Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Blogger Stylee

Experimenting with my own blog that I can take offline quickly (USB Stick) in case of some reason why I would want to work offline. Like, I've got a client who I want to bill for something really juicy, and I don't want someone else to steal my thunder.

Normally, I like to work openly... there is perhaps no reason to make this an absolute policy, sometimes working transparently can actually affect your bottom line. Today, I believe there is good reason to work in the open, where others can benefit from your example.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Filesaqs and Development

So there are a couple of different kinds of files out there... source, binary, document, and as a scientist I'm sure I'll need to be prepared to deal with all of them. Network file-systems are expensive to maintain and deploy, in particular when visiting friends you really can't expect them to let you install your drivers on their boxes unless you're about to establish a serious relationship.

Sharing files and disk (sharing with yourself counts here also, for people who are multi-homed or multi-boxed to manage their instances across the various computers), you can make filesystems on disks and use networks to fill them up, transparently with DAVfs2, but more on that later...

liveusb-creator from Luke for some help with that development environment, the system is a static Fedora Core 9 live image, with a transparent overlay filesystem that can be used to keep all of your work on a USB stick. When it dies or is lost (inevitably this will happen) your changes will be preserved as long as you can maintain a backup of this overlay, which means storage requirements are pretty low, really people throw 2GB around like toilet paper these days, and the overlay can't get any bigger than that.