When I first started hosting my own services in the ‘ol days of university, it was out of frustration with existing service levels. The campus gateway to the outside world would go down periodically, the free webmail services took hours to deliver email, hooking up the Internet cable to someone’s Windows box to do the sharing wasn’t reliable, etc.
So I sallied into the world of Linux I’d heard about. IIRC, I started with RedHat 5. Many man pages, web tutorials, and servers later, I ran my own email server, web server, play server, etc.
As the years progressed though, I’ve noticed:
- I’d rather buy a hardware router than go through the hassle of setting up iptables, even if the router gives me less fancy rules.
- I like gmail’s search, capacity, and reliability enough to give webmail another go, even if I can’t use mutt or do any fancy email processing or bouncing.
- Bloglines’ organizational structure and reliability seems “good enough” to give up running my own server based aggregator.
Am I getting lazy? Less free time? Held expectations constant while technology progressed? Who can say… I was even willing to give up vi (gvim) for a “good enough” IDE that finally appeared (Eclipse 2.1+), though thankfully I cheated that tradeoff thanks to a viPlugin for Eclipse.
Some other stuff I’d like to get off my desktop and into “the cloud”:
- Outlook (calendar, contacts, tasks). I use Plaxo, but it’s not quite the same experience.
- My music collection. This is just a function of cheap, high quantity storage space I guess. If the RIAA cooperated, one could save a lot of space by keeping single copies of songs and sharing them out, though.
- A multi-protocol IM client. With at least a half-decent UI, please.
Since I work with software, what I should be doing is taking the initiative and doing it myself. Alas, that kind of prolonged drive is hard to come by, and [for a mandatory excuse] I’m already embroiled in a software project already.
