bustle

being an ambient activity feed for tilde.town

development plan

• skeletal server
• skeletal client
• manually created proof of concept spool files for a few users
• basic bustle update <something> (decide on protocol)
  • receiving client update
  • writing audit log
  • writing to bustle.log
• basic bustle command
• proof of concept inotify implementation
• bbj integration
• user management task
• event aggregation, sampling, and throttling
• ...honestly if you can even get to hear you can worry about what is next then.

motivation

it's quiet. you've shelled into tilde.town but until you take one of the following actions you will have no idea what else is happening on the server:

• run chat
• run bbj
• run feels

all of these have different problems.

chat:

• it requires energy and social grace
• it might be empty; worse, it might /seem/ empty when you join
• it can get addictive
• it can get heated
• you don't see people that don't like chat. some of those people might be your new best friends.

bbj:

• the pace is slow
• it's hard to tell what conversations are already going
• admin can't figure out how to unsticky stuff

feels:

• the pace is slow
• it's read-only in that you can't respond to people

instead, what about a new command bustle:

$ bustle

you hear faint noise in the chat room

       ~endorphant is moving around in their home directory

  ~vilmibm just added to their public_html

                     some things are knocking around on bbj

    ~selfsame just created a new file

  there is a rattling sound in ttbp

someone shouts, 'HI WORLD'

                   ~archangelic shouts, 'HELLO BACK'

architecture brainpuke

I am not sure how to do this without a daemon process. Something needs to be listening to inotify events, listening for shouts, and ready to receive API hooks.

How should the daemon work?

• for shouts and bot integration, every user gets a file in /town/bustle/spool/. bustled does a select over every file. a scheduled task adds and removes spool files based on who exists on the system.
• for file activity, some kind of inotify watcher.

How should user clients work?

when you run bustle, it enters a loop. at some interval, messages print. should a connection be maintained with bustled waiting with recv? I don't think so, since the log is not personalized. what if bustle is just a fancy tail -f on a file, /town/bustle/bustle.log? i think that's fine. i want running bustle to be exciting and cute, animating the messages in various ways. someone who just wants the log is free to read /town/bustle/bustle.log.

How should API clients work?

I'd like to be able to report on irc, bbj, and feels events. feels can be a special case of just users editing in their home dir, but bbj and irc are more special. i think to start those services will just get a spool file like a normal user and then write to it programmatically. this will require modification of bbj and hooking into an irc bot run as some user.