Folks: Here is an excerpt from my blog today: (On my blog, it has lots of hyperlinks.)
http://testgrid.allmydata.org:3567/uri/URI:DIR2-RO:j74uhg25nwdpjpacl6rkat2yhm:kav7ijeft5h7r7rxdp5bgtlt3viv32yabqajkrdykozia5544jqa/wiki.html Regards, Zooko Bespin+Tahoe (My mom, and others, have pointed out that my blog is chock full of jargony goodness and they can get only the vaguest idea of what I'm on about, mostly by reading the verbs. I don't like those sorts of communication gaps (even though they are inevitable), so I've decided to try the exercise of translating each item that I post from programmer-speak to English. If it is hard to translate into English, maybe this tells us something about what it means in its original programmer-speak.) Last week I saw from Simon Phipp's blog this interesting project named Bespin. It is a programmer's text editor implemented in JavaScript and the Canvas element. That same day Tom Lord mentioned Bespin to me in email. Bespin is exciting stuff! I really want to hack it to save the files to a tahoe-lafs grid. If you saved your files to a tahoe-lafs grid, then you wouldn't have to rely on the server to make sure your file isn't deleted or corrupted, that its contents aren't stolen by someone else, nor that permission to write to your file was accidentally given to someone else, nor that permission to write to your file was accidentally denied to someone with whom you had intended to share it. (By the way, the list of claims in that sentence should arouse great skepticism in security and distributed systems experts. On the other hand, webapp authors and users probably paid little attention, thinking to themselves "Well, why shouldn't it Just Work?". I love this chaos.) I had a lot of fun hacking TiddlyWiki to store itself to a tahoe-lafs grid, with the help of TiddlyWiki hackers FND, Eric Shulman, and Jeremy Ruston. The result was two small JavaScript plugins that anyone can add to their TiddlyWiki to make their TiddlyWiki into a gridapp: HTTPSavingPlugin.js and TahoePlugin.js. I would love to do something similar for Bespin, but I can tell that I need to focus on the tahoe core right now. The announcement of tahoe-lafs 1.3.0 has encouraged more people to start contributing to Tahoe, and I'm busy teaching them how to get their patches accepted into the tahoe core. That said, if any JavaScript/Caja/Tahoe/Bespin/TiddlyWiki hackers out there want to have a go at Bespin+Tahoe, do let me know and I'll give you a little help. :-) Mom: Hm... This one is pretty hard to translate into English. I think that in the future new applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, tax software, photo album browsers, email, etc. will live on a web page and you will use them by pointing your web browser at that page. I think the most fact about this is that the market for software is likely to get more competitive — a greater marketplace of useful software, easier to use and with better features, that you are able to try out and then adopt. A large part of the motivation for the Tahoe project is to explore whether we can get all those values and still let you retain ownership of your own data. _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list [email protected] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
