My new job is keeping me busy.  My old job is burying me.  I have 72 video podcasts to catch up on.  I'm so far behind on my blog roll that I'm going to have to mark them all as read just get a handle.  Seems like I barely have time to check out the latest happenings on the web!  Here is a short list of some of the interesting things which I have been able to accomplish in the last couple of weeks:

S3Sync

As you've probably gathered by now I'm really interested in the Amazon Web Services.  The most straight forward of these is the virtual disk service S3.  I've been looking for ways to put this service to good use and I've come up with quite a few including pushing out web content.  I've done this simply by opening read access to everyone on a bucket named fileshare.palmerek.com and then creating a CName record on palmerek.com and a little trick of how S3 references buckets and folders.  As and example you can see  http://fileshare.palmerek.com/images/Pedro.gif. 

The other, and currently more meaningful use I've found is using a Ruby script called S3Sync which works a lot like the Linux rsync command.  After a little bit of setup I can now backup portions of my system with a single command which only transfers the files which have changed.  I'm currently only doing this with a few folders but I'm considering doing this with entire drives. 

The big benefits here is that it is very easy to do, can be scripted to run as a scheduled task and stores all of my data in a secure off-site location which I can access anywhere from any machine via my portable version of Firefox and the S3 Organizer plugin.

Talkshoe Live!

I love Talkshoe.  The idea is solid and the uses are unlimited.  I haven't yet hosted a Talkcast because I don't have any friends and I don't have anything interesting to talk about but I can still appreciate how much potential is there.  Since I am always so pressed for time I'm becoming more and more interested in the concept of virtual businesses and Talkshoe fits right into that strategy. 

Misc

Twitter, Virb, Geni, OpenID and others continue to pique my interest.  Skype Prime has gotten me thinking about business models for paid support, help desk and a variety of other possibilities. 

I'm going to be getting a new machine soon and I'm trying to decide between another laptop or a kick-ass desktop that I can use to run a few VMs... If I go the desktop route I may end up building it myself.  I'll keep you posted.

I just pushed out a sales intranet for a client so hopefully that will free up some time for me to get back into a groove.  Who know, I may even be able to post a blog entry more than once every couple of weeks ;-}

TTFN

I think Ruby's principle of "Convention over Configuration" is extremely powerful.  It has (almost) every ingredient needed to speed the development of great software.  The only thing it's missing is the "assholes and idiots" feature.  As long as everyone on a team can practice agreed upon conventions then life is good, unfortunately there always seems to be at least one asshole or idiot per team (look around, if you can't figure out who it is, it's probably you)

Configuration is a fine model as well.  Nothing beats being able to tweak the hell out of a system even after it's installed.  Look at Firefox for example, there are more configuration variables in about:config than you can count and believe me someone somewhere has used every one of them to bend it to their will. 

Then there is code.  Fast, solid and completely (theoretically) reliable.  Using tools like CodeSmith you can generate hundreds of thousands of lines of sourcey goodness to fulfill your coding dreams.

In the hands of professionals this all comes out good but that's rare.  Usually I see someone create a new XML schema then use that schema to feed into one process that generates mountains of code (usually needlessly) then generates another file which is used as input to configure a different but related process often running side by side with the generated version.  To top it all off they compensate for inadequacies in their new XML schema by imposing certain conventions like "the first node of type X is the default value" or "variables that don't have a type specified will default to type Y"

Come on people this stuff just isn't that hard!  Combining 3 good things does not create 1 great thing.  Usually the reverse is true.  Sex, milk and a good joke are all great, but not at the same time!

TTFN

Mr Bauer gave me a well deserved slap across the face and told me to cowboy up and quit complaining about how much is on my plate.  That along with the fact that I had a few minutes to spare while installing a new DNN site means I have something worth while to blog about for the first time in weeks.

LibriVox

Now that I have to drive to work I have to revisit and old problem "What does someone with ADD do while trapped in a car for 20 minutes?"  Podcasts you say?  Great, but I'm already caught up on all of the audio podcasts that are worth listening to and many of the ones that aren't.  I have fallen behind on video casts but....  What to do what to do?  Enter LibriVox.  I love this concept.  People record readings of books that are in the public domain.  There are thousands of books available and though you won't find the current best sellers you will find most of the classics.

Scribd

Another interesting twist on a successful model.  Scribd attempts to do for documents what Flickr did for images and YouTube did for videos.  The idea has some interesting possibilities and could be a boon for wannabe authors.  The implementation is solid, the idea is sound and yet it misses the 1 minute window that a web business has to pique your interest.  Perhaps it has just gotten to the point where I expect to be spoon-fed "pop info" and lack the desire to dig deeper than the surface.

CI Factory

I'm one of the laziest developers you'll ever meet.  I hate doing things twice.  I'm always looking for ways to make writing systems easier.  Given a choice between a well written, functioning code snippet that has already been tested and writing my own from scratch, I'll always choose the former (blaspheme to most coders).  Because of my overall theme of lazy development I fell in love with Continuous Integration even though it takes a bit of work to set up.  CI Factory may make even that part suitable for a man as lazy as me.  Admittedly I haven't taken it for a test run yet so I won't sing praises or profanities, but based on the demo video I plan to soon. 

I'm in the weeds.  I have a crap load of work on my plate that I don't think I'll be able to clear off for the next six weeks.  On top of that I've changed jobs so I've got a whole new industry to learn, a whole new code base to grok, a  whole new set of people to learn and a whole new group of people to train to worship me ;-}

So I just wanted to leave my mark to show that I'm not dead... yet.

TTFN