Infinite State

Although it makes me feel old to think back over the various application architectures I’ve learned in the past 25 years, there’s some consolation in the perspective I’ve gained. While I don’t get the same electric buzz from being introduced to a new one, it can still be exciting in a quieter way. And given that my business and technical life has been web-centric for the past decade, my frustration with the limitations of how we build web apps makes me eager for whatever comes next. Web 2.0 advocates will say it’s here now, that Gmail and its ilk built with JavaScript and DHTML in the browser are ushering in the next generation as we speak. And a quick search on Google yields the unsurprising news that a conference is already planned (with Mary Meeker speaking???)…but I don’t think the actual architecture for building these apps is there yet.

Web 2.0
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It seems like no one talks much about what to do with old mail. I asked a few uber tech friends and the answers weren’t convincing. If anything, it made me reconsider whether saving mail really made sense. When was the last time you looked for something more than a few months old?

But it pissed me off that there wasn’t a simple solution and I wasn’t about to part with a few years’ worth of typing. Damn it, those were my *tendons* I’d spent on all that typing. So I spent some frustrating hours trying to figure the best way to keep my old mail around with the twist that my mail is sitting in an IMAP server far away. Or rather, in the mail directories on my hosting account accessed through that IMAP server. Turns out, there’s no obvious or consensus way I could find to deal with it, and since I was just about using up my quota for the account I had to.

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I’ve been using the latest Google Desktop Search beta, and generally liking it. While there are some things I’d like to see done differently, it’s immediately useful in a way that changes your expectations for how to use your computer — and that’s significant. I thought I’d share some experiences and compare it to other options in this category.

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I rejuvenated an old desktop, and found it was still a fine machine but way too noisy. I’d replaced the motherboard awhile back, with a stock Celeron for CPU…and Intel’s heat sink/fan was like a small jet plane. So I sprung for the latest lovely Copper device from Zalman (CNPS7000B-Cu), folks who make really smart and *quiet* CPU coolers.

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As a leading-edge, early-adopter techno-Earth-muffin type, patience hasn’t been my cultivated strength. But I’m starting to wonder if it wouldn’t make a good decade-long project, to see if just waiting for things to get built by other people isn’t a better approach. I could spend my newfound time whipping up a tasty snack, reading some of the books waiting on my shelf, or noticing how beautiful the sky is.

I would *really* like it if there was a calendaring application available to use instead of Outlook, with a simple and enjoyable rich web interface, where the data was stored someplace safe (my server, maybe someone else’s), and it was smart enough that I can pass vcal and ical data to it for import. Am I willing to sit down and start writing it now?

I think I’m going to try waiting and see what happens.

So I spent a little time today looking into Ruby on Rails at last. I got it set up, did a tutorial, tweaked some code, broke and fixed it.

Fascinating.

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