Unique Kings

This weekend, I will be participating on the field at the Plano Baloon Festival.  This requires to use of a portable rig (in most cases, this is a handheld radio).  Unfortunately, I do not have a handheld radio.  In the back of my mind, I know that I’ve been wanting to build a backpack-ready setup for my Yaesu FT-7800 mobile radio, and this seems like the perfect opportunity.

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There has to be some balance between a fully developed content management framework and flat a wiki with little to no real control over presentation or security.  I understand that some CMF’s are generally lightweight and some wiki’s do allow for templating and ACL’s - but none of them really “fit in” to what I’m looking for.

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Starting in mid-2007, duplicity gained the ability to store and retrieve backup sets directly on to Amazon’s S3 service. This addresses each of the issues I mentioned in a previous post “Backups, A Home-Grown Solution“.

1. Remote file dump is encrypted
2. Remote files are small enough to burn on a standard CD-ROM
3. Files never live on disk unencrypted - ever
4. Backup files should live ONLY on the remote server
5. The whole system should be backed up
6. Only commonly available tools should be used
7. Backups should be quick and automated
8. Reconstruction of a backup should take less than an hour
9. Support full, differencial, and incremental backups
10. Simple to redeploy on another host

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So, I’ve switched from Drupal to WordPress on this site…  Despite my ongoing infatuation with Drupal, I can’t get past the fact that the easy things are always so hard.  That being said - the difficult things that I normally have to deal with when setting up a site were really easy.   Odd, eh?

Well, for whatever reason - I decided to take FreeBSD out on a date recently.  In fact, I enjoyed myself  so much I brought FreeBSD home and installed it on my home server (replacing Debian/Lenny).

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To the tune of Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up.

We’re no guests in this net.
You know the tendency, and so do I.
An aging system’s what I’m thinking of.
Ignoring this just makes our risk too high.
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To the tune of Suicide is Painless (aka - M*A*S*H theme song).

Through early morning fog I see
Vsions of what used to be
The walls of datacenter three.
The water came up to my knees.
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One thing that really bugs me is when application developers (or product management) makes serious mistakes which improperly confuse or cause problems for less experianced users.  One such example is the still-open bug with Outlook Express which is managing to single-handedly prevent the wide-spread use of secure certificates. [Read the rest of this entry...]

To the tune of Forever and Ever Amen by Randy Travis.

You may think that I’m talking noobish.
You’ve heard that my software is free.
You may wonder how I can involve a cow
In every Perl script or shell script that you’ll ever see.
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Ok Microsoft, I suppose I’ve got to give credit where it’s due.  While Microsoft Windows drives me up the wall sometimes, you’ve always seemed to pull out in the lead when it comes to deep integration between products.  OneNote is a shining example of that quality.

In the free software world, there’s really nothing that comes close to the ease of use that OneNote provides for keeping track of many different ideas in a way that puts the user at the steering wheel.  While there are a number of things I’d like to see made easier (such as advanced formatting and integrated spreadsheets), overall the quality of the product is very good. 

For someone with a very visual mind, it’s extremely helpful to place the notes visually on the page just by clicking there.  The same goes for the groups, tabs, and pages.  By grouping tabs visually, it helps to block out the clutter of other ongoing projects.  If information is needed from another tab - it’s possible to create links to take you directly to the paragraph where the information lives elsewhere in the document.

The tags are very well done and make to-do lists and hilighting/categorizing important notes pretty straightforward.  Megan and I use OneNote quite a bit for keeping up with our various projects we have going on around the house and our “honey-do” lists.  Keeping track of information from web research is easy as well with the visual clippings and automatic reference tracking with clipboard pastes.

I guess my biggest issue is that I’m bitter that I can’t have something like this in the open source world.  File formats aside, there’s nothing out there to replace the functionality of OneNote.  The closest thing I’ve found is wiki-style, and that doesn’t really fill the same shaped hole in my brain.

Word is nothing special.  Outlook and Access are overrated, IMHO.  Excel does charts better, but that not enough to pull me in.  OneNote though - there’s your killer app in my book.