Tahoe-LAFS

I actually like the Tahoe community a lot; enough for me to want to contribute to it. Tahoe 1.6 was my first sponsored package into Lucid earlier this month, and I'd really like to get together with other local Coloradoans and sprint on Tahoe.

If you just want to see what Tahoe provides, you'll want to check out the Test Grid. It gives you a nice web interface to explore Tahoe. You can create directories, upload files, etc.

The web interface wasn't enough for me. I installed Tahoe, and then made a few KVM virtual machines and set up my own test grid (albeit a crippled version, as I was lazy and only wanted to set up the parts I to play with). My installation had some hiccups, but was incredibly happy to find that my tahoe mv and tahoe cp were working.

Being a web developer by day, I think the web interface could use a little more love, and could be a bit sexier, but I suspect that the web interface isn't the main way to add things to a Tahoe installation.

I'd like to find some ways to contribute to Tahoe in the future.

Node.js

Node.js is a cute idea. It's a web server for server side javascript. It may be a little perverted to say, but I really love javascript. Sure, it has its bad parts, but the good parts are pretty good. Naturally, this meant that I was curious to write server-side javascript.

As I was working on it, I started writing a little web app. I was handling post data and stuff. I was returning html. Pretty soon I was writing a templating engine and basically re-implementing Django/Zope/Rails/Your-Web-Framework-of-Choice. This really put me off, because there are better existing tools to build web apps than building something from scratch with Javascript (no matter how much I like Javascript).

One thing I thought was funny was that my server side javascript was sending javascript through in the response for the client to work with. This is a phonomenon I'd never encountered before: using the same language on the server and the client. It made me wonder what having python in the browser would be like.

I think I might play with Node.js again when I don't have to create an entire framework around it.