I've gone and put PSPlant on Sourceforge over here. This seems to be the start of a new phase of my work whereby I take everything that I create, however useless, and start a Sourceforge project for it. I started with Feedling, soon I'll start selling old clothes and stuff on it.
In other news, not a lot's going on. Work's busy, and I get to graduate again on the 29th! Going to be very exciting. Going to pick up some Chelsea buns from Fitzbillies - should make me suitably popular in the office. :)
Someone sent me this today. It's a new concept for interacting with computer desktops modelled on how a real desk behaves. Watch the video and then visit the site. It claims to be in a private beta, so hopefully it'll be available to try out soon.
I'd be interested to see how it works, as the guy is talking about moving away from a point-click type of interface. Creating new stuff is fine, but how that works when the main user interface device is fundamentally a pointy-clicky thing is yet to be seen. Maybe it's aimed at the supposedly upcoming touch-based interfaces...
The trouble with Openfiler, and other 'pre-built' appliances
I've been spending some time with OpenFiler over the past few weeks, and I've got mixed feelings about it. For those of you that don't know what it is, it's a linux appliance that allows easy configuration of storage and making that available on a network. It supports a bunch of things, SMB/CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and on the face of it seems to work rather well. On the inside, it's just rPath with LVM and some cleverness.
But then the small-yet-terribly-destructive bugs creep in, and you start to spend more time trying to figure out what on earth's going on rather than actually doing anything useful. This is a problem for me, because I like doing useful things. For example, I've found that under certain circumstances, you set up your physical volume, then your volume groups and then maybe an iSCSI partition and an ext3 partition - all seems fine, but then for no reason it drops the volume group. No idea what's happened. Google reveals nothing. I could try and learn LVM properly and then wade through lots of logs to figure out what's gone wrong, but that defeats the point of having a pre-built appliance in the first place. The whole reason for going with OpenFiler was that I didn't know anything about iSCSI on linux, and I didn't know anything about LVM. If it fails, it should do so nicely and tell me what's happened as opposed to just blanking me out and let me figure out myself what happened. Sure, it's nice that I've got that option, but correctly diagnosing and fixing the issue requires knowledge that would mean I probably wouldn't be using OpenFiler in the first place.
Consequently, I'm building my filer myself, using VMWare, Debian, LVM and lots of documentation. At least that way I'll learn something and actually be able to fix it when it breaks.