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Antonio Ospite, theorist attacks

Recently both OSnews and Slashdot pointed out some experiments about context-aware UIs done by Christian Giordano at Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu GNU/Linux), and the first results are somewhat interesting. As you can see in the good video demo from the original article the effects are nothing mind blowing, but they serve greatly to illustrate the concept, and by building on that something more useful would come out eventually.

That reminds me of another (never realized) old idea of mine from when I was attending the Operating System course at the university, I wanted to bind system responsiveness —at a lower level— to user presence, by tuning scheduler parameters according to the user being at his/her computer or not.

Imagine a desktop computer which is encoding a video in background, when the user is interacting with the system then the interactive tasks must be more important, but when he/she leaves, then the system could assign to the background job all the resources it needs to run “at its best”.

The parameters to change system responsiveness could be, just for instance, process niceness, swappiness (some report that less swapping results in more responsiveness, but I don't have numbers either to agree or disagree on that), or the whole scheduler could be changed on the fly if there is any system allowing that.

The mechanisms to detect user presence could be the usual: proximity sensors, video from a webcam or audio form a mic (humor alert), some measure of mouse and keyboard activity, a pillow/button on the seat (that would tell butt-on / butt-off... ehm).

In my original thoughts I wanted to detect when the monitor was manually switched off, that's because I usually switch it off when I leave the computer in order to save some power; on a laptop we have the lid button which could be abused, but I couldn't find a way to detect when an external monitor is turned off, anyone?