Rough sketch of how I would like to use my laptop and my (more powerful) office computer (let's call it the "station"). For the record, the station has two monitors, as of this writing.

When I say data is "in" a computer, I mean I'm able to use this data when I have this computer and no other, and I'm unable to use this data when I don't have this computer.

• "heavy" data is in the station; thinking in terms of my work today, that would be the few-hundred-megabytes-each Zope instances.

• personal data is in the laptop, except the data that is necessary to run "always-on" things on the station.

• more specifically, personal data is in my USB2 external HD. If I unplug it, the laptop should have a more or less minimal system, which I can fearlessly let friends use. If I plug it in, my stuff magically "pops in" on the right places.

• when laptop and station are together:

  • the laptop's input devices control both. (I don't care much right now about what happens with the station's input devices, although Nebraska style dual-pointer would be cool.)
  • "applications" that were already "active" in the laptop can make use of the station's superior RAM and CPU. (Although I want to get rid of the idea of "application" eventualy, but let's leave that for a future post.)
  • I can move UIs ("windows", in terms of today) between the three screens. If the UI paradigm is window-based, then no window tries to display half in each screen (or, even worse, one piece in each of them).

• if the laptop goes away, the station automatically locks input and output devices. I can still manually unlock it, in case I ever need to use it without the laptop.

  Alternative: locking input devices is done on a per-device-set basis; output locks if there is no unlocked input set. So I would leave the station's device set always locked, and output would lock automatically when the laptop's input disappears.

• an UI on the station (or laptop) can interact with traffic on IRC. The machine that is actually connected to IRC is my other PC at home.

  I currently do this using irssi-text, screen, and ssh. But the UI of irssi is clumsy, and this setup wastes a lot of bandwidth.

  Bonus points if I can display (and therefore waste bandwidth with) only a subset of the channels I'm actually seeing in my monitor at home.

  Bonus points if this is the same UI as (or at least consistent with) my IM.

• the station is permanently connected to the IM accounts I use for work (lalo at exoweb dot net on msn and jabber, as of this writing)

  Bonus points if it automatically goes "away" when the output devices lock.

• I'd like to play mp3s that are on the USB2 drive (connected to the laptop), using the best CPU available (station if station is there, laptop otherwise), displaying the control user interface on the laptop, having a choice of output trough the laptop's headset jack or the station's speakers (again, if the station is there).

  ok, I don't really want to play stuff at the station's speakers at work, but I want to do this at home, and I didn't want to make the example more complex than necessary by introducing a third machine.

• if I'm somewhere else (with the laptop and connectivity) and I need data that is in the station, I can get to it. The system is smart enough to do IO-heavy processing on the machine where the data is stored, so what actually gets transmitted over the wire is as little as possible.

• if someone else has a similar setup with the same system, and I gave them my permission (and conceivably a hard disk quota), they can use the station in the same way (with their own laptops) when I'm not using it.

  Bonus points: we can turn all the stations in the office into a cluster of identical instances of this setup. This would raise a few considerations:

  • we probably don't want to duplicate data too much between them, but some duplication might be good
  • it doesn't matter to me "where" my IM connection is actually "running" in this cluster; in fact, it may even be thrown around between them and I wouldn't notice. But if I link the laptop to one of them, then the IM thingie will jump to that one.

Tom's comparison between his own commercializing plan post versus Jono Bacon's OpenOffice article strikes me as a perfect example of the two languages that are being spoken these days.

Essentially, Tom says: "the freedom to use, study, improve, and share source code", and then goes on to "The intractability of the stack means that the hard won software freedoms which apply to its source code apply more "on paper" than in practice" , finally proposing to "advance software freedoms, take a worthwhile leadership role in determining the future of personal computing, and earn a profit".

In contrast, Jono goes on about "the responsibility for the suite to help the push to Open Source", "marketing", and "software blessed by the Open Source methodology".

Tom describes the article's plead for more developers and shorter release cycle as "rearranging the deck chairs". From the point of view of Tom's post, it surely is; on the other hand, from the point of view of Jono's article, Tom's post is trying to solve a solved problem.

Maybe I'm still under the effect of dinner with RMS, but this sounds to me like one of those Free Software vs. Open Source things.

...and now that you have the history behind it, let me try to put in words my basic point of view on computers.

Let me begin by saying that, as of today (and this has been true for many years), all systems I know about, suck beyond tolerance. And yes, I have used OSX. It sucks too. (By "system", an intentionally vague term, I mean OSes, and GUI environments, the general UI/API paradigms, and so on.) And they are "improving" in the wrong direction - which means, in 5 years, they will probably suck more, but be more shiny about it.

The premise I'll work with is: there is very little limit to what a computer can do. It is essentially, as I realized when I was about 9, a programmable device; the whole point of its existence is to be customized, to do what you want the way you want.

