the rain tastes funny

Found or rediscovered a bunch of nice software this week

• Spreed.com web-based meetings, with shared whiteboarding, application sharing, video, and soon mindmaps.  Why is it noteworthy? They explicitly support linux, even for whiteboarding and app sharing. The whiteboard is geared toward making notes on top of a presentation, and participants can easily generate a PDF of any page. The linux screen sharing client is written in python, and the mind maps (coming soon) promise to be compatible with FreeMind.
• Coccinella instant messaging client with shared whiteboards. What I really want is OmniGraffle for Linux, with the ability to share drawings with someone on the other side of the world and both edit in realtime. Inkscape's Inkboard feature would be even better, if it worked, but it doesn't, and I haven't had time to get in and try and fix it. Coccinella doesn't have a good way to save the drawings for later though, it's more useful for scribbling on existing drawings. It does have a very nice way to screen grab anything and then draw on it.
• Monitoring software - I need to start doing some serious monitoring soon, and here's what I'm looking at
  • Graphite enterprise scalable realtime graphing. in django. with a custom storage engine.
  • Collectdthe system statistics collection daemon
  • Reconnoiter - when Theo says he's writing a better version of something, I listen. Goals are to support monitoring thousands of machines.
• Satchmo a couple of different projects that I'm working on are going to need to handle credit cards soon, and Satchmo integrates with a lot of different payment gateways, and with Django.

I've started a new project at Canonical, and am really excited about it - going to be building some nice things that even my non-technical friends will want to use, and thats going to be a lot of fun. I really need to find some talented Gnome hackers and also some engineers to work on very scalable web service systems - if you are interested please contact me.