YouOS

I just found a site called YouOS.com and I'm blown away. It's a platform for web application developement that's hosted online with an online IDE and online execution. All the apps in there run in Javascript with AJAX-like connections to some elaborate database server code. The tutorials on the site are pretty good at getting you up and running with "Hello World" and a few other simple YouOS apps. It only took me about 20 mins to follow the first two without any hard errors and it's definitely got my gears turning on something interesting to do on the platform.


So this is what the first operating system for the web looks like. I've got lots of questions. Is there a way to charge for an app if I create it and want to license it to users? Can I access anything outside the YouOS server? How hard would it be to duplicate this system? Their IM and chat apps are for the time being limited to those on the YouOS system. They're really going to need a lot of bandwidth and processing power if they're going to run this for a substantial number of users and allow meaningful access to other systems.

One of my big gripes with my two shared hosting accounts is that I can't run cron jobs on them without resorting to something like webcron so it's difficult to use them to build a web service. I wonder if YouOS will allow people to write server processes with scheduled execution. That'd really touch off the YouOS revolution.

I'm impressed with the speed of YouOS. They've clearly got some hardware resources at their disposal. They're clearly great at abstracting code so I think hardware and bandwidth are going to be their biggest challenges. A challenge which will be quickly solved when they're bought by Microsoft or Google. I, for one, am counting the weeks until that happens.

Links: YouOS.com

Repaired: One LCD Screen

I just fixed my laptop's screen! I noticed that it started up with a pink tint long ago and more recently it started flickering. About a week ago it finally went black. I thought, maybe I'll just plug it into an external screen and call it a desktop...or I could order a new screen assembly. My screen is 1400x1050 so I knew that wouldn't be cheap. Then, I remembered reading an article over at hackaday.com on fixing lcd monitors with cheap parts so I went back to it and also read another article on replacing the mercury cold-cathode tuble

I started by taking the screen out and apart which took a lot of careful unscrewing, bending and cajoling. After digging into it for about a half-hour I got to the burnt-out cold cathode tube. I found a replacement part online by looking for my laptop's model number and ordered one to be shipped out three-day for $25 total.

Today I received and unwrapped the tube to find it didn't come with a connector on it. That meant I was going to have to do some soldering. I'm no expert solderer but I managed to detach the wires from the old tube and solder them onto the new one without too much trouble. I was even able to use the solder and wire from the previous tube assembly thereby saving myself a trip to the store for wire and solder. The hardest part came next...getting the tube and all the layers of the lcd screen(I counted 5) to fit back into it's metal frame. Once I got that done, I put the laptop back together and powered it up.

Now as you can imagine having never worked on a hack like this, my expectations were low....along the lines of a puff of smoke or more maybe some sparks flying. Much to my chagrin, no smoke, no sparks, and the screen powered brighter than ever. I'm looking at it now and I can't say when it ever looked this good. Guess all those years of taking apart radios and remote controls finally paid off!

Our Own Google

The other day I began to think about search engines and their innately commercial nature. I thought, why is it that the Internet, which exists as a large network of networks, relies on commercial organizations to index the web and serve search results. Shouldn't the Internet index itself and provide search as a basic utility or protocol? With the success of the open source development model there must be great potential to create an open-source community-owned-and-operated search engine.

What would be the benefits of such a system? It would ideally collect only aggregate and anonymous(hash IP addresses with random session keys) logs that would be used for the sole purpose of improving search. The servers providing search would be donated via a distributed effort similar to Seti@Home except limited more to local ISPs with the server resources to provide the search results and maintain replicated indices.

After a bit of thought on this concept, I did some research. Turns out there's a project over at the Apache Software Foundation by the names of Lucene and Nutch. These are open source projects with the goal of developing world class indexing and search application software. I'm not sure if they're trying to build a distributed web search infrastructure but their project is certainly important to the idea I've been thinking about. One thing I learned from their FAQ that I did not know is that indexing the web is not the most bandwidth intensive task a company like Google or Yahoo has to deal with...it's actually serving the search results. Makes sense when you think of how many times people look at a specific site versus how often it would change.

One other thought before I call an end to this post. Open source software is generally good at recreating or making small improvements to commodity software where features have been stable for some time. Since search engines are being rapidly developed in the commercial sector, it is difficult for open source to supplant leaders like Google and Yahoo at their own game. It may be necessary to start the search engine I'm talking about by looking to index sites that would provide little or no ad-revenue. Think scientific research and academia. If you've got any ideas on this, I'd love to hear 'em.