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a man slumped on his desk, from 'The Sleep of Reason Produces
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Oblomovka

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Archive for August 12th, 2008

2008-08-12

digging tahoe; wattage update; @fontface!

After Sunday’s brunch conversation, where we idly dreamt of a capabilities-based distributed-hash-table fault-tolerant filing system, Jeremy took a closer look at Tahoe, Zooko’s project that I’m continually plugging without completely understanding, and noticed that that is exactly what it is.

Last time I played with Tahoe I blundered into a dark alleyway full of unmet python dependencies and got mugged, but the latest version installed a lot more cleanly, and we now have a mini-grid going. I’m also re-reading RFC’s 34013405 on the Dynamic Delegation Discovery System. I can’t honestly tell you why it feels to me like these are all interlinked, because I’m still at that point where it’s all just pieces looking rather sad on the floor of my garage. I have good instincts, I think, but slow to rationalise, and I backtrack alot. Right now, for instance, my instincts are to put the DiSo people, the AllMyData people, the Zeroconf person, and several bored iPhone hackers in one room, lightly steam them in mild entheogens, and then just when they’re getting somewhere, divert a stampeding herd of straight-edge yet angry and dissolute teenage router-distribution developers into the building. And that can’t be right, so I’ve clearly got some more thinking to do.

I’m going to start dividing up these blog entries when I mention more than one thing, for the love of the metadata. But these are really throwaway items: we discussed how much power a home server draws, and I pulled figures from beyond my arse, but I’ve just run Kill-A-Watt on my old MacMini powerserver (the one running this website), and it does indeed pull down around 17W average. My arse speaks sooth. Of course, I’m not taking into account the cable modem, and the wifi router, so I guess I need to look into that.

In other news, one of the oldest bugs (but not the oldest!) that I watch in Firefox (@fontface support) is getting some new love. Soon, all the major browsers will be able to use downloadable fonts, and then what fresh desktop-publishing linotype hell will we be in?