Posts
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Gordon Bell Tonight
A reminder to those in the Silicon Valley area, Gordon Bell is speaking at PARC tonight about a project to catalog and search enable all aspects of his life. Sounds pretty cool.
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Implications of Increased Mobile Storage
An article over at The Feature talks about some of the implications of storage getting larger in capacity and smaller in size and power consumption. Although there might be some technical errors (for instance, the original Palms didn’t use flash memory, but low consumption battery backed RAM) I think the insights of the article are right on target. Increased storage capacity will have a great impact on the way that people use mobile devices. I’m not sure which of the two main usage patterns will win out however.
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#etech
A post by Justin Hall over at The Feature does a very good job of summarizing the impression of ETech that I got. Justin says:
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PalmHTTP 2.1
Posted a minor update to PalmHTTP today. The 2.0 version generated warning messages when run under POSE with all debugging enabled, this adds a missing call that keeps that error from popping up.
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TypePad Palm Client
According to this info from TypePad.com they’re going to be releasing a Palm client for posting photos and text. I haven’t even made it through posting images from Vagablog yet, because I’ve been trying to release features without forking off into different versions for each blog hosting tool. And the sales of Vagablog have been quite slow. I have lots of users, I’ve gotten a whole slew of support requests from people since the Blogger API location change. But I have few registrations. The support requests for Blogger outnumber the registered users two to one :-)
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WaveBlog
Russell posted info about WaveBlog today. This is the first I’m hearing about the company and the product line, but it’s an area that I’ve been watching intently for a long time. I think the technology is right on the money. Attaching blog updates to places and being able to deliver alerts make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me. Being able to find updates in the area that you’re currently in allows for a bunch of applications that just aren’t accounted for with the current architecture. The only part that has me a bit scared is that it’s being sold to carriers. But given the strength of the technology, I’m not sure that even carriers can destroy this. But they’ve done so poorly with almost everything, it makes me at least a bit concerned.
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Busy
Hello all. Sorry there haven’t been many updates in the last few days. I’ve been completely overwhelmed and haven’t even really had time to read news, let alone write up anything of interest. This will probably keep up for a few days at least.
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Some More Clustering Tools
A Linux Gazette article about Hybrid Clusters mentions a couple of cool tools that I didn’t know about. In particular, the DRBD package looks great. In the past few weeks I’ve run across Clustered JDBC for the first time as well. c-jdbc looks like a great package, but applies only to databases being used through JDBC (of course). DRBD is a block device for Linux which can replicate information on the fly for any full block device. There are tradeoffs in both directions, such as being able to use c-jdbc in active-active clustering across two or more servers, but with DRBD having applicability to more datasets; but the important aspect is that there are two great open source and free technologies that can be used to fulfill what is a very high-end clustering capability. Also mentioned is a set of scripts for managing failover, called TKCluster. IP address takeover and automatic failover always end up being more complex issues than they look like on the surface, it’s nice to have working samples to start from. Would be nice if there were some docs to go along with the package itself. This article seems to serve as the project page as well. The code in there seems to be quite clean though, and I don’t mind working like that. But lately I’ve found myself spending more time writing more docs for packages I pick up than doing actual work, so unfortunately that has tainted my view in general.
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Emerging Technologies Conf
Although I would have loved to attend, I’m not going to be able to make the Emerging Technologies Conference, but given that nature of the conf this might not be much of an issue. There’s a wiki to go along with the event, an ETech page on the Joi Ito wiki, and a moblog as well. There are people hanging out in #joiito and #etech on irc.freenode.net who I assume will be filling in info on the sessions as they happen as well. This is an interesting opportunity to see how well these technologies manage to convey the information from the conference in realtime. It looks like I might be able to get some great info from the conf right as it happens even though I can’t make it down there.
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Geographic Info and Presence
I saw an article about IETF work on geolocation and presence info linked off O’Reilly. This is very cool, I hadn’t heard anything about the GEOPRIV working group before, and it could mean that work in general on the subject is a lot further along than I expected it to be. However, work on standards is not a working project. There’s still a lot to be done in terms of making a working system, such as getting a good working set of maps. This should prove a very interesting additional point of entry into the subject if nothing else.
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