Obsolete Your Idols

Everything is a File System

Following a link from boingboing took me to doxpara which took me to the Linux Userspace FileSystem which took me to this excerpt:

You mount a gnetfs in ~/gnet. You wait a couple of minutes so it can establish its peer connections. You start a search by creating a subdirectory of SEARCH: mkdir ~/gnet/SEARCH/metallica mp3. You wait a few seconds for the results to accumulate. The you chdir to SEARCH/metallica mp3 and try a ls: surprise the files are there! You shoot up mpg123 and enjoy... You are happy.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, it's here...

Oh me, oh my. If someone implemented shadow-fs in it, maybe it'd get more press. Of course, it's already in Debian, so I have no excuse for not having heard of it before.

posted at 09:27 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link  

A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy

Belatedly got around to reading Clay Shirky's piece on Groups and Software, close kin to the keynote speech he gave at O'Reilly's Conference on Emerging Technology. It's got several head-smackingly duh points, explained in ways that are only so obvious because I'm looking at someone doing a better job of making them than I ever could. When developing software for group usage, there are three things you must accept about the system and four things you must design for in the system. Go read the piece yourself to get it in context. For additional insight and inspiration, here's a copy of the LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction document referenced.

posted at 08:44 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link