Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Notes

last update:

The empire strikes back

Microsoft is moving. Whatever the outcome of this, the landscape of software development will never be the same.

Dear Lazy Web, I need to implement a distributed election algorithm over an mostly-reliable group communication channel. Any pointers to papers or software that already does this would be mostly appreciated. I'll post my own findings here also. Kisses,

Sync power

There as been a lot of talk about offline modes for Web applications lately, and this path is getting closer to what I see as post-web-2.0 generation of applications. Someone will eventually coin a term to describe these apps, but I think the following features will be part of them: offline mode: there are those who believe that universal, always on, connectivity is just around the corner. I just might, but personally I think that they live in a nice dream and will eventually wake up.

Google power, duh!

This is cool and helpful: placing your pet transponder ID in a web page for Google to index it. It is also somewhat obvious, so, duh... Now we just need a micro-format and profit!

Raising your head, once a year

Once a year, I look around and re-evaluate my SCM decisions. In the last year, I've been using darcs as my main SCM and I love it: simple and powerful. And given that I don't branch and merge a lot, I don't run into his issues. Yet, for fairly big projects with lots of files, it starts getting a bit on the slow side. Also, I haven't find any graphical change-set browser yet.

This is just too cool not to buy. Checkout Meraki.net and their meshed network gear. It looks amazing. I'm trying to buy a pack of three here in Europe. I'm hoping the scandinavian reseller is able to ship them to our little corner of land. Can't wait to play with these...

Yeah, Web 2.0 fan-boys will likely point out Amazon Simple Queue services, but I tell you, us UNIX old timers will stick with lpd, I tell ya. It never ceases to amaze me the length people will go to abuse a UNIX system and get away with it...

Module of the day: IPC::JobQueue

There I was cleaning up my "presentation inbox" when I came across the Scary Jifty presentation by Jesse Vincent. He's crazy, in a very sane sort of way. Anyway in the middle of the presentation he mentions IPC::PubSub which is a nice publish/subscribe system that you can embed into your own applications. But the prize came in the SEE ALSO section of IPC::PubSub: IPC::DirQueue. I can't remmember how many times I needed something like this.

Storage

Recently, Rui pointed me to Drobo. The feature list and the ease of use look amazing, and the box is pretty too. Unfortunately there is no NAS version (yet?). One of the features is the seamless storage expansion. Just add disks, and the box takes care of the rest (all that RAID non-sense). The best NAS product that does the same thing that I could find is the ReadyNAS NV+ (Anandtech review).