Re: Does Org-mode need to be position aware?

From: Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>
To: Sebastian Rose <sebastian_rose@gmx.de>
Cc: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Does Org-mode need to be position aware?
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:55:55 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <rmisk4asm44.fsf@fnord.ir.bbn.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87iq57co58.fsf@gmx.de> (Sebastian Rose's message of "Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:06:27 +0200")

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Sebastian Rose <sebastian_rose@gmx.de> writes:

> On Linux, BSD and MAC OS X there is `gpsd'.  I don't know how useful
> it is --- I don't own a GPS yet.
>
> http://gpsd.berlios.de/ states:
>
>    gpsd is a service daemon that monitors one or more GPSes or AIS
>    receivers attached to a host computer through serial or USB ports,
>    making all data on the location/course/velocity of the sensors
>    available to be queried on TCP port 2947 of the host computer. With
>    gpsd, multiple location-aware client applications (such as
>    navigational and wardriving software) can share access to receivers
>    without contention or loss of data. Also, gpsd responds to queries
>    with a format that is substantially easier to parse than the NMEA
>    0183 emitted by most GPSes.
>
> Is there something like it for other systems? Windows?
> I think Cell phone systems should have something ...

(I am one of the maintainers of gpsd.)  gpsd works well; what it does is
get data from almost any gps receiver -- in that receiver's format --
and make it available in a standard format (now JSON based) with a C and
python library available.  Dealing with gpsd from emacs should be pretty
easy.

I think people have run gpsd on windows, but I don't use windows so I
don't pay attention to that.

There is also geoclue:

  http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/GeoClue

which is intended to integrate multiple location providers (including
gpsd) so that programs that want location can get it without worrying
about gps vs manual config vs wifi database vs geoip.

>> But I guess the emacs-lisp gurus here might know this much
>> better then I do. Another issue comes to my mind for mobileorg users. As
>> far as I know, mobileorg only fetches agenda views from a server but
>> does not generate them. However, this would be necessary to create this
>> kind of location aware agendas.
>>
>> Would be nice to hear other opinions. Makes this sens? Should it be part
>> of mobileorg, or rather a independent package?

Various cellphones have location support.  This is more or less like
geoclue but proprietary per platofrm (e.g.s apple's Core Location using
wifi, cell towers, gps as available).

> I'd make it an independent package.  Some laptops come with a built in
> GPS these days.  And your desktop might know his GEO location as well.

Architecturally, both org-on-real-computers and mobileorg should have a
way to hook up to a location provider.

The hard part is that lat/lon is really not what people want to think
about.  And, location services not using GPS will return locations that
are only sort of near the right answer.

So I'd suggest having the user define a set of locations as a sequence
of tuples of name, latlon and maybe radius.  This could be a GPX file
(standard interchange for GPS waypoints) perhaps plus radius.

Then, org could find the appropriate named point, and use that for
location, and most matching could be in terms of point names.

This way one could have tags for contexts, and reduce the gps use to
just autoselecting tags.  I think this might be the least mysterious and
error prone.

I edit org files on a computer that stays in one place, from many
places.  So I'd definitely need to say '(org-set-location "office")' and
not rely on automatic.

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