Software Architecture and Web 2.0ness

        I was talking with a coworker the other day (Squid) about various architecture stuff. For those who are not in “the know”, software architecture is just the way of organizing large software projects into more manageable chunks. For those kind of in “the know”, go read “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You” . Basically as you get more experience in how software projects get put together someone will decide your an “Architect” now and not just a developer. This means you spend more time playing with onmigraffle and keynote then you do with make and gcc. Anyhow Squid was asking me about my new found attempts to maintain a blog and how he felt a blog compared to a wiki. I had just introduced Squid to wiki’s a few weeks earlier and he was really getting into them while he viewed a blog just a diary and not really a way of organizing information like what can be achieved in a wiki. It was at this point in the conversation that I slapped on my marketing/architect hat and said “That is the great thing about the web paradigm, you can have a wiki and a blog and have links that go between them allowing to cross reference the information in each, either the blog or the wiki and let each provide the information in the way that is most natural. That way your not trying to shoehorn information into a blog that best represented in a wiki and your not creating a bunch of wiki pages that should really be a blog. It is the intersection of having information, representing the information in the most natural way, and cross linking so it can be found in multiple ways.”

        I then came out of my trance, the aliens left my body and asked Squid what had just happened. He said you just made a lot of sense and if you need to capture that exact thought you just had in your blog......So Squid, this one’s for you.

Testing new version of MacJournal

        Due to my bug reports over the past few days, I now get to try out beta version of MacJournal. This is very exciting as this version should also copy labels given to posts in MJ to blogger. If all goes as plan (and that feature has been implemented in this version), this post should show up as having the label of “Software”. The problem with testing out this software to see about the long posts getting cut off is I don’t typically write long blog posts so while last night was a fluke, tonight it is just going to some forced rambling much like being on a forced march in the military. I should note that while I called what happen a bug and reported to MJ it could also be bloggers fault and the actual MJ software could be working great. I don’t want to blame MJ if it is really a google issue.

        Wow, second paragraph time.....This is where things get kind of weird as I am actually done for the night but need to write 21 more lines of text. I guess I could will add some more random thoughts on software. I have recently found or discovered some really cool software that I can’t wait to try out (in some cases I knew about the software just never got around to looking at it.) There is also some software that I really need but can’t seem to find and I might actually have to dust off some coding skills and write it myself. The problem with most of this cool software is it doesn’t run on any of the platforms I need it to run on.

        First there is Truecrypt which is an on-the-fly disk encryption software. The cool thing is it gets awesome reviews all over the web but the serious bummer is it doesn’t support OSX yet. I plan to start using it in a limited amount here in the next month but can’t really use it too much until the do support aapl. The good news is OSX support is on their roadmap but so is a lot of other things and no dates are given ....

        The next cool piece of software is really a software service is Amazon S3 storage. This looks like the perfect thing to solve my remote backup problem but since my main servers all run OpenBSD there doesn’t seem to be a front-end that I can use. I guess I’m going to have to spend some time this weekend looking at ways of making the two play nicely with each other.

        The piece of software I really need is a good backup strategy (architecture?) for my laptop and my server. I like rdiff-backup to my main server should work OK, but getting my main server backed up to someplace off-site has been one of the big problems. If you, the great lazyweb, have any ideas on how to fix my back-up woes, please leave a comment.

        Well as I think I have written enough now, time to upload it and see if this whole post makes it or not.