http://www.workspot.com/blog/ Greg Bryant en-us 2004-09-21T13:09:27-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2004_09.html#000030 What's the most helpful thing workspot can do? The people we want to help the most are people who cannot, or will not, own a computer. That's actually a majority of computer users, and a growing percentage, and yet the computing services available to them are rather limited & fragmented. So the first mission is to create a free package, a distribution, of workspot's system, for use in community centers. Or anyplace with a one site, one room datacenter/Internet access lab. Say you run a community center. You have an Internet connection, and a bunch of hand-me-down machines. First you put a self-configuring Linux installation CD into each of your machines. Then you put a special CD into each of the special-purpose machines: firewalls web servers Internet service servers file servers backup servers process servers workstations The workstations are what the people actually use in the Internet cafe. They have an account and using the Linux Terminal Server Project they share the resources at the community center. Using workspot they have web services & extranet services (all based on GPL packages) so they can both continue their work from anywhere, and broadcast to/interact with the outside world. Essentially, the workspot distro is a modern version of a time-sharing system. In various forms, we think this is a wave of the future. It isn't clear that the personal-computer-ownership economy is quite working. Ever-bloating software on your personal computer eventually (sometimes rather soon) makes your machine obsolete or unusable. Unreliable software & hardware means you have to be a computer technician to reliably backup your work & data. And it is impossible to completely protect yourself from viruses. Really, experts need to do this work -- but only corporations can afford the software & personnel for a lightweight, well-maintained datacenter. So, we want to provide a free datacenter package. A free network Computing package. Because we don't believe that large autocratic corporations should be the only ones with access to reliable computing!... grogbrat 2004-09-21T13:09:27-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_09.html#000022 So who exactly would this incipient GNU Workspot project be competing with? After all, to do the public good, it should become the standard GPL solution to specific problems in a diverse, expensive and messy market. Citrix application deployment servers, for a start. Sun has many related products: the Sun ONE identity server. Portal server, and the application server. And Microsoft Terminal Services. That's just for starters. And that's many thousands worth of software, soon to have free counterparts. *** As with most categories with open source offerings, I think ours will not really effect commercial service providers -- there are always people and corporations that want to outsource, and it's not usually because of the price of software. Webex, Placewhere, Go-To-My-PC, Hotmail, Visto, VidiTel, and most ISP's will not be effected immediately by a free package allowing you to provide services to yourself. The cost of what they offer is closely tied to service, hardware and connectivity.... grogbrat 2003-09-25T01:03:47-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_09.html#000021 Generally, corporations make money through some form of mass-production, financed by investors, amplified by armies of salespeople, deal-makers, and support people. Well, Workspot doesn't have any of that, and isn't likely to get it. And ... do we really want it? We're impoverished, as are many of our friends, so perhaps the unattainability of creating a corporate machine makes it easier to spurn the tools that have made capitalism the world's alpha-steamroller. But, on the other hand, we've been there, lived it, and really found it terrible. So we'll be continuing this project as a non-profit endeavor, for the benefit of the software community. And shutting the for-profit corporation. This is no guarantee of success, but at least we won't be pretending to be a commercial venture any more. We have to get real: we have no assets, and we made almost no money this year. Is going non-profit a bad thing? No. But how did we get here? Well, no one is investing in innovation just now ... they are investing in 'scaling'. That is, if you're already successful, and have a high 'adoption rate', and don't really need investment, then you're likely to get a call any day now from someone with financing. Secondly, no one is publicizing small projects. Everyone has a small project -- their blog, perhaps, or neat photos they snapped with their cellphone. So the media, which is very hungry itself, is looking for 'real' stories: 'hard' news with weight and pizazz. They're not generally looking to solve computing problems or improve the world. They're trying to get noticed, so people will read their websites. So, no publicity for Workspot. We went public with the latest incarnation of our software in January, and there was a flurry of interest. But I couldn't get on News.com, or even Slashdot. We've had some people look