Recently I have been giving a lot of thought to the Software as a Service concept. The basic idea behind this catch phrase is that rather than paying a lot of money up front for a piece of software and/or server combination you subscribe to the software online and have it hosted remotely. There's obviously a couple of concerns over such a model, firstly you have got to trust that these companies do not go out of business plus you have to be confident that your Internet connection (and theirs) will be working whenever you need the service. A lot of these myths have been put to rest as this Business Week article illustrates, but for hard-core (old school) network administrators the idea of out-sourcing essential software sends cold shivers down their spines.

Anyway one thing that really blew my mind the other day was Amazon's new S3 service. On the surface it seems really simple, a basic web service that provides cheap online storage (US$0.15 per Gigabyte for storage per month). What is exciting is the ramifications, if somebody (like you or I) want to store a lot of information for ourselves or others online there is no need to invest in big servers and fat Internet connections to serve that data. It also means that by design your web applications will scale effortlessly at least in the sense of the data storage mechanism assuming Amazon's server farm is up to the task. I have signed up for an account and read through the documentation and some of the features are pretty nice (access control lists, time sensitive url's and a lot more). There has been very good things said about it on TechCrunch and other places, plus some criticisim for not supporting the very simple XML-RPC protocol (which would have been very nice to have in simple applications).

The cost of redesigning an old table/image based site around CSS can be outweighed by the bandwidth savings as associate art director for ESPN.com Mike Davidson points out:

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2003/06/espn-interview

In the interview he explains the logic behind the ESPN.com redesign and the massive bandwidth savings they were able to achieve (approximately 730TB a year). Given the actual saving per hit was only 50Kb the huge overall bandwidth illustrates the magnitude of the Web space. Designing high-bandwidth sites with lots of images, table-based design or even worse Flash is just asking for trouble in the long-term if the ultimate objective is to create a popular site. It is no good generating lots of advertising revenue from page views if this traffic ends up costing far more.

Late last week Apple released Boot Camp, a tool that greatly simplifies the installation of Windows XP on Intel Mac hardware. Obviously this tool has been in development for some time, it and the included Windows drivers CD image are very slick. Once hackers managed to figure out how to get Windows XP running on the Intel hardware a few weeks ago it must have been decided within Apple that now was a good time to let the cat out of the bag.

OSX and Windows after Boot Camp (click to enlarge)

Last night I used Boot Camp to install Windows XP on my Intel Mac. The process was very smooth and the instructions provided by the software could not have been clearer. After about an hour I had a fully functional Windows XP install with graphics, wireless, bluetooth and sound all working without hassle. In fact it was significantly less work to set Windows up on an Apple Mac than it is to do the same with a Dell machine. Hopefully this tool will urge Dell and HP into action in this regard.
Another nice touch is that the Windows volume is accessible from OSX so it is straightforward to copy things to the Windows partition. Unfortunately as Windows does not support HFS (yet) the reverse is not possible.

Novell recently released a developer testing version of their XGL extensions for the X-Server. This is good news as it finally paves the way for a Linux equivlalent of Expose for OSX. Expose is the best addition to OSX and is something I have become totally accustomed to (I have my hotspot in the bottom right corner of the screen). Whenever I sit in front of a non-Expose equipped desktop (Windows/Linux) I often find myself gestering to the bottom corner with my mouse only to find nothing happens. With Novell putting their weight behind this initiative it has finally paved the way for what many consider as 'eye candy' (and what I consider as an essential piece of functionality). If you are running the Beta of OpenSUSE 10.1 there is some relatively simple install instructions for the XGL extensions available on the Wiki.

After having my fair share of backup dilemmas and stress Tim Bray's post at least gives hope that I am not alone. It is strange that there really are not that many decent backup products considering how simple the task really is.

The most effective backup system I have used is the one I wrote myself for Linux servers. It is simple, flexible, non-proprietary and most importantly it seems to work without hassle. It comprises of a bash script and some configuration files.

The bash script compresses gzipped tar archives onto a removable hard drive. In most cases I use two removeable drives for redundancy. Typically all user data is stored in the /home directory with a few special directories: media (music/movies), temp and data shared amoungst the users. The /home/data directory holds most of the office data and as such the backup script breaks archiving of this data into smaller pieces in order to facilitate easier restoration.
The backup script stores multiple backups on disk to ensure that a corrupted backup does not lead to significant loss of data. The backup usually runs every night with the removable disks swapped during the day. On completion (or failure) of a backup an automated email is sent out to interested parties.

InstaLinux makes it easy to create a template iso for your favourite installation. If you are planning on installing multiple copies of a Linux distribution using the same settings this little tool steps you through the process of selecting default packages, partitioning, update strategies and default user details. I have not yet tried downloading an iso an using it for real but the end result is hopefully as painless as the website's functionality. Supported distributions are various versions of SUSE, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu.
A great resource and well worth checking out.

FireAnt brings video, RSS and tagging together into a very tidy package used for automatically downloading video content onto your desktop or personal media player. It is interesting that people can construct their own 'channels' which are a series of different (or similar) shows and act like a mini-CNN, Discovery Channel or E!

Whilst Apple's iTunes video service it is still targeted at the 'pay per episode' model it would be nice to see a competitor offer something that worked with the concept of channels. We do not have the bandwidth or the iTunes video store in New Zealand but it would be nice to imagine a day where I could subscribe to and pay for mini-channels produced by people of my same interest group featuring both commercial content, videoblogs and adverts. For example I would gladly subscribe and pay for a channel that played the Simpsons, TWiT, Discovery Channel documentaries about space, the highlights of BBC World News and an episode of Lost. That would be a great night(s) television watching. Plus I would not mind the adverts as long as they related to me (ie nothing about retirement, womans products or toilet paper). Conventional broadcasting models do not allow for this but digital video based environments like what are evolving certainly do.

Tab Mix Plus is a great extension for Firefox. One thing I do not like about a default Firefox install is the appearance and functionality of its tabs. Tab Mix Plus provides a stylish new tab button, close tab icons on each tabs and tab session saving functionality all in one small extension. Everything works smoothly and there are a tonne of configuration options for everything from keystrokes to mouse buttons. Overall probably the best extension to Firefox I have used so far, hopefully it gets folded into the main tree in the future.

Over the weekend I finished the transition from my PowerBook to the Intel based iMac as my primary development platform. Rather than use the PowerPC only Flock or stick with Safari I have started using an unofficical Intel compiled version of Firefox. Performance is excellent and there are no issues with reliability, Java or Flash.

Installing Rails and ImageMagick turned out to be very straightforward thanks to DarwinPorts, the Rails on OSX wiki and the ImageMagick on OSX howto. Currently there is no Intel compiled DarwinPorts binary but fortunately it compiled from source without issue (once the Apple Developer Tools were installed).
In the process I found a nice Eclipse plugin for Ruby on Rails named RadRails.