I’ve been extremely busy since wrapping up several library conferences in October. I’ve got a few projects we’re trying to finish in the office and several more that we’re working on for some member libraries. Every project has some sort of technology aspect these days. So I tend to be involved in almost everything. Oh, and I can’t believe that November is almost over. Where does the time go?
As busy as I am, I’ve still found time to play around with Mozilla’s Prism browser. I really shouldn’t call it a browser since it’s not intended for browsing the Web. The Mozilla site describes it best: “Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.” The idea is that as more applications move to the web, people will want a way to use those apps outside of their web browser. Prism is essentially a bare-bones browser intended to view a single website (web app). There are practically no bells or whistles like tabs, bookmarks, or customizations. Users create shortcuts on their computer that allow them to launch a web application just like any other application on their computer.
I was drawn to Prism by my own extensive use of web apps. When I launch Firefox, I have tabs automatically open for sites like Remember the Milk, Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Calendar. Should I have to keep those tabs open in Firefox all day and keep track of them among the other sites I visit? Would it be better to launch a web app from the desktop or from Firefox’s bookmarks? Intrigued by the idea of moving those apps to their own windows, I started using Prism for many of my applications.
While the concept of Prism is promising, it was a much different experience in practice. I found myself longing for many features that I had become accustomed to in Firefox. There is no find as you type in Prism. I never realized how much I use that feature. Many web apps offer their own integrated search, but it’s just so easy to hit the ‘/’ key and start typing search terms. I also miss the ability to easily adjust font sizes. Pressing Ctrl++ has no effect in Prism. Apparently Prism does have some support for extensions, but these must be loaded for each web app individually. Some extensions like Google Gears are not supported at all right now. I don’t use Gears much, but I like having it available for Remember the Milk and Google Reader if I want to use them off line.
Again, I think that Prism has a lot of promise. It has a lower memory footprint than Firefox and it’s nice to see the different applications showing up on my task bar instead of my browser tabs. Libraries may eventually find a use for Prism as a nice kiosk browser. It’s really easy to lock it down since it doesn’t have many features or menus. My problem is that I’m just too used to living in my web browser. Firefox is the only application that I always have open. Granted, if I used Prism I probably wouldn’t need Firefox open all the time. I guess old habits are hard to break.
I’ve also been playing around with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). For about a year now, Amazon has been offering a remote storage service with unlimited capacity. The storage and data transfer costs are cheap enough that S3 can serve as a nice off-site backup option. The catch is that the storage is made available only as a web service. If you want to store or retrieve data, you must write your own interface or use a third-party tool. Some of the tools are free while others are commercial. Jeremy Zawodny has a nice list of tools available for S3.
I started playing around with some of the tools to see which might work well for backing up our files at home. I started with Jungledisk since it is one of the more popular offerings and it’s cross-platform. With Jungledisk, I can mount a “bucket” on S3 just as if it were a drive on my computer. Unfortunately, Jungledisk kept failing on me for larger files. I don’t know if it’s a problem with just the Linux clients or what, but it just wasn’t reliable enough for me as a backup solution. I eventually tried S3sync and that seems to be working out well. It acts like the *nix utility ‘rsync’ and only transfers new and updated files to S3. That saves on transfer costs and time. Using a tutorial I found on automating backups with S3sync, I was able to set up automatic backups for our home server. I’m still getting some odd errors at time and apparently there are some bugs with the S3 service itself, but overall it’s a promising solution for disaster-proofing your data.
So the point is that even though I’m buried in projects at work, I’m still trying to find time to play with newer technologies. Playing with cutting-edge stuff doesn’t always pan out, but every now and then you find a gem.
