Lately I have two programming project ideas I've been mulling over. I think there is a place for a good, solid, general peer-to-peer framework. It seems to me that the need for a dedicated pieces of "server" software is something of an obsolete idea. Any number of interesting and useful apps could be built on top of a good p2p framework: calendars, email, im, file sharing, etc. Part of what got me thinking about this was ++jwz 's recent post about the evils of groupware and a conversation with ++nat. As he mentions there, all interesting modern software is social.

The second idea stems from a problem I have organizing my personal information. I need an information manager that encourages me to organize my output (code, blog shit, work stuff, email, ims, etc). On top of that I'd like to be able to search for things, have transparent versioning, and be able to sync to multiple locations (perhaps using a p2p framework of some kind :P). The key thing here is it needs to get the hell out of the way. I want to be able to work normally while this stuff is automagically happening for me.

I know there is already a lot of work happening in both areas. beagle seems to be a very good start in the information indexing area, for instance. Version control is done to death. Etc. I'd like to see if I can't pull all of this under one umbrella without it becoming an over-complicated steaming pile.

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Actually, I guess I shouldn't speak to highly of beagle yet. It's proving to be a real pain in the ass to get working. I'm using mono 1.1.4 and beagle from cvs (yes, I have the other pre-reqs installed). When I start beagled it seems to run for a few moments before simply going away, never to be heard from again. It refuses to answer queries or pings. I'm not seeing anything in the debug output that seems indicative of a problem. If I had to guess I would say there's some kind of a threading problem here (race condition, perhaps). I'm going to let it hang out over night and see if it produces any new output. I'm fairly disappointed. I was really looking forward to trying it out.

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Is it just me, or is opensource getting sexier? There is so much hot shit happening in oss: cairo, xgl, mono (and all of the goodies it has spawned), etc. Wow!