I don’t travel too often when it’s not work related. However, when I do get to travel for “fun” I would rather not have my laptop, netbook, Thinkpad, or other weighty computing device with me. The exception is my Blackberry and my iPod. (I hope to collapse those together someday). At the same time, I want to be able to get my personal email, blog, edit photos (for my blog), and on the rare occasion, mess around with the guts of my website. And, for good measure, let’s say I’m trying to build a farmhouse and all of my materials information is stored as bookmarks in Firefox.

My solution is "”Portable Apps”. There are good implementations of most of my required travel companions and one passable implementation. Here is what I travel with:

• GIMP Portable – Photo and Image Editor
• FileZilla Portable – the full-featured FTP client
• Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition – the handy email client
• Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition – the award-winning web browser that’s safe and secure (with the Foxmark plugin)
• 7-Zip Portable – File archiver and compressor
• Windows Live Writer, Portable – Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using your current blog service.

In case you were wondering which is the “passable”, it’s Windows Live Writer. The author is doing a pretty good job but there are a couple of issues like it must be installed to the root of the portable media and it occasionally has forgotten my configuration.

I was about to try MojoPac but the forums are littered with negative commentary so I will hold off until I have time and a device to spare.

I have also used a 1GB flash drive for the above so it is pretty compact. There are some other options but this one is my current choice. Things often change. Your mileage may vary. Stay tuned for updates. yada, yada, yada.

I recently saw how a virtual team of a few hundred people chose to share information.

1. setup a “community” to manage membership and let participants choose to subscribe and un-subscribe. GOOD
2. setup a Wiki to establish a calendar of meeting topics. OK
3. setup a “quick” file sharing site for posting presentations. GOOD
4. email out the links to the above three sites. BAD, BAD, BAD

The email is not ideal but it is one way to get out the work to likely participants. The really bad part is the the three different spaces were not integrated. There should have been a single place that all of the content appeared – even if it were in three different tools.

The community makes self-registration easy. The Wiki supports simple group editing of the calendar topics. The file sharing means there is no need to email or forward slides and demo files around.

A mashup of all three capabilities would have given all users a single URL to bookmark. Ideally, there would be a small number of RSS/ATOM feeds for new content – one for everything, one for everything but community changes, one for meetings and files, etc.Users choose how much information they get. The “team space” appears as a single solution and functions as a single solution – not as separate pieces left to the user to manage.

Editorial: I don’t think this is too much to ask. If you want people to use your soluitons, you need to make then user friendly.

If you are a Microsoft Windows user and need a “relatively” simple solution for screen capture and editing – say, for uploading to YouTube – then you might find the combination of Microsoft’s Windows Media Encoder and Microsoft Movie Maker a good place to start. There is a tutorial on how to use the two together but it is not that difficult.

I used this technique for my “spiral staircase” video.

My primary work machine these days is a Thinkpad X60 with only a 1024×768 screen. This means I must be diligent to keep “always on” applications to their bare minimum size.

I got rid of all the cool UI space hogs like Docks. I added a virtual desktop solution (VirtuaWin) and my taskbar is only one row deep. The one thing I wanted was a quick way to get to a number of freqently used folders and applications. I couldn’t put them on the desktop becuse that was covered up 100% of the time and I didn’t want them on my taskbar since it was getting crowded already. What I wanted was the Stack UI that you see on the Mac and on Windows and Linux when you have a Dock running. I wanted Stacks from my taskbar.

StandaloneStacks gives me simple groups of shortcuts – either in a grid or a fan – direct from the taskbar. I now have a stack of “places” (ala Ubuntu); a stack of “work applications” (VPN, corporate email, IM, etc.); and a stack of “specialty apps” (internet tools, graphics software, etc.)

Now I need to find a utility that let’s me snap my IM client to the side of my screen and auto-hide it until my cursor touches the side. I know I saw something to do this before but I can’t find it now … @$%#$%@$.

I was blog surfing this morning and came across a post at Bill de hÓra talking about web applications. I’ve suffered through too many software architecture meetings where 3-tier design was *absolute* only to be followed up a year later by software architecture meetings where our entire focus was on making our 3-tier solution *work*, *perform*, *scale*, etc. and addressing all of the customer issues we generated the year before.

Many large enterprise web applications tried really hard to implement a Physical Three Tier Architecture … The idea is that you have a physical presentation tier (usually JSP, ASP, or some other *SP) that talks to a physical app tier via some form of remote  method invocation (usually EJB/RMI, CORBA, DCOM) that talks to a physical database tier (usually Oracle, DB2, MS-SQL Server). The proposed benefits of this approach is that you can scale out (i.e. add more boxes) to any of the physical tiers as needed. 

Great, right? Well, no. It turns out this is a horrible, horrible, horrible way of building large applications and no one has ever actually implemented it successful. If anyone has implemented it successfully, they immediately shat their pants when they realized how much surface area and moving parts they would then be keeping an eye on.

The main problem with this architecture is the physical app box in the middle. We call it the remote object circle of hell. This is where the tool vendors solve all kinds of interesting what if type problems using extremely sophisticated techniques, which introduce one thousand actual real world problems, which the tool vendors happily solve, which introduces one thousand more real problems, ad infinitum…

It’s hard to develop, deploy, test, maintain, evolve; it eats souls, kills kittens, and hates freedom and democracy.

Source: Ryan Tomako (2005) quoted in a post on Bill de hÓra

I can talk from experience that the more layers you have the more you will regret it in hardware costs and software costs but mostly in human costs. The ratio often is somewhere near 10:1 for the cost of people vs HW/SW – and that is just short term. The customization, maintenance, and administrative costs are insane. And the more people involved, the more oversight needed and the costs continue to go up. And the system is so complex that even a small amount of turn over in the staff can bring the solution to a halt so you need human redundancy which again adds to the cost.

So I agree with Ryan in that “it eats souls” and it may indeed have the blood of kittens on its hands. If not kittens, I bet more than a few heads rolled for the cost of a 3-tier solution. Unfortunately, the heads that chose 3-tier have long since been promoted and it is the workers left on the shop floor who have lost arms and legs to the 3-tier web application monsters.