List of ideas

Here's some projects I would like to do but probably won't get around to for some time:

SysObject
The idea here is to create a system administration toolkit in either ruby or python that would allow you to administer a system via method calls on an object. Think of it as sort of a what-if-physical-computers-were-dbus-services scenario. For example, consider the following admin script:


SysObject::ObjectSpace.login("username","password") do |objectSpace|
boxA = objectSpace["webServer1"]
boxB = objectSpace["webServer2"]

boxA.httpServices["phpBB"].useDatabase boxB.services['mysql'].schemas['phpBBschema']
boxA.services["apache"].AllowOverride = "none"
boxB.reboot
end


Another relational filesystem
There's been some people who have tried this before (WinFS etc) but few people have found a good way to make the data available. Much as I tend to dislike XML, I think XPath is one of the better solutions to this. It offers the perfect mechanism for relatively succinct queries and is also a superset of conventional unix file paths.

A new programming language
I think C is in need of a bit of a refresh. The reason that this hasn't happened is people have gotten distracted with VHLs and other interpreted languages that are better for a subset of tasks, but still ignore some bits of C's use cases. A version of C that got rid of some of the curly braces, had a more powerful preprocessor (yes, more preprocessor. And by more powerful I mean implement-your-own-language-in-it powerful), and got rid of the whole horrible include system and function predeclarations would fit the bill.

Well there's that. Enjoy!