at us for possible investment: Google, Intel, etc. Generally, we're too far away from what's already happening, so the examination was keen but brief. So this blog is about to morph into a rather different kind of beast: the log of an idealist, driven to create software that is useful for people, released under a GPL license, that will offer a free alternative to commodities from Citrix, HP, Sun, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. Does the software "compete" with theirs? "Undercut" theirs? Morally, that would be wonderful -- to me, these corporations help to squeeze the life out of the world, and out of their workers. I'd be overjoyed to accelerate the end of their days. But, more likely, I'm simply empowering a group who can't afford to be their customers. I'm interested in seeing software in the hands of any individual or small group who want to try to accomplish something good, or make a living, in a variety of ways I can't possibly imagine.... grogbrat 2003-09-24T00:17:41-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_09.html#000020 It hasn't been picked up by the media, but I think this is quite a story -- VNC now has the highly touted AES encryption standard, under GNU's GPL license. Benny Soetarman of Workspot did this work, based on Dr Brian Gladman's algorithm. The patches can be found here. The encryption is self-contained, and lightweight, residing in the client and the server software itself. Benny explains: "It doesn't use SSL. This is because of the Java client; it was too heavy to send the SSL classes or to have the users install an SSL implementation. The new Java 1.4 already has SSL as part of the distribution, But the majority is using MSIE, and the JVM for it is pretty old. So the current AES implementation is self contained in the applet, linux server, and native client."... grogbrat 2003-09-23T20:29:44-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_09.html#000019 Thanks to everyone who was so patient with our support delays. Basically, Workspot isn't making enough money to pay even a single person regularly, so whether or not your questions got answered depended on the availability of our core group members. We've recently shuffled things around a bit, to provide better response. More shuffling to come!... grogbrat 2003-09-23T18:30:04-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_07.html#000018 An obvious problem since the advent of browser-based applications -- the lack of an acceptable way to create true network applications -- something where the client-side could have a bit more juice than just HTML. Java applets were a glimpse in this direction -- but one of the reasons you don't see very many of them, is they just can't get very big without being unwieldy. Macromedia Flash and the free SVG both address this problem too. Applications that download are another solution to the problem, but a difficult one, since it involves unique installation and update procedures for each application. Frameworks, such as Microsoft's .NET and Sun's J2EE, are trying to address this problem with a comprehensive approach. Microsoft, with the largest installed user base, would seem poised to win the battle for the network application platform. There's another potential contender: the Open Software Application Foundation's Chandler project. If this becomes a universal PIM, downloaded everywhere, taking parcels, with flexibility for user and application in storing information, then we have an application platform with some teeth. So, now it's on our list: enable future Chandler users to synchronize data securely to their Workspot. When they can't run Chandler natively, they can run it in a Workspot -- actually, you can do this now. Chandler in a Workspot... grogbrat 2003-07-30T00:58:04-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_07.html#000017 The Linux economy needs a boost, and I think there's a way Workspot could provide it. Imagine an Online Showcase, where you can try, rent, buy or download, any Linux desktop or server software, environment, distro or hardware ... directly supporting the developers. It could be a retail site, but not being Amazon-inclined, I'd much prefer it to be a kind of 'consumer reports' come to life. I'd love to set up an initial working version of the Online Showcase. But unfortunately we don't have the funding yet to do more than the service you see here. VC's find us too small to fund. So we just have to continue to find subscribers, and slowly build out the showcase. The free part of the showcase might look like this. There'd be an equivalent ontology for logged-in Workspot users. They could also sign-up for the on-going focus group for an item they care about. They could evaluate changes online, in real time. The user could volunteer to have their session recorded for UI analysis. Programmers would have an audience. Users could vote on features and fixes. User-driven participatory democracy might create a real revolution in software!... grogbrat 2003-07-18T12:31:28-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_06.html#000016 Workspot's Web Playground is back! Workspot users get a website, http://users.workspot.net/~username, to fool around in. But it's the simplest