joel's thoughts

Lately I’ve been casually following Project Aardvark, the summer-intern-project brainchild of Joel Spolsky. It’s to be open source (GPL, I believe), but they haven’t yet said what exactly it is they’re building, and there’s been all kinds of speculation on that particular point.
The last few posts on PA’s site really have me wondering…there’s mention of some SSL encryption (via OpenSSL or MatrixSSL), but that’s not particularly informative. However, in Ben Pollack’s last post he mentions a taskbar object that manages connections, followed by a comparison of naming conventions used in TightVNC and WinVNC source code. Now, if he wasn’t actively waist-deep in the source code for one or both of those projects this isn’t likely the sort of comparison that would have been fresh in his mind. Not to mention using the comparison as a follow-on to his and fellow intern Tyler’s challenges in coming up to speed on an unfamiliar codebase felt a little weak. I’m almost starting to wonder if part of their blogging assignment is to slowly leak or suggest details about the various parts and pieces of the project.
I admit I’m still at a loss for even a guess of the whole, though. VNC over SSL is nothing new, although I’m not sure if anyone’s integrated the two before. And Spolsky’s company makes money on bug tracking and web publishing software. A multi-server remote administration app, maybe? Might be handy, rather than opening up multiple remote desktop windows (come to think of it, maybe someone needs to write a tabbed interface for rdesktop on Linux…but I digress). But then I recall there being mention awhile ago of an e-commerce engine in there somewhere, and that doesn’t seem to fit. So I have no idea, but we’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.