject is this thing:

It once used to let people know where they could find me, as sort of a "presence indicator", prior to me being on instant messenger whenever I wanted to participate in the goings-on online. These days, I'm not always on-call, which is strange, since I really am available to pitch in for an issue at work whenever I'm not busy with my personal life. It's just that my jobs for the previous fourteen years weren't even that reasonable, regarding on-call. I got called by work, about doing a production code push, on a Saturday, on my wedding day.

In that environment, the idea was, that someone could see if I was already sitting in front of a computer, either in the office, or at home, that they could call me at that phone (presuming they had the number), and not bother someone else who'd left the office already, or was out enjoying their life and family. Conversely, I thought, if people got used to this system, they might check it, and postpone casual requests until my status suggested I was around and available.

The whole thing hinged on the fact that my workstations are pretty much always on, and that, even at home, I set them to auto-lock after a few minutes of idle time, for security reasons. Cached keys expire, screens lock, clipboards encrypt, etc. so that a cat walking on a keyboard doesn't reboot a server someplace, and a burglar might get the laptop, but that loss doesn't threaten my business.

In that environment, sensing presence is as easy and running a periodic process that checks to see if the screen-saver is currently running, and a http call that generates an image and moves it into the right place. It only ever said "screen is active!", but technically I could've called it to say arbitrary strings.

Since I've changed jobs, that old office workstation is long gone, and my current office computer is a laptop that travels with me, and docks into multiple-monitor-land when I'm there. But it's not online when I'm away. My new computers at the new home aren't set up for this either, so my sidebar's been inaccurate for quite awhile.

I'll probably put something like a presence indicator on "the new thing", but I'm not sure what form it'll take. I track and log my location hourly, so technically, it should be pretty easy to "check in" at home, work, or wherever. One small benefit of living in an apartment, and not a house, is that it's far less a risk to report things like "I'm out of town for the week" on twitter, facebook, etc.