making
Infrastructure
So in the physical world, there’s tremendous constraints placed on a system by existing infrastructure. It defines and limits what can be done without significant extra resources expended - which means cost, complexity, risk, etc.
In a recent issue of Wired, there’s an article about how a new city in China is being designed with what amounts to a well thought out infrastructure optimized towards energy use
It’s an interesting contrast between that approach and the agile software approach of evolving the infrastructure (and the approach to infrastructure that’s true for most cities as well). Of course, the infrastructure in software is much more malleable than the physical infrastructure of a city - yet there are still great costs and challenges with evolving software infrastructure.
Why haven’t we figured out how to make this easier?
MacFuse - Sweet
Ok - so maybe it’s a sign of just how much a shiny-gadget-geek I am, but I love what’s possible with MacFuse (and MacFusion). For example, I have an existing website (at omnis.com) that doesn’t have a ssh account, so the only way to deploy / work on what’s there is via FTP. So when I need to work on it, I have to use FTP to push & pull code & data, but I don’t do it that often - so I’d have to right FTP client to do bulk transfer was a pain, etc. So now, turn on ftpfs via MacFuse and woila (as my 4 yr old says) - there’s the shooting match. Now, it’s an easy matter to bring it all back down locally, put in SVN (as it should have been years ago) and re-deploy to my new account at dreamhost.
No new functionality, just a greater ease of use - esp. since my muscle memory knows how to use either shell or finder interfaces to work with files.
Sophie, Squeak, Croquet
There seems to be more and more instances of platforms appearing which raise the level at which people can create, manipulate and share rich content in a rich context.
Sophie appears to be another interesting entry, in addition to Croquet and the etoys work in Squeak.
