Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The ultimate absurdity is that you can't play the word 'redskins' on ESPN." -- Eric Chaikin (director of Word Wars), on special rules for Scrabble tournaments that are televised, after champion Trey Wright caused a flap by playing an inappropriate word during the National Scrabble Championship. (Event 2004-08-05, AP story 2004-08-06, not sure which date the quote came from.)

[For folks who don't get the significance: ESPN, a sports network better known for football than Scrabble, shows National Football League games. The Washington, D.C. team is called the Redskins, a racially charged term deemed 'usually offensive' (though, to muddy the issue even farther, IIRC a recent poll indicated that most Native Americans do not favour changing the name of the team).]

Thanks to Eric Albert for pointing out the story on a mailing list.

I want more portability in my computing environment.

No, I don't mean a laptop, though I very much want one of those as well. (Actually I have a hand-me-down laptop with Windows 3.1 and a broken pointing device, that I think I can make useful as a text-mode Linux box once I get around to setting up a PPP server on my LAN so that I can boot an installation diskette and then install Linux over the serial port. But a machine that could run Acrobat Reader, xv, gv, and any of the several graphical web browsers I can stand (I'm picky, but not too picky -- Firefox, Safari, or iCab would be acceptable for on-the-road use if Opera doesn't fit) would be rather noticeably useful. But I digress.) ...

No, what I mean is portability of whatever I'm in the middle of (and to some extent, simply what tools are available) from one workstation in the house to another. If I'm in bed, I want to be able to say, "I feel like working on that stuff I had open on the NT box," without having to get up and move to the office to do so. If I'm at my desk, I want to be able to decide to finish a LiveJournal comment I'd started composing on the Macintosh. Or to be able to say, "This machine is too bogged down; I'd like to transfer one or two of these currently-running apps to a different desktop where they'll run faster, without losing my place."

Creative use of VNC could almost sortakinda solve a lot of this problem uh, fulfill this desire, except for a few snags: most of the machines in question are underpowered, so adding another layer to the GUI (and schlepping the mouse movements and window-updates back and forth across my LAN isn't going to speed things up; most of my screens are too small as it is; sticking a virtualized copy of another machine's screen into a smaller monitor is ... uncomfortable; and I'd have to deal with breaking and re-establishing VNC connections a lot to avoid loops where one machine has a twice-virtualized copy of itself in a window on its own screen (or having VNC error out and tell me it won't do that, when I try to grab a screen). I don't know whether upgrading from a 10Mbit LAN to 100Mbit would help any; I suspect the bottlenecks for VNC are in my processors, not my network.

Now if I ran everything on really fast servers that were only accessed via VNC (much as all my Linux boxes are currently only accessed by Telnet and X except when I'm shutting them down or rebooting them) -- that is, if all the workstations in the house were used as nothing but thin-client terminals -- that would solve the looping problem and the processor speed problem, but I'd need a fast application server or two to put downstairs first. Come to think of it, it'd also solve the "I want to have Windows, Mac Classic, OS X, Linux, BSD, and AmigaDOS all on one screen and have it magically behave like the one I'm thinking of whenever I try to do something" problem. But it doesn't solve the screen real-estate problem. And unless the hypothetical fast app servers were really loaded up with RAM, the "doing too much on one machine" problem would still exist. But I dunno, it might get me close enough.

I want a meta-OS. One that ties all the machines on my LAN into one huge system that lets me move from workstation to workstation willy-nilly, independent of how it moves processes from CPU to CPU for load balancing, and lets me copy from a browser window under MacOS and paste into a spreadsheet under Windows, reading my mind to figure out which of the possibly conflicting behaviours I want it to exhibit from moment to moment.

(And I still want the Bat-Computer, as previously mentioned.)

I'm wondering how close to this I can come. And how close with existing (preferably open-source or freeware) tools.

I don't really like using VNC. I think VNC itself is pretty neat -- it's PFM[*], and can be a real problem solver -- but my experience using it has been slow and laggy and has not felt "transparent enough" to make me happy. That said, it's still a Hell of a tool, and it can be a real lifesaver sometimes. For example, despite finding it laggy over a 10Mbit LAN, I was quite willing to put up with even worse lag to use it over a 56Kbit dialup in order to use tools that were in MD when I was in ON and get paid for the work I was thus able to complete while on the road. If I'm going to use it all day every day, it'd have to be pleasant to use. But to solve an unusual problem once in a while, I don't have to enjoy it; it just has to solve my problem.

It's an impressive tool. Being able to run a Windows machine from a PalmOS device has entertaining amounts of geek-fu. Throwing Linux/Unix graphical apps at a Windows machine that doesn't have an X server is useful. And occasionally taking over the screen of one Windows machine from another, or from a Linux desktop, can save some running back and forth between rooms. It's just that I've always been aware of the extra layer between my brain and my results, the lag of the mouse cursor, the squinty fonts to make another machine's entire desktop fit into one window (possibly on a smaller monitor). So if it turns out that I can build the setup I described in my previous entry using VNC, and that gives me enough extra usability to make VNC worth putting up with, then I'll do that, but I'm wishing for something oomphier.

OTOH, I don't know how snappily VNC performs on modern hardware that I can't afford, and how I'd like using it with larger monitors on the current workstation than the systems I'm controlling from there. Maybe on the right equipment it really does manage to be everything that it sounds like it ought to be, and thus manages to be more of an everyday tool than a last resort?

Anyhow, I first installed it to experiment with and decided it wasn't up to snuff on my hardware (at the time a 386/33 running Linux and a slowish Pentium running Win95), but I didn't uninstall it. Since then I've installed it on more machines, and even though I don't like it well enough to use it often, when I've needed it, it has saved my ass. (That and port forwarding on my NAT box so that the Windows machines are reachable from outside the house in the first place.) If the performance issues go away on current hardware, making use of VNC transparent from a user's point of view, then I could imagine someday setting up "thin client" workstations around the house.

If you've got a situation where something like VNC sounds like it might be useful, don't let my griping about a laggy interface stop you from checking it out. a) It might not be a problem on your hardware, and b) For special circumstances it can be a lifesaver even if it's too slow to use comfortably all the time.

[*] "Pure F'ing Magic"