Pixelhum

One of my favourite albums is Marillion’s “Misplaced Childhood”. I wore out the cassette tape (remember them?) listening to it and I knew the album inside out. When I first listened to it on CD I noticed things I hadn’t heard before, particularly the singers wail as the guitar solo started, so I had to go back and listen to the tape again to see if it was there which, of course, it was.

Well, I’ve had the iPhone 4 for about 3 weeks now, so I can write a bit more about my first impressions with it.

AeroFS is a decentralised file syncing system, similar to Dropbox but without the online storage. Looks very interesting!

AeroFS is designed to let you go beyond simple file syncing and collaboration. You own devices with vast amounts of storage available (e.g. laptops, desktops), yet you are forced to rely on third party cloud technologies to sync and share files between them. Cloud-based syncing and sharing works well for small personal documents and limited media, but breaks down when we talk about use cases such as:

• Businesses sharing and collaborating on sensitive contracts and documents, where control over your data is truly important
• Sharing vast amounts of rich media (think hundreds of gigabytes), where cloud storage costs grow rapidly

To address these issues, we’ve designed AeroFS to be completely decentralized. You can sync files between any two (or more!) devices with or without Internet access, over a LAN, and behind a firewall. Your files do not need to be uploaded to the cloud, so you will retain full control of your data.

So on Thursday 24th June I decided to go and join the queue for the iPhone 4. Thankfully I was early enough and, after waiting for about 3 and a half hours they finally let me into the o2 shop to buy one.

I recently had to install PostgreSQL on Snow Leopard with PHP support for development. It took some fiddling and a re-install when I screwed up a dependency but I eventually managed to do it! I thought I’d document the process here for anybody else in the same boat.