[ExI] Got blog!

[Emlyn]

2008/8/26 BillK <pharos at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 4:13 AM, Emlyn wrote:
> <snip>
>> Some of this idea came out of working in corporate server environments
>> a lot, in a consulting capacity. What you find is, you are always on
>> these plain vanilla (windows) machines, and you don't have your tools
>> at hand to reach out and touch stuff. Furthermore, the machines aren't
>> online, and you can't just willy-nilly install stuff on them. What I
>> wanted (want) is a tool that could have all the stuff I need, that I
>> can hand to an admin and say "install this one thing for me", and
>> there's all my gear.
>>
>
>
> I'm maybe missing the point here, but isn't a bootable USB stick with
> your own software tools running from the the USB stick what you want?
> That (and bootable CDs) is what I use for cleaning virus-laden pcs and
> installing new software.
>
> There are several online packages of portable apps than run happily
> from usb or cd without installation.
> e.g. http://www.app-stick.com/
>
>
> BillK

The sort of stuff I have to do usually involves diagnosing problems
with custom software, so I need to be running under the host's
installed OS, rather than using my own bootable USB device. But yeah,
usb devices are cool, I go for notebook drives or harddrives in
enclosures usually. This thing could be used in that manner.

But think corporate servers. Very often those servers still don't have
usb 2.0 ports (seriously). And you can't get to the network (let alone
the internet), and you don't have install privilleges, it goes on. So
that's a use case for this thing.

There's another use case, probably more important now that I think of
it, which is to act as a shell for utilities. I find myself spending a
lot of time building one-off gui utilities to do various things, most
often special case and applicable to only the project I'm working on
(eg: at work I've recently spent months writing a set of gui tools for
working with a comms protocol, very specific stuff). There's a lot of
reinventing the wheel in doing that; every gui app wants a menu,
toolbars,  status bars, file load/save mechanisms, multiple document
instances, autoupdating, you know, stuff. Maybe even some integrated
help if I really have nothing better to do. So this editor will make
developing those kinds gui tools much quicker (you just build a plugin
in visual studio, using all the designer based tools if you want to).

I didn't really want to get into this onlist, it's an open source
project but really at this stage it's for me; it's at the stage of
making something that I'd find useful, and if I get to the end of
that, I'll think about the next stage (you know, other users).

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com - my home
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http://speakingoffreedom.blogspot.com - video link feed of great talks
on eCulture
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