Weave, an addon for Firefox that syncs bookmarks, passwords, cookies, and the like, is very awesome. It is still in an early testing phase, and thus subject to the occasional hiccup, but when it works properly it can be quite handy. With the possiblity of it someday being able to sync other things, like plugins, browser settings, and plugin settings. It could soon be even cooler.

Just got back from Camp Dixie. I spent to wonderful weeks up there. I am tired and a bit worn out but nothing a night or 2 of rest and readjusting to my work schedule won’t fix.

17500 email messages today, mostly spam backscatter. Magic Mail Monitor to the rescue! I was able to quickly delete ~ 17000 messages.

I want a Firefox add-on that will let me cache select Wikipedia pages for offline reading, and automatically update the cache as needed.

Oh and work with my intranet TikiWiki as well.

So, some spammer decided to use one of my domains as the return address on their latest spam run, so I got stuck with the backscatter. 7435 messages this morning. Whee.

Friday, May 23 2008 I got up at 3:50 am and drove up to Camp. I stopped just inside the gate and changed into my tuxedo. I slowly drove into camp, with my windows down, hoping not to hear the dogs start barking.

Luck was with me and I parked at the Big House with no sign that Rhonda or the dogs were awake. I opened my trunk and started removing the boxes of tea candles (from the Dollar Tree). I placed the candles along the railing, lighting some immediately so as to not have everything spoiled if I was caught before I finished.

As I was working, I heard Rhonda open the side door and let 2 of the dogs out. That shook me a little. After getting all the candles placed, about 15 had gone out so I went back and re-lit them. My hand was shaking a little, and the lighter was losing some if it’s umph. I spread some rose petals (fake, from the Dollar Tree) on the ground and on the table, mixed in with the candles. Lastly I put some flowers (fake, from the Dollar Tree) on the table. All was ready. I took a deep breath and rang the doorbell. Nothing. Her doorbell doesn’t work. I went to my car, and honked the horn. Nothing. I went back to my car and did ’shave and a haircut’ on my horn.

Rhonda came out side wearing PJ’s and with a slightly befuddled look said “What? I need a jacket”. She then went back inside and closed the door to get a jacket. She came back out, this time I had enough time to actually ask the question. Her immediate response was

“No, no, now’s not the time!”

Fortunately I could tell she wasn’t answering me, she was just overwhelmed.

It took her about 15 minutes, but she eventually said yes.

We (she) called everyone and told them the news, then we cleaned out the gutters.

The Ring

Rhonda: “I couldn’t ask for a better engagement ring.”
Me: “Good, cause you’re not getting one!”

The next day we went to Wal-Mart and I bought her a $9 ring that she can wear even when she is working.

Anyone out there want to share Wii numbers?

As a heavy user of the Internet I have a lot of passwords. Initially I used a text file to keep track of them. Later I moved to a spread sheet, and finally to a password manager that ecrypts the password store.

Firefox also has a password manager, however it is fairly primative. I can’t store arbitrary information about a site or passwords for arbitrary systems. I can’t store the password data at a specific location or switch between password files for personal use and password files for work without switching Firefox profiles.

I can’t easily open up the password file in other applications.
The password manager doesn’t help me to generate passwords.

Someone, please make the password manager in Firefox more fully featured. Compatible with standalone apps and powerfull enough to use as my main password manager.

But not today.

I’ve been avidly watching the iFolder project for a while now. I’m currently using iFolder 2.0 at work and love it, I was thrilled to hear that iFolder went open source and have high hopes for the project. Progress on the peer to peer part has been dissapointingly slow, but understandable. The only real quibble I have is that the developers seem to be unecessarily complicating certain areas that should be simple.

Specifically , if I want to share a folder I should be able to designate an iFolder and create invitations that give the bearer the rights to access the share. Letting the user figure out how to get the invite to people, reduces complexity. Most people know how to send a attachment in email. Consider the invite a key, although an optional additional level of authentication, say a password, would be nice.

Other ideas:

Embed a user name inside the invitation.
If I send an invite to Fred and I suddenly see 300 simultaneous connections from computers using Fred’s invite, then I can disable that invite and possibly issue Fred a new one. If I want to issue seperate invites to 30 different friends, all to the same iFolder share, I can assign rights and even revoke the invites individually. If I want to issue a single invite to all my friends then I can. I can name the invites user as an individual “Bill”, or as a group “Website design team”. Individual machines IP addresses may change, and users may use same invite on more than one machine, but the name tells me who is connected. Allow the host to see who (based on name I assigned in invite) is accessing a share and on how many simultaneous connections.

File name only sync.
Create all the files and subdirectories but don’t sync any of the data (0 byte files). This allows for a quick sync, I can decide if I really want to subscribe to this iFolder, and lets me pick individual files to sync fully.

Secure / blind sync
Client computer gets only encryped copies of the files, allows users to let friends or family to host blind backups. Make sure to encrypt the file names too.

Move sync.
Moves files from host/server to client. Once the sync is complete, the file is deleted from the host but remains on the client. This allows me to easily move files from one machine to another.

Multiple levels of access on the same share.
Bill has read and write, but Ted only gets read access.

Revision control system built in.
Track versions of files and show who and when made what changes.

Scheduled / throttled sync
Allow the host to limit number of files to sync to others per day.
Don’t sync file until specific day and time.

P2P with Authoritative host
A central host has the Official versions of all files, all peers sync their changes with that host.
But when host is down, peers sync their files with each other until Authoritative host comes back online and straigtens things out.

Force Peer sharing.
Once server knows that there is a full copy of a file out on the peers, point all other peers to the peer copy of the file. Saves host bandwith.

P2P redunancy
Peers keep record of all other peers (and hosts) latest IP, peers only need to find one other peer still connected with the share to get reconnected to the host. Works even if host is not on stable ip. Have the host go out and try to find peers when the host restarts iFolder.