A Few More Words

Personal Context. It can be used to enhance software interaction with you. Time has been the big one so far. You tend to know when you are fairly cheaply. Time can be used in software fairly reliably - problems are mostly encountered when you personally travel or you communicate with someone in a different time zone.

What else could work as context about you?

• Email address - identification and contact mechanism. It is distinct, regularly used as a login name, but suffers a little because it changes.
• Biology (fingerprints, dna, eye scan, heart rate, blood pressure) - identification, state of health, what you are doing (eg brain waves indicating sleep/dreaming).
• Written signature - identification.
• GPS - answers the “where am I” question. Could this be the next big thing in Personal Context?

Software that knows where it is. How do I move from here to there? Navigation systems do it and have already been implemented all over the place. Sports watches already use GPS information to provide speed and distance for the runner/cyclist/sailor.

I have a personal interest in building a better to-do list (perhaps by creating some software). How about combining your pda/mobile phone, with GPS, with location and time aware to-do software? Now I can have software that automatically:

• only shows tasks relevant to work when I am in the office
• reminds me to buy bread when I walk near the grocery store
• reminds me to buy a birthday present when it is a week to a friends birthday and I am near a shopping centre
• reminds me of something that I want to tell a friend when I visit them

What about the actual mobile phone software - I want calls from work to only vibrate the phone when I am at home, but to ring when friends call.

GPS, with its growing and cheaper hardware base, looks very interesting in combination with software that can make use of my personal context.

Recently our 3 year old daughter was introduced to what I call…

“The Spiderman Rule” - with power comes responsibility*.

Basically, with the powers that we allow her to use, like playing in the front yard, comes responsibility, like staying in our yard (it does not have a fence at the front). Not living up to the responsibility means that the power cannot be used. Simple.

I like it because it is short, easy to say and involves a comic character that she likes.

• (Actually, in real life ;), Spiderman lives by the motto “with great power comes great responsibility”)

Go here for the other posts in this series.

MIGRATEdb will parse an XML file of database changes and load them to the targeted database if they are not already there.

A database change consists of a test to determine whether the change has already been applied and a set of change actions.

The tool works from the command line and also as an Ant target. For a simple start we have an Ant script that includes targets for:

• user.xml = create the application user (this will be executed by an existing ‘power’ user with the permissions to create a schema/user)
• db.xml = all application creation SQL
• drop.xml = drop (cascade) the application user (I expect this would only be used in my development sandbox)