web publishing imaginable: you just drop stuff into your public_html directory on your online Linux desktop. If you like, you can drop stuff into a webdav directory on your local machine, one that's linked to your public_html directory. This was part of the original prototype, back before VNC was made GPL, and Workspot was a webtop. After we quit working for SONY/Etak, every morning Curt Brune and I would meet at the University Coffee Café and try to think of the greatest thing we could do with an online desktop, with the least amount of work. This is actually one my fondest memories from the early days, because using this 'prioritized incremental approach', we made an amazing product in just a matter of days. And it was a refreshing breeze of freedom for for Curt Brune, a very inventive and lucid fellow, who had been trapped in corporate-change- control hell for years. So, there were lots of cool possibilities, but editing your website from an online desktop had to be one of the coolest! And the coolest of the cool part was the cgi-bin subdirectory. Now, someone can just subscribe to workspot, go online, launch emacs in their browser (sic), and begin writing and using Perl to make generated web pages. The obvious extension of this, is to offer more server applications and server environments for the users, so they can have a pre-configured server which they don't need to set up. And an extension of that is to create an economy where people set up these turn-key server environments, and people pay to use them, or pay a subscription or micropayment to use the latest one. This could convert the "HOWTO" world in to the "DOIT" world ... why would you stop at a "how to" when you could make a working environment that a million programmers could use instantly? One of the best Workspot legacies is that I published all these crazy ideas almost 5 years ago, so no one can possibly make a business plan patent based on it. Whew. Your Workspot VNC session is now AES encrypted! Another feature: the cross-platform clipboard! You can cut something from your PC, Mac or Linux desktop, and paste it to your Workspot. Go to another machine, and copy it from your Workspot desktop. Really useful and quick!... grogbrat 2003-06-08T00:27:15-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_06.html#000015 grogbrat 2003-06-07T23:35:24-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_03.html#000014 I remember, in Palo Alto during the Internet boom, everything was so intense, everyone could sense the historical forces, the people, and the money at work ... "it feels like a war," I quipped, "just massive birth instead of massive death." But the only similarity I see now, between war and boom, is that I've become an Internet news junkie again. And a vertebra in my neck is hurting once more. The differences are more striking. For example, the difference between "Internet Time", as we first perceived it, and now. Just try to watch how quickly important stories move around today ... it's enough to give you whiplash. Ah, perhaps that explains my neck pain. I followed the Peter Arnett thing today ... he went from working for NBC and National Geographic, to the Daily Mirror, in an instant. But even more amazing is how fast history can be rewritten. Arnett's Baghdad stories disappeared from NBC. I saw the entries in the search database, but they clicked through to nowhere.... grogbrat 2003-03-31T22:24:14-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_03.html#000011 Just got a note from Dan Gillmor, saying that he found Workspot bogglingly slow. On the other hand, a real-time data guru, John Sahr, who uses the passive radar of commercial FM broadcasts to monitor the shape of the earth's ionosphere, says: "I logged in using Netscape on a RH7.3 laptop over a 384k DSL link, performance was amazingly good, considering what was happening. It was obviously slower than a "regular" link, but definitely fast enough to use. " It's a good thing we have the demo, so people can self-select for speed! I wrote Dan that he may have a constrained connection, but "performance perception is a delicate issue ... it's possible that our subscribers tend to be intrigued by latency, rather than suffer from it ... "... grogbrat 2003-03-16T22:41:19-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_03.html#000013 During a raging anti-war party in downtown Eugene, a small group of shy technology people held a monthly Eugene Linux user's group meeting. Like all Eugene groups, the meeting was replete with characters far too complex to invent. This may be one of the few cities whose non-profit free software group, efn.org, has a storefront in the city's center. I'm tempted to open a workspot.org shop next to it. The topic of the meeting: Knoppix, the Linux Terminal Server Project, and Workspot. Knoppix works extremely well, although it still helps to be a Linux admin, depending on what you need to do with it. LTSP is used for the Internet café at efn.org. Bob Miller organized a working core group for the demo, with laptops and several extra machines and pieces of equipment. The group pieced together and debugged the demo in front of a live audience (albeit a small one). Like a live engineering project, Bob