Things on my mind. George Drapeau's Weblog

Palm's new WebOS running the new Pre phone emulator inside VirtualBox, running on Mac OS X, courtesy of Engadget.

Coooooooooooool.

As I'm learning how to use Drupal for creating and deploying web sites, I'm keeping track of it in blog entries.

The way I work: I do my development on a virtualized environment: I run OpenSolaris as a guest OS under VirtualBox; that way, I can easily blow away my development/test environment or send it to other machines running VirtualBox.  Then, I install the WebStack (PHP, Apache web server, MySQL), then I install Drupal using the instructions on the drupal.org web site.

Once I get my test Drupal site working, I follow these instructions to deploy to an actual production server.  It makes the develop-test-deploy cycle pretty easy, and I can develop and test pretty much anywhere.

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I've got lots to update here, including my experiences using OpenSolaris as my home file server which I've been using for a couple of months now with success.

But now, I want to take just a minute to mention a really cool Mac OS X app that I use every single day: it's called Notebook, from a company called Circus Ponies, and it's wonderful.

For years, I've carried around a physical book to write notes in: you know, catch meeting notes, take action items, that kind of stuff.  I switched to a Franklin planner some years ago and found it helpful for me to organize myself.  But there were always some things that I couldn't put into my Franklin filing system, like presentations or technical documentation.  Also, I have horrible handwriting and I'm slow at it (but fast at typing), so I looked for a way to do all of this on a computer.

That's what I use Notebook for.  The metaphor is a spiral notebook: the app looks like a spiral notebook and you just start typing into it.  It's trivially easy to make outlines, just by using Tab or Shift-Tab.  Making action items is similarly trivial: as you're typing whatever, just press Command-Control-A (action) and it's now a to-do item with a little checkbox next to it for you to click when you're done.  Want to give that to-do a due date?  Type Command-Control-T (time) and type "today" or "wednesday" or "6/1/2009" and it'll do the right thing.

If something you're typing refers to something else like a URL, there's a simple command you type to attach the link; you see a little icon next to whatever you were typing.

Want to link a document to your notes?  Just drag it onto your typing and a thumbnail of your document will show up, and Notebook will keep track even if you move the document around your directory tree.

Notebook has a nice indexing mechanism, too: for each notebook you make, it adds some standard pages to the end, like a To Do Items page, a an index of words (like you'd see at the end of a text book), a page showing all your attachments you've dragged into the notebook, and some other things that make sense once you've started using some of the other cool features.

I love this app.   I think it's a beautiful Mac application, and it really does help me stay organized.  I'm not even scratching the surface of what it can do.

Check it out.  Or as with just about everything nowadays, become a Facebook fan of Notebook.

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Looks like the VirtualBox people keep chugging along (although if you're moving at 150mph, is it right to call it "chugging"?).  Yesterday I saw they've released version 2.2, which supports the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).  This is what I like about it: when I want to share my software configuration with somebody, I make a vbox image and give it to somebody, but then they have to know the vbox VM configuration I used.  That means they have to go into the vbox UI and manually set up the same settings I did.  It's not difficult, but it's error-prone and it's tedious.

No longer: now I just tell VirtualBox to create an appliance out of my vbox image and it creates two files: an OVF image and the OVF description of that image.  When my co-worker wants to use my appliance, she tells vbox to import that appliance (the OVF description) and it does the right thing.  No configuration, nothing: it's just ready to go.  Nice and easy.

Jignesh Shah tried it out yesterday and created a relatively small-footprint OVF appliance of PostgreSQL 8.3.

I think this is going to be the way to distribute software in the near future.  And if not the way, then a valid way.  Virtualized images solve a few problems that I can think of:

1. You don't have to worry about which operating system the customer has deployed on their desktop or server; as long as they're running a hypervisor, you can deliver your software to them easily, nicely pre-packaged in a virtualized image "appliance";
2. it eliminates the install step for trying software: you've already packaged up your app in an appliance, no installation needed for the customer just makes things simpler and faster for them to get rolling;
3. The transition to cloud computing becomes easier; if you use a virtualized image on your desktop, you can use the same image on a cloud like Sun's cloud computing offering, Amazon EC2, or other clouds that I'm sure will come online over the next few years.  This gives customers the flexibility to run apps where they want, and to migrate to/from clouds.

JumpBox is one example of a company that provides open source applications in virtualized appliance format, but also lets you try their appliances right now, for free, on a cloud: it's JumpBox.  Nice idea.

TurnKey Linux seeems to be something similar; I haven't looked much into it yet so don't know if they offer the cloud preview feature that JumpBox provides, but they do have the download-an-app-in-a-virtualized-image feature.

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