Garbled

I’ve mentioned @carl_youngblood here before. Someone once was trying to buy him something with his name on it. I think it was a key chain. You know the kind, right? However, then didn’t have “Carl” only “Carlos”. So we joked that, one day, he needs to write an operating system and name it CarlOS. Aren’t we funny? I know. I’m sorry. Anyway, the other day, we actually got into some OS discussion that I thought had some interesting enough ideas to post here.

So how many computers do you own and use? I’ve got a desktop at home, a laptop and a machine at work. It’s sort of a bummer to have different stuff or different versions of stuff, or stuff with different preferences on different computers. At least, for me it can really jack up my work flow. Especially if there is some application I use a lot with non-default preferences. Man, that bugs me! Remembering it all, bleh.

One thing Carl’s fantasized about is having a computing environment the same everywhere you go. That’s sort of a mainframe or dumb-workstation idea, which is not new at all. However, what if your whole computer were version controlled? You could branch it (so you don’t have your work apps at home, etc.) and merge changes from one branch to another, if you wanted. You could check out a different branch on one machine and it would feel like you were on another.

Clearly an OS would have to be built from the ground up for this idea. You’d also have to have some kind of provision about storing the non-checked out branches locally. Also cloning the repo would be a hassle at current average (even high speed) connection speeds. But how cool would it be to install, say, Textmate at work and get all your settings right, etc. and then go home and merge that change in (You could merge it from work, I guess and then just pull from home. Whatever.)? You could get diff data (hard to implement, but with metadat not impossible):

$os diff gaming HEAD
+ Steam
+ Half-Life 2
+ X-Fire
- Textmate

Or whatever. You get the idea. Reverting would making backing up and creating, uh… what does Windows call them? Recovery Points? It would make all that easy and moot. Clearly Linus Torvalds needs to be in on this “project”; he has the experience in both OS design and version controlling that would be invaluable. Not that, you know, Carl or I are actually considering doing anything with this idea. It’s an interesting thought experiment, though.

I use Twitterfox to read and create tweets most of the time. I follow enough people that, when I open my browser for the first time for the day, more than 20 tweets have accumulated and, really, I don’t want to go back and read all 60-odd or whatever that have accumulated overnight. Twenty, I should note, is just what Twitterfox picks up when it first turns on.

Occasionally, I’ll come in and see the last few tweets in a conversation between two people I’m following (I only see @replies by others who are to people I’m also following). If it seems interesting enough, I’ll go back and page through to see what they were talking about, reading in reverse order. Sort of like reading a chat log written by the guys that made Memento. It’s not horrible, but neither is it ideal.

So I had an idea about it and I’ve started work. Twitter tracks what tweet (technically called a “Twitter status”, apparently) any given tweet was a reply to. And, I figured, it would be relatively simple to, given a Twitter status ID, recursively follow the reply chain back and get the whole conversation. Turns out, I was right.

A proof of concept:

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require 'rubygems'
require 'twitter'
 
class Reply
 attr_accessor :text, :author, :in_reply_to, :time, :atreply
 
 def initialize status_id
   status = Twitter::Client.new.status :get, status_id
 
   self.text = status.text
   self.author = if status.user.name then status.user.name else status.user.screen_name end
   self.time = status.created_at
   self.in_reply_to = status.in_reply_to_status_id
   self.atreply = Reply.new self.in_reply_to unless self.in_reply_to.nil?
 end
 
 def each_reply &block
   reply_chain.each do |reply|
     yield reply
   end
 end
 
 def to_s
   self.author + ' - ' + self.time.to_s + "\n" + self.text
 end
 
 protected
 
 def reply_chain
   return [self] unless self.atreply
 
   self.atreply.reply_chain << self
 end
end

This has a dependency on Joshuamiller’s version of twitter4r. My medium-term plan is to make a one-trick-website that will take an ID or twitter URL and give you the replies all pretty-like. Maybe make a bookmarklet for convenience’s sake. I plan on using Rails, even though that’s overkill because I figure it’ll be a good learning experience on that front. Find it on Github.