acting a the chief engineer. Actually much more interesting than trying to 'produce' a slick, foolproof demo. The process is as educational as the product. From a dozen people, only one person was really interested in proselytizing the Linux desktop. He was only partly satisfied with Knoppix -- it's great, but still rather install-like. He was about to leave before the Workspot demo: I stopped him, and asked Bob to launch a browser on Knoppix, which I'd never done before, and go to workspot.com. Mozilla came up, luckily with Java pre-installed, and I said 'hit the button'! Voila, the desktop appears! With enough attention to robustness, sometimes things will work in the worst of circumstances.... grogbrat 2003-03-15T16:08:06-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_03.html#000012 Late night talk with Christopher Alexander ... I mention the one-click Linux demo. He says that should be a very big deal, to Linux people. I said it should be a big deal to half-a-billion people. He looks at me with his 'be honest' look and says "Is Linux the best desktop?" I say, no, Mac OS X and Windows XP are still better in several ways, although no desktop is really going in a good overall direction. He said "you're not being a very good salesman. What's the point in showing people a Linux desktop that's not better than what they have?" He said that the $100 cost of an operating system, amortized over the life of the machine, is very little money. I said that for big purchases by corporations and governments, it makes a difference. "Is that your market? Bureaucrats?" No, certainly Workspot's for individuals. And individuals usually choose for themselves. So they need to see something better. Linux is popular among people who can use its strengths. Either people need to grow to be more Linux-like (which isn't too common, but it's kind of the goal of many LUGS); or, Linux has to work better for people. When it does, then we'll build real momentum on the desktop. So, we must make a better desktop.... grogbrat 2003-03-13T04:10:17-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_03.html#000001 admin 2003-03-07T11:09:55-08:00 http://www.workspot.com/blog/archives/2003_03.html#000004 A simple thing, which people can't yet do with their Workspot, is install a program as root. Another simple thing, which I want, is for people to run freshly contributed software on Workspot. Let's say that 'mad genius X' has just written a program that will change everything ... people should be able to run such freshmeat without installing it on their home machine. But we can't yet set up a system where we encourage everyone to distribute standalone programs, and run them. If someone offers you an executable in their directory, it could plant something nasty in your directory, the moment you use it. All this implies disposable machines: virtual machines on which you could install anything as root; and virtual machines (with a virtual filesystem, or journalling and rollback) on which you could run anything as a normal user. Programs could go through the normal community acceptance promotions, until they were tested, read and trusted enough to run at home. [Someday, of course, all home machines, which will run Linux, should have these features and handle these issues automatically]. When I started working on Workspot, in 1998, it was obvious that we'd have to tackle virtual machines. Bruce Robertson started writing a VM Manager, and watching the progress of other projects, even proprietary ones like VMWare (something we were wary of, because we'd have to change it so much). A founder of VMWare visited us in Palo Alto ... but nothing happened before the bubble burst. A number of GPL VM initiatives that have emerged (I recommend Grant Gross's Newsforge summary): the other UML (User Mode Linux) vserver The technical issues are interesting. At the moment our VNC server spawns sessions on a cluster of machines -- we'd either need it to spawn a session within a VM, or direct the user to remote login to that VM from their main Workspot desktop. The same choice applies to starting a fresh VM. But which makes more sense from a user standpoint? There are many scenarios where we'll need to spawn a VM without initiating a desktop -- for example, when we run a single application in a web page ... (I'll write about this, Appspot, soon.) So we need to create HTML navigation through the Software Showcase anyway. But someday, especially since we are desktop Linux advocates, we'll need to create a desktop interface to all this variety. Luckily, we have Nautilus, and it should be satisfactory to use directories to navigate, through all the possible machines and distros, cooked and raw software. The main issue with the raw software is protecting the user's files. Since our first time around, journaling filesystems, which keep a transaction journal of filesystem writes, and allow you to rollback in case of trouble, have become more cooked. I'll write about these soon. Hey, with virtual machines running, we'll be able to demonstrate the different kinds of Linux filesystems too! And work on sensible, humane user interfaces to filesystem rollback! One step at a time ...... admin 2003-03-06T17:13:45-08:00