Just came across the website www.pachube.com. It allows a user to post data to their servers and then use their services to graph and otherwise manipulate the data. Think of it as the YouTube of dynamic data. As an example, suppose you just happen to have a system that monitors your heating system and logs that data (zone valve states, temperatures, …) to a file. Now suppose you would like to look at that data when away from your computer. If you pushed the data to Pachube you could look at it remotely. In fact you can see my data (at least temporarily) here: FurnaceData.
What I have learned is that Pachube is not ready for prime time. The interface is clunky, their website is slow, the documentation is poor, and I have yet to figure out how they plan to make any money to cover their costs. I think that I may very well cancel my account and do a similar thing using my own file server.
And as an aside, care to guess how they pronounce the name of their company? According to them it is “Patch Bay”. Somebody with worst spelling than me must have come up with that.