Steve's Things

So I’ve decided to get my feet wet again with programming after a long hiatus doing other things like photography and electronics. I thought I wouldn’t have any problem programming again but little did I realize how trained your mind becomes with certain patterns of thought through programming. Electronics, being a utilization of a natural force, is often non-linear in nature and required a different mind set, even small numbers of components can produce complex results/problems.

So for the last few days I’ve been trying to make a new program based on an idea I’ve had for some time, the name of this idea is Notary. Notary is a very simple program in implementation but if you keep up with entering data into it, it becomes useful.

Here is the premise of Notary:

• User(s) are greeted with nothing more than a window with a text box.
• The User enters any kind of text, for example, a phone number along with a name or a description of how you solved a problem
• the text is stored in a very simple database, essentially an ascii file with record headers and unique IDs
• The user can then later search the database to retrieve information that is directly or indirectly related to a search term

This sort of approach has probably been taken before but in much more complicated ways. I intend for the computer to search and present the information appropriately rather than the user trying to wrack their brains to make the data useful or search the data.

Here are some of the key ideas:

• Make the interface simple. Hence, the simpler and easier it is to use, the more likely a person is to enter the data.
• Allow future replacement and deletion of data, but never get rid of it, allow for future recovery and allow indirect search through this void data.
• Allow 2nd to 3rd order matches to a keyword, in other words, allow the relationships from the keywords have record commonalities from 2 or 3 levels away. Inference of this kind, especially on large databases, allows for unexpected info recollection.
• Allow database blending, thus you can have multiple databases blended together from various locations at any time.

Hopefully I can implement these ideas well. I’ll keep working on it, and if anyone actually reads this site, I post it as well in one of my side pages.

Simple.