Modern software is more in the business of telling you what you want.

It might be a "monopoly of magic" problem. Programming is potentially easy, at least for small tasks. But if everyone could program, how would "true" programmers make a living? So the big companies, who very much prefer to stay in business, want you to believe that it's a very arcane art, a burden they are taking away from you - and you should pay them for that. That is, IMO, one of the main reasons they are so afraid of Free Software and open source; we take the stance that, instead, programming is accessible to anyone, and that it's best done in groups (community), and worse, that it's fun. That even the small tasks you can learn to do with a few days of study, can be an useful contribution.

Or it might just be laziness.

To me, a computer which is not programmable, or not conveniently programmable, is at least 50% useless. That's why I eventually abandoned my PalmPilot to buy a VR3 on which I could run Python. Incidentally, that's also how, years earlier, I learned about Free Software, GNU, and Linux... after I was forced to abandon OS/2, I went on the net (which was a new thing for me) in search of a good C++ compiler for Windows, and stumbled on djgcc - which had a great page explaining what is Free Software, and a link to GNU. I was hooked.

But most people are content with what is dumped on them by the vendors; most don't even change the windows color schemes.

I guess what I mean is: I want more developers and less end-users. I want to turn all end-users into small-time developers. My dream system is an infinitely customized thing, where "upgrade" implies some revision-control-like operation of figuring out how the new features fit in with your customizations. Where sharing these customizations is routine, and the system itself gives you tools to do that.

(Yes, I know about Squeak. It's an awesome prototype of these concepts. It also suffers from many other problems that make it unusable as an actual system, most of which are off-topic for this article, but most important of all, being locked into a single programming language.)

The only desktop development that made me really excited recently was the OSX Dashboard (or gDesklets). Not that it's incredibly more accessible than writing an app with applescript or pygtk or even pyobjc; just that it encourages more people to try. But seriously, anyone in the audience whose mother masters enough html and javascript to write an actually useful dashboard thingie (or enough python for a gDesklet one) please raise their hands.

Even in the world of Free Software, we're still bound in "their" thinking, the "ball and chain" way, which makes our systems suck as much as "theirs" (in some aspects, less, in others, more, average 0).

We design our apps to be end-user friendly because, well, we want new users. But few, usually young, projects care about newbie developers (bzr comes to mind). We should do both; aim for a clear model that you can actually explain to someone who is doing high school, for well-tested code (so that people who are learning to program can see exactly what breaks the app), for code that an unexperienced programmer (or someone trying to became one) can actually read and understand, for a programmable interface (be it plugin system, client library, scripting system, whatever) that end-users don't need to be afraid of and that will encourage them to actually learn basic programming. For encouraging communities, where newbies know where to post patches and extensions, where those submissions are actually reviewed, often resulting in hints that help the new programmer improve. (Sometimes even, heh, in actually accepting the patch. The quality of submissions should generally improve with the amount of help available and the clarity of the system, until at some point, total newcomers can actually write usable stuff.)

Eventually, when enough people engage in this "meta-refactoring" principle of clear models and understandable systems, when enough users no longer perceive the tools they use as black boxes, I believe we will naturally suffer a few paradigm shifts in the systems as a whole (now I go back to using "system" in the sense I used on the top of the post), which can gradually help them get rid of the suckiness. My pet peeve is getting rid of the concepts of "application" and "process", which are rooted in Multics/Unix ideas from 30 years ago; but another good point, raised by Tom a few days ago, is that we need to outgrow the boundaries between "computers", and the notion that there are a few minimal components a "computer" must have. (The latter is pretty much dead already. You can run Linux (yes, mr. Stallman, I'm referring to the kernel here) on anything that has a cpu and memory.)

It may turn out that we need new languages, too...

so I figured the best way to start this blog was to introduce myself.

Not in the sense of "hello, I'm Lalo, I live in China and I come from Brazil, and this here is what I do." I mean, if you don't already know who I am, then you're probably not very interested either :-)

What I mean is - and I don't think I ever discussed this thoroughly with anyone - what do I believe in, from the point of view of software, why am I so adamant about Free Software, what is my vision for the future, what I would like to do to help, and hopefully, why.

In the process, I hope this "braindumping" can also make a few interesting points along the way :-)

But before I start, in the more traditional "blog" style: yesterday at the Beijing LUG we had a great presentation about "Linux adoption in China". The situation seems to be more or less the same we had in Brazil about two years ago. I think it's very promising. And next Thursday we have an exceptional BLUG meeting, to welcome RMS and hear about the history and philosophy of GNU, et al. Yeah, I know how obnoxious he can be, but I'm a big fan, so I'm going :-)

Then, hmm, let's get to it.