This week's geekery involves a small select few things, almost not worth mentioning, but I'm committed to the shift from politics, so...
I'm about ready to start playing with VM images of all sorts. I like the idea of a VM jukebox. VM plus VPN can get me all sorts of elementary cloudishness.
NoSQL is an interesting and peculiar movement. I think they've got a lot of cheek, and I like that. But criticizing the NoSQL crowd is forcing me to think about the nature of the particular sort of computing I do. I think one way to think about it is to understand, as John C. Dvorak says, LAMP is over. Which means that the business model of certain providers like Dreamhost, as much as I love them and am a loyal customer, is threatened. Rackspace has evolved. There is an IT revolution afoot but before we get ahead of ourselves...
Way back when everybody was coming up with e-Business plans, I thunk up some mildly interesting product ideas. My obsession then, and growing again now, is what kind of things could be done with multiple database technologies. The plan was called 3DB and intended to build best of breed (enterprise) applications using object, relational and multidimensional databases in tandem. Why? Because each kind of job that interoperates across an enterprise requires a different kind of workflow with different sorts of transactions, and you simply couldn't assume that one database technology would support that best. I didn't end up specing out that business, but the idea remained in the back of my head. Now I'm thinking about it again, in the narrower sense of a tri-level hub and spoke architecture for data warehousing.
But the point is to think about workflows that databases support. I'll repost the idea from a comment thread at DBMS2.
NY Nick hipped me to the Verizon Mifi. A very cool device with a somewhat limited battery life that enables a personal mesh. Now that I swore off Palm and am on iPhone that allows no tethering, I have a marginal need for that. It's a really good idea, but I think I'm going to hold off. Another 40 bucks below the radar subscription is not what I need right now.
I'm about to get my first Slingbox today, from a buddy of mine. I can certainly use that now that I'm on the road. Why? Because my kids fill up my DVR with junk when I'm not around, and I don't need that. But there's an implication that I could VPN back to Vault107 remotely, which is weird because i don't think that my FIOS gives me a fixed IP. It has been years since I tinkered with DynDNS and it never really worked out for me. Hmm. We might see that again.
Video Professor has been charging me for stuff I didn't order. Be very careful if you order from that guy.
I'm trying out the Seesmic Desktop as I navigate my way sensibly through the Twitterverse. I originally had Twinkle on the iTouch, then on the iPhone. I then tried Tweetie and liked it. On the desktop I went from Twhirl to Tweetdeck and back to Twhirl, primarily because I like Adobe Air and Twhirl is cross platform. But I like Tweetdeck on the iPhone now. So today it's like this:
iPhone: Tweetdeck
Windows: Seesmic + Twhirl
I added a bunch of DW heads to follow and I'm a little annoyed that they haven't decided to compartmentalize their life into waffle-hole sized blocks like I have. So now I know that one of the great database heads of our time has a cousin who wrestled with TSA over the weekend to fly his special homemade charcoal. OK.
I'm about ready to make the leap over to an EC2 box. I'm thinking VM host and/or Ubuntu playground. I'm displeased with the throughput I'm getting from JungleDisk and Nirvanix (not that I've tried much recently), but it just doesn't make me feel good about standalone cloud storage. Meanwhile the appeal of Dropbox is increasing. I think it obliviates thumbdrives.
I got a peek at Windows 7, and I must say that I'm intrigued. What I saw was MSFT finally approaching the multiple desktop paradigm that's been in Linux since the invention of KDE. It also looks like you can Alt-Tab by application. So instead of cycling through all your apps, you can cycle through just your open browsers or just your open spreadsheets. Nice.
I also found Isohunt, an alternative to the Pirate Bay.
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