After a few days working from home, here you have my preliminary conclusions about this first -and almost real- experience telecommuting:

• These have been highly productive days. You can be completely focused on whatever you are working on, and absolutely forget about your environment. For me, that means walking around my flat talking alone about the best way to implement something, asking my cat about the best names for important classes, having short naps when reaching a deadlock, etc. Well, the usual stuff when working alone :D
• I love the mid-morning shower. Forget about games, unlimited drinks, free food and sofas. Showers should be mandatory on every reasonable work place. Oh, wait! Sofas are great. All these days I’ve working from my confortable sofa. Forget only about games, drinks and food :)
• Second favorite and refreshing moment when telecommuting is the lunch break: visit your closest supermarket, choose some fresh products for a quick lunch, breath some fresh air, look at the faces of that other people around you, go back home, cook something tasty, relax for a few minutes and go back to work. I’m pretty sure this is way better than any massages given by someone hired by your super cool company.
• Working from home is great, but you need people around you, a cat is just not enough. 100% telecommuting is too much. Even they are not working in the same stuff, simply talking to other people is a powerful tool to stimulate your creativity. In a way, this works like the mutation operator in genetic algorithms. People around you charges your mind with diversity, fresh ideas and alternative points of view. Ok, this does not only apply when developing software, but I’m still only talking about that :D
• And finally, you need a life. You always need a life, but when telecommuting, it’s mandatory to have an active social life. You need something that forces you to stop working in your amazing project, leave your home and do whatever you want: have some drinks with friends, getting around by bike, … whatever, but leave you home.

So, to sum up, I’m loving it! :) It’s good for me and it’s great for the company. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t seem to be as popular as it should be in technological companies. Be that as it may, now I’m sure telecommuting needs to be part of that imaginary job I’m always looking for, of course, together with massive amounts of money and happiness, outstanding quality of life, exciting and changing challenges, etc. Mr jobs effusively explained the idea some years ago:

”[…] You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

  — Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

Duplicity 0.6.15 has been released! Now with built in Google Docs backend! Just thought that everyone would like to know this ;)

Almost ready for the ultimate apocalypse!

• ✔ Decentralized all my bookmarking using Google Bookmarks + Read It Later + a couple of Chrome extensions.
• ✔ Removed / migrated to wordpress.com & Tumblr all my previously self-managed WordPress sites.
• ✔ Purchased extra Google storage & uploaded all my photo albums to Picasa Web Albums synchronizing further changes using the desktop app.
• ✔ Scheduled incremental encrypted backups of all my stuff to Google storage using Duplicity + my homemade Google Docs backend plugin.
• ✔ Improved password management using Dropbox + KeePassX + OpenSSL & a few custom scripts.
• ✔ Still pending filtering all my old collections of MP3 files and uploading them to Google Music.

A couple of facts:

• DropBox & similar services are awesome & handy, but their prices are far away from the *extremely* low cost of purchasing extra Google storage (e.g. 80GB: $20 USD per year, 200GB: $50 USD per year, etc.).
• Duplicity is the definitive tool for encrypted efficient incremental backups of personal stuff.

Using Duplicity together with Dropbox is trivial, but it would be great to be able to store your Duplicity backups on Google storage. Currently Duplicity supports many storage backends such as ssh/scp, rsync, ftp, imap, Amazon S3, etc. In fact, using the imap backend you can easily store your backups in your inbox. It simply works, but it stinks, and I’m pretty sure it’s a GMail ToS violation :)

That’s the reason why I’ve implemented a new -and trivial- Duplicity backend -less than 100 lines of Python code- that uses the Google Documents List API -recently opened for uploading files with any content type- to upload backups to any folder in a Google Docs account (e.g. gdocs://carlos.abalde:s3cr3t@gmail.com/backup).

Feel free to check out the branch implementing this stuff, doing some tests (remember to install gdata-python-client; python-gdata package in Ubuntu) and sending me any feedback. And please, be friendly, it’s my first time in Python and also my first time using the Google Documents List API.

After upgrading my beloved MacBook Pro OS to Lion, MACFuse & SSHFS stopped working -once again-, this time displaying a nice message every time I tried to mount any filesystem:

/Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs/Support/fusefs.kext failed to load - (libkern/kext) requested architecture/executable not found; check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8).
the MacFUSE file system is not available (71)

It seems this time the problem was related with some module compiled using the wrong architecture. Tired of all this recurrent sh^H^H, I spent some time googling and I discovered that the MacFUSE project is dead -since 2008!-. That explains a lot. Luckily the project was forked some time ago by Fuse4X and it seems to work nicely.

If you are experiencing the same problems, follow these steps and make your life easier:

1. Uninstall deprecated MACFuse stuff. According to the Fuse4X FAQ this step is not required, but I like to keep my system as much clean & tidy as I can :)
2. Download and install the latest version of Fuse4X following the download link in the website. Currently Fuse4X 0.8.7.
3. Download the latest version of Fuse4X SSHFS. Currently SSHFS 2.3.0.
4. Unpack previous file: unzip sshfs-2.3.0.zip -d /. Binary and man page will be copied under /usr/local/.

At this point you should be able to mount any remote filesystem through SSH, and even more important, forget about all recurrent MACFuse problems, customized Tuxera versions, etc.

For further information about upgrades and uninstall instructions, refer to the Fuse4X FAQ.

Guys, I need a pet project, something really cool, awesome, legendary! But I have a job and I usually enjoy spending some time away from my laptop, so it shouldn’t be a 1M-lines-of-code project. Of course, I don’t want to use any mainstream technologies: Google App Engine, Erlang, Python or Scala would be great. Also very important: I don’t want to build user interfaces. Again: I don’t want to build user interfaces. An API could be ok, but please, not colors, buttons, layouts and all that shit. If you have any ideas, please, contact me :)