Category: Tech

The good news is that Node.js does run on Android. The bad news is that at least at the time I’m writing this the build process requires a few extra steps. Nothing too scary though. See below for details.

I evaluate below a bunch of backlog managers. I picked them based on what looked interesting. Not an ideal methodology but there are so many of these I had to narrow it down. The one that did everything I wanted was YouTRACK by IntelliJ, even the pricing was outstanding. But I rejected that option (for now anyway) because their UX is just too confusing for me. I actually had settled on Flying Donut and started to use them but I quickly realized that they were too simplistic. They didn’t do a good job of allowing me to manage iterations, epics and releases separately. So Tim Park had mentioned he had used Pivotal Tracker at his previous company and I tried them out. They aren’t perfect and their beta has some bugs but they had a really great balance between simplicity and flexibility. So hop on over to our new tracker and see how we are using them!

Zooko’s triangle proposes that a global naming system can be human meaningful, distributed or impersonation proof - pick 2. Below I look at Pet Names, the traditional way of handling Zooko’s triangle. Then I look at proposals that claim to actually solve Zooko’s triangle and show several attacks that these systems don’t appear to solve and so argue that Zooko’s triangle still stands.

Google announced that they may (the code is not officially supported yet) support PGP Mail in GMail. This might seem like an unabashed win for user privacy since it would make it impossible for Google to read their user’s mail. This article points out a number of problems with Google’s actions (I still think Google should be commended for doing this work) but I’d like to focus on a different issue than covered in the article - why digital signatures are a bad idea in general for social networking/email and how Thali deals with this problem.

Investigated how well Java runs on iOS. The answer is - it runs. But it seems like there are issues. I enumerate them below.

HTML5 is built on the assumption of a client/server web. Below I walk through the issues this raises for the peer to peer web. The good news is that we really don’t need terribly many changes to HTML5 to make it peer to peer friendly. Basically we need a new same origin policy that is based on certs rather than hosts, a way to handle mutual auth requests, standardized support for node.js (or equivalent) and a few other minor things.

HTML 5 contains a dizzying array of features. Below I created a cheat sheet identifying features that I think are likely to have some relevance to the peer to peer web. This is mostly for my own reference. Note that not all these features are actually part of HTML 5. Some were standardized separately. Some haven’t finished standardization. But whatever, this gives me a sense of the landscape.

Services built on a peer to peer web inevitably run into the synchronization problem. How do you keep state on multiple peers in synch? Below I walk through the assumptions and requirements that led me to believe a multi-master eventually consistent model is the best base to work off of.

I really need to synch both arbitrary structured data and blobs in in a multi-master peer to peer environment. Oh and I really don’t want to write the code to make this work and it has to work on a variety of mobile, desktop and cloud environments. And yes, I want a pony with that. Thankfully there are pony’s for everyone! The solution? CouchDB, duh!

To help me wrap my head around the peer to peer web I’m going to try and write out some requirements and scenarios. I am not going to worry about tightening up the requirements the way I would in a real spec or standard. My main focus here is to work through a variety of scenarios and get the lay of the land.

[Note: Updated on 9/5 to add section on web applications. Also note that everything to do with Paeony is NOT related to my employer.]