The zrobo experiment is teaching me about a soup of logic blobs and a broth message bus.

The essential components to a blob is code and persistent storage. The code is javascript, executed in a v8 sandbox. The storage is provided by redis.

(say something here about complexity and emergent behavior)

The blobs that get used regularly are

• location
  • where is <username>

    report the last location for username.

  • icecondor

    monitor locations of users and notice when they 'dwell' inside 300m for 20 minutes.

• weather
  • temp <wunderground station name>

    display the last temperature reading for this station. also monitors the temp of a default portland station every 10 minutes and alerts when the temperature goes below freezing. also remember last-used station on a per-user basis to report the best station for that user with just 'temp'.

  • noaa <zone name>

    display any published alerts for this zone

• cryptocoins
  • mtgox
  • coinbase
  • litecoin
  • dogecoin
  • coindesk

    coindesk pulls in the rss feed via this handy google rss to json service

  • btcwatch

    watches the mtgox price for swings larger than 5% inside 60 minutes (10 min poll)

• miscellaneous
  • spacepeople

    query the spacepeople api every 10 minutes for changes to the list of people in space

  • github

    monitor the github status json url and publish any change notices

  • calagator

    search calagator for matching events

  • isgd

    monitor the conversation for long urls and post a shortened one via is.gd