During lunch, spoke with the author of libferris, which is a library
for doing the same things as beagle, and Apple’s spotlight. It has a
bunch of file-type plugins that let it do indexing of arbitrary file
meta-data, and includes version history so you can search for files that
existed last week but not now, for example.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could index based on user state… where
did I move that file last night when I was too drunk to be operating
the computer? :-)
We’d need a program that hooks into X input and does some analysis of
the keyboard and mouse movements, to work out what state of mind the
user is in. Given that we’re using the backspace 5% more than usual,
I predict that the user is about 2 beers tipsy. Now the user is
typing without any backspace, and there’s a 90% typo rate, and it’s
3am; user must be smashed.
You could do some neat things, like increasing the font size, if you
knew the user was pissed :-) It might start freaking them out though:
“Hello Dave, I think you’re over the limit. May I suggest you stop
typing, drink some water and take a Nurofen, and go to bed before you
send that email to all your workmates?”