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While looking at a new flash drive, I spent some time looking again at PortableApps. In case you’ve never seen this, portable apps are basically apps optimised to run from your flash drive. So you can walk up to another computer, plug in your flash drive and feel right at home. I’d always assumed that PortableApps would be stateless and that settings would not be remembered between uses. I was wrong.

The first discovery was just how well thunderbird works from PortableApps. I run my own mail server, with remote access via IMAP over SSL. I have installed squirrelmail, but I’ve found it to be generally pretty slow on my low end hardware. So being able to plug in a flash drive and to be able to just run thunderbird for IMAP over SSL solves an immediate problem.

I was happy to discover that portable apps also quite happily allows you to install plugins for thunderbird and firefox. This is a great, I generally have about 10 plugins installed for firefox. For example, this means I can have bookmarks synchronised with foxmarks.

Ideally for something like this, you want to have all the mail cached locally so there isn’t too much time spent loading up messages. However if I do this and I lose the drive, someone would have all my emails. Even if I did not cache all my emails, they would still have cached the headers, which is far too much information.

Enter TrueCrypt, true friend of the appropriately paranoid. TrueCrypt is an encryption program that can encrypt whole drives. It includes a traveller mode for flash drives, just what I was looking for. Using TrueCrypt, you can encrypt the entire PortableApps folder, ensuring that if you lose your drive your data is still safe. Unfortunately it seems to require admin privileges, but in most cases that should be possible to arrange.

I haven’t bought the new drive yet, I’ll report any issues when I get it.

When I wake up I normally can’t get to sleep, regardless of what time it is.

This happened recently when I was helping an organisation test a web application. I woke up at about 1am and couldn’t get back to sleep, by about 5am I’d tested everything and written out a full report for them.

This morning I couldn’t sleep again, so I worked on solving what has been a long running problem for me.

I was looking for a flash drive to replace my current rather battered 1GB drive. Once my flash drive sat happily on my keyring. First the keyring connector broke. Then the plastic casing came apart and I was left with this:

It works just fine, sits in a jeans pocket well and has been through the wash safely at least half a dozen times. However I do leave it behind at times so I really want something that I can put on a keyring. The other problem is that I keep finding myself running short of space.

Unfortunately most flash drives have pretty fragile keyring links. There are some that don’t, but they seem to by ultra-rugged style drives that would be rather heavy on a keyring. Additionally, I don’t see the point of waterproofing flash drives. If mine has been through the laundry half a dozen times quite safely, what is the point? So long as it dry inside and out when I plug it in it should work just fine.

Fortunately I found the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium. Not too large, tough exterior and a good strong keyring link.

So unfortunately I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to work on my book library project. What with buying a unit, Christmas, going to NZ and helping test a software app on the side, I just haven’t had the time.

However I had made some progress.

I’ve done some basic work familiarising myself with python. I’ve come to the conclusion that it would have to be one of the best languages I’ve ever worked with. The only way I can describe it is as if C++ and perl reproduced and had a child that took the best features from both languages and none of the worst features. Glee! It is very easy to write nice clean code that makes sense.

I also bought a CueCat for scanning the barcodes. My reasoning was that it was cheap and was likely to have good support on many platforms since there are so many of them around. I’ve since found that it can be little slow to scan barcodes, but is certainly good enough for the moment. I’ve ported some code to decode the CueCat output from javascript to python.

My original plan was to build a GUI for this using wxpython. Since then I’ve discovered that the CueCat doesn’t need complicated drivers, it just dumps encoded output similar to the way a keyboard does. So there is no real need for a heavy client on a desktop, I can just skip to building the whole thing as a web application.

I’ve currently looking at different frameworks, but at the moment django looks pretty sweet.

Vic and I just got back from a great trip to New Zealand.

We had a lovely time there and took a lot of photos.