Chapter 18 - A One Girl Server

Tracy was feeling much more relaxed, not only was Andy trusting her again but it was obvious that she was no longer a target for Imogen. Even better Andy had put them on the same team. While Tracy still did not trust her completely, if she did do something underhanded then it was Andy's decision to involve her in any projects. That was good enough, damn it.

Her mobile buzzed: B4 U go C me. It was from Imogen, there was 2 days before she left for Jerramungup. Tracy dialed. "Hey, what's up?" "If you're feeling totally de-stressed, I've got a comms solution for you when you're at the homestead." "Whatever it is it will have to go by Andy first." "Who will want to know if you're happy with it." "Is now a good time?". "Surely is, meet me at Dad's workshop. Definitely after 5. Say 5:15"

Christine didn't do much overtime these days and had already left when Tracy arrived. "Ok, assume I know nothing, how is this going to give me an easier day?"

"This is about you and occasionally others putting useful information in and Andy and yourself getting useful information out. So at the moment you're communicating via email with password protected zip files. If you want to know about 1 thing, like the tagasaste or the chickens then you're OK. But if you want to know about how the tagasaste and the chickens interact then you have to start trawling through heaps of documents. So what you're doing is creating a permaculture system whose key to success lies in the synergies of different elements and storing your experiences and knowledge in separate pigeon holes. Once you're gone a whole lot of hard earned experience goes with you. I offer you a chance to leave a valuable legacy."

"What do I have to do differently?"

"Forget emails, word processors and zipping. Corvine Projects is a set of scripts which work through your browser, meaning you can access it on a wide variety of devices. You type in what you have done and what you plan to do, assign it to one or more projects and give it a level of importance. So Andy wants to only know of the breakthroughs, the intractable problems, the unexpected surprises good or bad. They're the posts that get the high level of importance. You're focused on the day to day, the weather, checking up on the chickens, the hardware store being out of stock, stuff like that. They get a less important posting because in the long term it doesn't matter.

Lets say, I dunno, that you want to feed earthworms to your fish. When you confirm that fish do indeed eat earthworms then that's something Andy will want to see, it gets high importance. As you start to feed them each day you will give those posts a lower importance. Each of these posts gets recorded against earthworms and fish. The cool thing is that you can search for only those posts that have fish and earthworms tagged against. This gets pulled out in a report, which once again you can read on your browser."

"So I can type my shit up on a laptop and Andy and I can view independently on our mobiles, or whatever."

"Exactly."

Imogen showed Tracy how to drive the software. It all seemed straight forward enough, but remembering it all. "Hey have you a manual for this." "Sure have. If you record what you do each day, which is already habit for you then you'll be making posts on auto-pilot. Once set up User and Department Maintenance is a once is a blue moon activity and I'll give you a video for Project Maintenance."

"Ok, if this is reliable over a mobile phone USB modem how do I get this working on my homestead laptop?"

"That's the question I've been waiting for. When all has been set up Daniel will give you a web address."

"How pricey is the hardware?"

Imogen shrugged her shoulders, "Well usually nothing because most people have some kind of server hardware anyway. But if you're going to go standalone then a Raspberry Pi will do the trick quite nicely."

"What the hell is one of them?"

"It's a little credit card sized computer runs Debian Linux. More than capable for a couple of people entering text and uploading a few photos to. I think it could cope with a couple of hundred users easily, by which time you won't be worried about the cost of the upgrade. So yeah, $200 tops."

"Well Imogen from where I'm standing it's good to go. It's Andy's call though."