Tuesday, December 31, 2002

The Web and Stigmergy. What do memes, weblogs, Google and neighborhoods all have in common? More... [Bitworking] 3:28:26 PM    comment []

Personal Proxies. Russ Beattie, Les Orchard, and others are discussing an idea for something called a "Universal Personal Proxy", or UPP (because every vaporware product must have a three letter acronym).   "Personal" means "you run it yourself, on your own computer".  "Proxy" means "it's between you and something else".   But it's the "Universal" that's the most important - it's meant to express that this kind of software would work with all kinds of systems, not just the web or e-mail. Of course, this is where I must chime in to say that my own little project, Hep Message Server, is a non-vaporware UPP that's under active development.  Les has said that he's considering using Twisted for his app (Java being the other possibility). I sent him an e-mail yesterday saying that if he decides to go with Python I'll have a nice chunk of working code for him to play with.  So we'll see what happens. Meanwhile, I've started working on a GUI test app using my messaging library and PyGTK.  This is mostly to give me a chance to test my library in a different kind of application than Hep.  Also it's a refreshing change from the pure-data, no-UI work I've been doing lately. Working with a GUI also means that you notice speed problems much more quickly.  I already found (and fixed) a problem with the Twisted pop3 client code that made it use lots of CPU while downloading big messages.    [Abe Fettig] 3:00:18 PM    comment []