Fleeing from Catch Notes

Catch Notes terminates on August 30, 2013. Catch (ThreeBanana earlier) was the best note taking app to (sic) take notes. I.e. it doesn’t have all that colorful UI clutter requiring N taps for a simple action. It mostly serves (text) note taking with light organization and sharing features. It has mobile apps, cloud storage to sync and web UI for desktops. Where to flee now?

Simplenote seems to be an appealing cloud text synchronization service with an open API. But no satisfactory alive Android apps. And Google Trends clearly predicts it goes to the same end as Catch.

OK, what’s else? The remaining most popular note taking apps for Android are ColorNote, Evernote and InkPad. Evernote is overloaded and pricy, it's just completely another kind of apps. But the other two look light. Both have cloud sync but it triggered manually. No sharing and

• ColorNote can import notes from Catch but has no desktop or web client (it’s just planned) and no good way to organize notes. Though the Android app is convenient, has wiki-links between notes and ability to archive notes.
• InkPad has no organize tools too but has a web UI. Android app UX is a bit tough.

OK, what’s next? Google Keep, MobisleNotes, Microsoft OneNote and Springpad. OneNote and Springpad are by no way easy to use. Moreover OneNote brings SkyDrive - way too much for just a note taking app.

• Keep - are you imagine keeping several hundred notes there?
• MobisleNotes - has folders, supports collaboration on notes, but the app was not updated for year now and developers “planning the future of the service” since April 2013.
• Springpad - is it a note-taking app or a Pinterest prototype? Last time I gave it a try it clearly lost to Catch.

Last tier worth to consider - apps with 500,000+ installations on Google Play. GNotes and Simple Notepad by mightyfrog.

• GNotes uses a bit exotic cloud storage - GMail. Thus it relies on Google’s will which may change.
• Simple Notepad is like InkPad minus web UI - it uses Dropbox for sync.

The remaining apps in Play Market are not worth to consider taking their user base in account.

Finally. Either ColorNote or Evernote. Both have utilities to import from Catch. Both are harsh compromises.

Virualization cost for build automation

It is a build time trend chart from a Jenkins job building a Maven project. Around build # 480 the job was switched from a bare metal builder to a same size virtual machine. Average build time increased for ~25%.

The job was running on a dedicated Jenkins slave machine running CentOS 6 Linux. Earlier it had an i7 4 core + HT CPU with 8 GB RAM and software RAID0 over 2 rotating disks. Then it moved to a Xen 4 virtual machine (paravirtualized) with the same characteristics, only CPU logical cores number was set to 7 instead of 8. No other load was put on this physical box. So the performance drop is due to virtualization only.

Build time change was similar for the other jobs. Moreover C# builds running on Windows Server 2008 boxes shown the same figures. It means
migration from a physical machine to a Xen VM costs about 25% build time increase.
Given various comparative benchmarks of different hypervisors I don't expect better results from the other virtualization technologies. Of course things like Linux cgroups don't count. Another important note - we use local disks. For networked storage things are completely different.

Keep cloud data private - mission possible

Everybody has some digitized data - texts, and diaries, address books, photos, videos. Most of it is not intended for share. Some of it must be kept quite secret. These things used to live on a desktop computer at home. Unfortunately desktop box cannot be put into a pocket and brought with me everywhere. So naturally data moves to a place which is accessible most of the time - to cloud.

Recent years the amount of personal data in cloud grows explosively. Uncertainty with it grows too. Thats for reason. Our mail, documents, photos, updates etc are not in an abstract neutral “cloud”. All that data is stored on very physical disks owned very directly by a company controlled by a limited group of people. So it is quite possible to realize once morning that all your stuff is disclosed, sold or just dropped. It may sound unreal but last year changes in Facebook and Instagram policies, growing number of data disclosure requests to Google indicating an opposite.

There is a growing desire to keep personal data on personally controlled media. Unfortunately it is not realistic. Yes, most of people get more networked devices. But most of those devices - smartphones, tablets, laptops, - are not permanently interlinked, have limited capabilities, and cannot be considered as reliable storages. At the same time storage devices become exponentially larger and cheaper, and there are no signs of saturation. Thus privately owned devices cannot compete with large networked storage, i.e. with cloud.

The obvious solution is to keep private data in the Net but distributed (geographically and administratively to lower risks of data loss) and encrypted (to minimize risks of disclosure). This model is utilized in certain emerging p2p storage networks. But those networks rely on permanently connected computers - desktops or servers, nowadays such beasts become rare.

It worth to note than such kind of problem is not new. Communication networks - snail mail, telephone, Internet, - faced the similar requirements: they must be global, reliable and cheap to use. None of them belongs to a single organization, they consist of numerous independent service providers. Using this analogy Google and Facebook are similar to UPS and DHL - great but specific services. The common storage fabric should be formed from a lot of companies providing the same service and interoperate on a standard ground. At a certain time such service may become as common as cellular networks or broadband Internet connection.

Of course it won’t work unless it will be profitable for the service providers. Again the communication networks model may be adopted - service endpoints collect their money from end users and then it gets distributed among all participants. Modern communication networks operators will ride the trend or data giants will overtake and acquire telecom business - it may succeed in both ways.

Last but not least the data service must be extremely convenient to use. Fortunately it is mostly a set of technical problems. E.g. the most obvious issue - assure authorised access and encryption for a user using different devices, - can be solved using security tokens or biometric technology.