tola

As I announced in April, this summer I'm starting a business called Krellian.

Since April I have written an outline business plan and given a presentation in front of a Dragon's Den style panel of judges. The judges were impressed and awarded me a £4500 grant on the SPEED Programme. SPEED is a project led by Wolverhampton University with the involvement of many other universities to support Entrepreneurship in students.

On the SPEED programme I've attended a 3 day training course on running a business and am now developing the business idea further.

Well, it's 07/07/07 and as promised I'm launching my company web site(s) today. They're a little light on information at the moment but they're enough to point people towards, bearing in mind I'm working to a five year plan here.

Products - krellian.com

This is the main company web site where products will appear, products being Web Appliances. If that doesn't quite tell you exactly what the products will be then that's partly intentional. I've not decided what the first product is going to be yet, I'm working through a shortlist. The software projects at krellian.org might give some clues.

Services - krellian.net

This will eventually be the home of a suite of web services, but for now it's serving as a bit of an experiment in natural language command.

Community - krellian.org

Now this is the bit where I'm going to need some help. Once I've kicked off development of some software projects, I'm hoping to get developers interested and build a community around the projects. I don't expect this to happen overnight and I think I really need to get a release out first. I'll be working towards a release of something over the next three months.

Webtop will carry on where Webscope left off. It's a suped-up web browser for devices that don't need a desktop.

How I start on the Webdoors project will depend on what I choose to be my first product, but the long term vision is a Webtop Linux Distribution, much like the Desktop Linux distributions we have today. Essentially a collection of libre web applications given a consistent look and feel.

The vision that Krellian is working towards is a Ubiquitous Web facilitating the free sharing of information and ideas. The Ubiquitous Web is device independent. That means you can access information in a format suited to the device you're using, be that plain text, html, vector graphics, voice or even a 3d virtual world. This gives you an idea of the direction of the Webdoors project.

W3C Compliance

All three web sites are fully W3C compliant XHTML and CSS and are tested in IE6, Firefox and Safari (if anyone could test them in IE7 it would be helpful).

Balancing W3C compliance with the web page actually looking OK in the most widespread but worst standards supporting browser is a bit of a pain. My advice is keep it simple!

Hosting

It wasn't the original plan but the websites (apart from the software projects) are currently temporarily hosted in my bedroom. That's very bad because out here in the sticks we have a very unreliable power supply and I've recently had a lot of problems with PlusNet, my Internet provider.

I'm looking at hosting options at the moment, trying to get my head around Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of renting a dedicated server from day one.

VoIP

Thanks to ALUG for the advice on VoIP service providers, I now have an 0845 number for my business provided by sipgate which points at wherever I happen to be on the Internet.

Business Cards

I've ordered 250 double sided business cards from VistaPrint for about £15 including a completely custom design and delivery etc.

LugRadio Live 2007

See you at LugRadio Live!

Melt the Megafreeze, let it trickle

Tuomo Valkonen writes that The megafreeze development model is broken in GNU/Linux distributions. He argues for a very long release cycle for an extremely stable base system (in line with Kernel releases) and then separate repositories for applications which are constantly upgraded.

I've often thought that in a world where security updates can be trickled over the Internet as they become available, it's odd that new features come in big chunks with each new release of a distribution. With Ubuntu, I upgrade every 6 months to see new features, why can't the features just appear as they become available like we're used to with Software as a Service?

Sam has tried to explain the reasons for the status quo to me on numerous occasions (him knowing a lot more about building Linux distributions than I), but like Valkonen I still remain unconvinced that the Megafreeze is the best approach.

Abstract User Interfaces: "Plasticity"

While I was on Tuomo Valkonen's homepage I noticed the Ion window manager that he developed. I found the UI ideas very interesting because they're very similar to a lot of things I'm trying to achieve with Webscope.

Ion has "tiling workspaces with tabbed frames" and the screen is always filled at any one time, like the multi-level resource tabs I want to create.

Ion also has a "query module" which "implements a line editor similar to mini buffers in many text editors. It is used to implement many different queries with tab-completion support: show manual page, run program, open SSH session, view file, goto named client window or workspace, etc." which is a similar concept to the Natural Language Command Line I am trying to develop.

In a paper entitled Vis/Vapourware Interface Synthesiser Valkonen describes a system for describing user interface semantics and then automatically generating actual interfaces based on user's preferences with the use of stylesheets. This seems very much like a transform view in a Model View Controller design pattern and he's essentially talking about doing for the desktop what I want to do for the multimodal web. Starting with a semantic description of a user interface (e.g. using DIAL) and then transforming that semantic description into various different presentations using XSL stylesheets.

In his bibliography, he links to papers which use the term "Plasticity" in user interfaces, which I might explore further. User interfaces these days have to go "above the level of a single device" -- O'Reilly.

I created some interface mockups for Webscope over Christmas and today I added a slicker black theme. I've also been playing with the XUL interface a little bit (not much to see here), which is what I really want to find the time to work on.

I bought my Nokia 770 Internet Tablet in October and (as I thought might happen), Nokia have just released a new version, the N800.

This was reported on digg yesterday and today I found the official Nokia product page, I expect they will launch it properly at CES this week.

The new model has 128Mb RAM, 256Mb ROM and a VGA webcam and now supports up to two 2GB SD cards instead of single RS-MMC card. It's got a revamped design and has now really gone mainstream, becoming part of the NSeries (like my Nokia N70 mobile phone). This is great news because it shows that the Linux based Maemo operating system is seen to be a success.

Maemo is one of the platforms I would like to port Webscope to. The new hardware will be useful if I start getting X3D rendering and video playback running and will allow video calls as well. There's a long way to go before then though :P

I don't know if anybody noticed but my homepage and Twisted Lemon's homepage have been down over the new year period. We're back up and running now because Moose Computer Services have moved our hosting from the old virtual machine to a new, real server. Hopefully now we've got rid of our noisy neighbours we won't have the problem again :)

While tola.me.uk has been down I've been busy working on hippygeek.co.uk. Hippygeek now has subversion repositories and trac projects working (I've been playing with the Subclipse plugin for Eclipse. It's a bit clunky but a very useful feature.)

In particular I've started two new projects, webscope and moya. They are two projects I've been planning for a couple of years, but I've decided to make the thought process a bit more open in the hope that I'll make some progress towards implementing them. There's no code yet.

Webscope

"Webscope is a unified interface for managing your information with multiple modes of interaction. It is a web resource manager - a hybrid web browser, web server, media player and window manager replacement."

I'm hoping to write the front end using XUL, running on XULRunner, but the back end will include lots of other bits including an HTTP server.

You can click the link above for more information, or see the draft specification and UI mockups (which I created in Inkscape).

Webscope is an implementation of design concepts from my web site, including:

• Multimodal User Agent for the Web
• Web Servent

Moya

"Moya is software for a home information appliance, a central computer for the home. Features will include a media centre, social software and home automation with a minimalistic and multimodal web interface."

Moya will be a combination of lots of existing projects in lots of different programming languages, loosely coupled with APIs. Any new components will probably be written in Python, which I'm learning at the moment.

You can click the link above for more information.

Moya is an implementation of some design concepts on my web site, including:

• Home Information Appliance
• Device Independent Web Server
• Multi-tier Architecture for Distributed Information Systems