I switched to chess, and beat the system on its “difficult” setting in about twenty moves. Apart from its opening book, the system was pathetic–it couldn’t spot a simple fork or think more than a few moves ahead. During the rematch, I got it into a somewhat complex situation, likely a forced checkmate in about ten moves. It hung there with an hourglass for a good twenty minutes, then coughed up a dialog box asking me which part of the system it ought to shut down in order to conserve memory. Honestly, some are incapable of accepting defeat.

After I selected the default option, the entire operating system crashed hard into a black screen and began rebooting. Not surprisingly, the boot screen proudly proclaimed Windows CE circa 2004, then began loading up files using the ancient Xmodem serial protocol. Finally, it booted itself back into friendly pictures of New Zealand coastline. I spent the rest of the flight hoping Microsoft hadn’t won the bid on the flight controls.

I spent over 18 months architecting the system, from dedicated hardware to software including eCommerce, CRM, subscription management, recurring billing, and content management systems. I had great help from a small, dedicated, and very talented in-house team of artists and programmers. Absolutely everything is implemented on a LAMP stack.

As such, it represents a culmination of many of the enterprise best practices for PHP, MySQL, and Linux that I have discussed over the years here on my blog, including: Design Patterns and object oriented code, Pear packages, a dash of Ajax, a lot of Security measures and some cryptography, lots of optimization, a powerful and scalable LAMP web server farm monitored by cacti, coding standards; all managed using a few extreme programming tactics, built around best-of-breed eCommerce packages, and with a robust mail queue mechanism delivering countless emails per day.

I consider it a kind of real-world treatise on how to effectively implement enterprise best practices with LAMP technologies. No books, no debating, no theory–we did it. And eager new members are already rolling in. Hats off to the team at David Allen Company. Good times ahead.

• the encrypted file(s)–on your computer
• the private key needed to decrypt the files–on your thumbdrive
• the password required in combination with the private key to decrypt files–in your head

The process is simple and affords a great degree of security to your encrypted files, because all three components must be assembled to decrypt the data–a difficult task for a laptop thief or even a nosey coworker to accomplish, especially if you remove your thumb drive from your computer when you are not using it.

Mounting a USB device in Linux is slightly trickier than on a Mac. For a good discussion of the issues, see this post. Once you have the device mounted, copy your .gnupg directory to the device (e.g. cp -r .gnupg /Volumes/cryptkey). Then, once you have verified the directory exists and the files look good, remove the .gnupg from your home directory and set up a symbolic link to the directory on the USB device (e.g. ln -s /Volumes/cryptkey/.gnupg .gnupg). Now you can only use gnupg when the device is mounted. Always remember to properly unmount the USB device (i.e. drag the icon to the trash on a Mac) before physically removing it, or you could damage the contents. This approach is particularly useful when combined with a GPG email plugin. For Thunderbird, for example, I use enigmail.

Which brings me to the perfect application for a Linux client: the call center.

Imagine hundreds of diskless Linux workstations booting into the equivalent of Linux Terminal Server or Knoppix for Domino. In fact, many different types of workers could handle all of their day-to-day tasks in this environment with substantial savings not only on the overhead of operating system licenses, but everything that goes with a complex user environment–like viruses, malware, and (worst of all) the myriad of operator errors that go with giving users too much latitude.

Personally, I’d like to see a Linux client to work in a more sophisticated way. But my hunch is that if and when IBM does decide to port Notes to Linux, a scenario like the one described above will be the impetus.