Deviant Abstraction

I have recently relocated from a big city to a small town in the countryside. This lifestyle change pointed out several limits of the web application paradigm since I have now only a very limited Internet connectivity.

At first I tried to use web applications extensively for my private life: agenda, text processor, todo and so on…. But it turns out this is a far from ideal situation.

For instance:

• No confidentiality. I don’t want to expose all my data to outsiders especially on a wifi network. I send and receive sensitive data like my credit card number.
• Only online access. OK this one is obvious but my Internet access is limited and irregular. This is is the first time in more than ten years. It is destabilizing. How do I access my calendar even when there is no Internet around? Web application do not provide this.
• Silo effect. I usually process subset of my data with custom made scripts. Those scripts are not web aware. There are as far as I know no find or grep for the Web. Not even a universal and easy way to parse any HTML page from any computer language.
• Lack of customization. I have tailored my desktop to my needs and this is a huge value add for me. For instance, Evolution, Skype and Gaim are automatically launched at startup times, my SVN repositories are updated… Web application does not offer any way to configure them this easily. What I need is kind of NetVibes on steroids
• Integration with current application. Desktop applications are heavily integrated. For instance, I can load with my desktop computer my Ipod. I can not from web applications.
• Interactivity. I need speed and efficiency. This is the basis of interactive applications. Web applications (even Gmail) are slow and clumsy for obvious latency reasons. This is OK for email not for code editing.

One silly example that happened yesterday. I need to fill online my tax declaration. For this French’s government is generating a certificate. But no web applications allow me to store this certificate for me (and for good reasons).

You might object that I could have built a web application to take care of those needs, this Netvibes on steroid. Actually I started but I found in between a much more elegant solution: the use of a remote desktop system. One issue remains though. Its cost: a dedicated server is expensive.

(USB systems have also their own limit mainly “no background mode”.)

A virtual machine paid by the hour such as EC2 is perfect and nearly free (it could even be financed by advertisement if a company wanted to operate such a service). It is my Personal Virtual Machine (PVM). Some companies have started offering them for free (ie Desktop On Demand) but their offer is unreliable, slow and you cannot run all the applications you want/need.

In the end I installed KDE and NXE on my dedicated server (NXE is a great WAN remote desktop tool. Truly impressive). It solved all my problems really fast although it is costly (more than 30 euros per month). Marketing hype is on web applications but now we should start to explore alternatives especially if they empower users and are a cheaper alternatives (I can demonstrate it if needed). I can access it from my corporate PC, my cellphone or a cybercafe.

As a final note I am not saying that WebApp are bad. Just that they are not the universal panacea. Especially for lonely, interactive and heavily used applications. I will discuss this in more depth later. The PVM vision is not either the perfect solution but for heavy computer users such as myself it offers real advantages: no need for backup ever,r power consumption alway the lowest possible, you access your machine at your will without leaving it on.

The next steps is to be able to tie a virtual machine to a physical computer and then sends it back in the cloud. VMware system allows such trick. I will discuss this later in more depth too and I will tell you how it was to use this prototype for a month.

What do you think of this idea? Would you like me to explore those ideas more in depth?

“We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

Link via Rough Type

Email is so twentieth century

Where did I hear that? How?

The coming Fab revolution. A must read. Especially the links.

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Finally an understandable SLA. A really bright ideas by Red Hat.

This blog discusses this more in depth and I fully agree with their conclusions.

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This is a memo from Microsoft. It shows how they have prepared for a paper for Wired.

This is really freaky. It is OK to present your angle of the story IMO, but this is manipulation. I understand why Wired is quite upset.

Microsoft should learn how to relax and trust. Especially in our new connected-happy-world where those totalitarian tactics does not work (or not at this level). It reminds me of some dysfunctional companies I worked for.

Memo in PDF and the Wired article (via the Long Tail)

By dynamic, I mean adapted to each user. The phone WAP site are good at that for various reasons. It is trivial for the Web but we lack some good ideas to execute. This article shows some of them.

The marketing message is good, but I think their approach is only partially correct.

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I wonder why when to get some tech data on MySQL you need to register on their website. It makes everything harder especially when you want to google their doc.

This is a classical example of an ungeek marketing department. Of course, it allows them to gather statistics on who reads what… But most of the data they ask is already given by my IP address.

The other example I have in mind is IBM. Even Microsoft does not ask for registration.

Update I did eventually register (I need it for my master’s thesis) but I received the doc three
four nine times by email. And I just needed to read one page. I hope they don’t send me a survey to evaluate it. Actually, I have set up a spam filter to avoid receiving any more times this white paper.

One example

Google has just released a new service. It allows you to create your search engine quite easily. Here is my test one.

This is technically impressive. I need to test it further though.

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Sonos is a very cool music system. I will own some when I will get rich!

Joel Spolsky describes why this product is great and how it is built. Pretty cool article. Pure excellent applied marketing.

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