The Caboteria / Tech Web / PersonalInformationManagement (revision 22)

Introduction

I'd like to write a tool to manage my personal data about contacts, appointments, recurring events, notes, etc. Years ago I used a very slick "PIM" program called PackRat on the PC. It was very easy to use and yet very powerful (and this was back in the Win3.1 days). Unfortunately the company that wrote it really messed up - they released a new version which was wildly different from the old version, with buggy conversion utilitites. I never got the upgrade to work correctly and so ended up bailing out into paper. Polaris Software went out of business (but they may have come back).

The paper approach actually worked well for me (I used a system called Time/Design) for a while and then I went through a series of gadgets including the Sony Magic Link, Psion Series 5, and Palm III. Each had its strengths and weaknesses but all locked the data up in wierd proprietary formats which makes it hard to extend the functionality of the device in user-specific ways.

I was laid off from my job in the spring of 2002 so I had some time to think about this issue. I decided to write a set of tools to manage personal information and release them as Free Software.

Requirements

Notes

Since the project has no code yet, here are some notes on how I'd like things to work.

Servers

http://freshmeat.net/projects/scheduleworld/ - a proprietary scheduling client and server
Suse has a proprietary replacement for Exchange.
http://www.bynari.com/ sells a proprietary exchange replacement

Design

URL's

URL's are important, so I'd like to put some effort into designing a flexible URL naming scheme. The goal is to make it easy to reference specific objects or the groups of objects that I'm most likely to want to query.

Contacts

/name/ - return the contact info for person whose name is "name".

Appointments

It seems as if the most likely way that I'll want to look at this data is by a specific time frame, i.e. by day, week or month.

Todo Items

Typically I'll want to query these by priority.

Salamander Notes

Need to:

        mkdir ~/.salamander
        touch ~/.salamander/dispatch-sock

need to run src/dispatch and src/pos before you can run src/mingle.

dispatch sits on a socket, waits for mesages. Other programs can send dispatch a "OP_REGISTER" message telling it which message subtypes they handle, and then wait on a socket. When dispatch gets one of their messages it will forward it to their socket.

-- TobyCabot - 02 Jul 2002

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