Another Journal Ideas

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Thank you, Scott!

> Yes, what you've described is more-or-less the plan of record: don't
> store any metadata which can be extracted from the actual content, and
> use plugins in the indexing service to extract interesting metadata
> from a variety of "real" formats.

  Good.  So I wasn't so "off".  I tried to figure out what your design
was like, but from remote and just looking at the slides it wasn't so
easy.

  Reading your reply, only difference (?) is on the UI side;
"encouraging" the activity designers to have the data in the document
itself and make it visible.

> The few bits of metadata which
> can't be representing in existing document formats (non-path tags,
> "action id", etc) will be stored in xattrs, which are compatible with
> all modern Unix systems (including Mac OS X).  They may be lost during
> transport to non-XOs, which is why we'll try to minimize the number of
> these bits as much as possible.  This also makes us as robust as
> possible against indexer failures: we should always be able to rebuild
> the index using nothing but the information on disk (and possibly
> taking advantage of better indexers and metadata extractors when we do
> so).

  Good.  FAT32 formatted USB memory seems that second most used
storage, so taking it into account from the beginning (this time)
would be good.

> Non-local search is possible (see part 4 of my journal screencast),
> but probably not transparently: you will have to select a particular
> friend whose journal you want to look in.  This seems more reasonable
> (to me, at least) in an environment without perfect connectivity: if
> you try to search everyone's journal all the time, it's hard to know
> whether you didn't find any matches for your search because there
> really weren't any, or if the person who had the matching document
> wasn't on line.  If you explicitly selected the person to search, it
> can be made a lot more obvious whether or not their journal is
> available to search at this moment in time. (Where "available to
> search" may mean "cached on a local schoolserver"; it doesn't
> necessarily have to mean, "my friend's XO is turned on and connected
> to the internet right now".)
>  --scott
> 
> -- 
>                          ( http://cscott.net/ )

-- Yoshiki