Rapid Application Development for the masses.
censored distributed easy extendable fast informative intelligent lean maintainable open (source) portable pretty rfc'ed robust secure transparent version numbers virtual
I am now living in a place with no network access, although I do manage to drag
my computer to a network about once a week. I had been using the Skang part of
matrix-DFS as a tool to write web based software. Every time I did a Skang based
project, the RAD features of Skang grew. Skang actually predates matrik-DFS.
With the networking part getting almost no development, and the RAD part getting
a lot of development, it was time for a refocus. I recreated the entire project
as matrix-RAD, with matrix-DFS moving to a sub project.
matrix-DFS in the future will rely on things like freenet and bittorrent to provide
some of the underlying transport protocols. Some of the things I am adding to
matrix-RAD will speed up development of matrix-DFS.
As a very experienced computer programmer I am unsatisfied with the programming tools
that are available, particularly with the bloat and complication. I at least, and
maybe the world, is ready for a small, extremely easy to use, cross platform, Rapid
Application Development (RAD) tool. matrix-RAD will be that tool. It will be so
easy to use that ordinary computer users will be able to do some development tasks.
That is why I call matrix-RAD "Rapid Application Development for the masses".
'Cause Telstra sucks B-). Seriously, Telstra BigPond Cable (BPC) had several big
problems at the time, but it has all changed now. Not that they got any better,
just different from what they were. They were the only game in town though. I
have this theory that you can tell how bad a company / product is by how often
they change the name, they want you to forget the bad smell attached to the old
name, and fool you into thinking that everything is new, fresh, and exciting.
Telstra used to be Telecom, who used to be called something else, and are
generally refered to as "Bastards Inc.". BigPond Cable changed to BigPond Advance.
'Nuff said.
At the time this all started, BPC was available in two of Australias major cities,
and they were starting up in a third. Melbourne and Sydney were each divided into
four routers, with the customers being on one or the other router on a geographical
basis. Brisbane, just starting up, had two routers. BPC users could not communicate
with anybody on the same router, but could communicate with everybody else. This
was not a technical problem, and could be solved in a minute by changing a simple
configuration parameter.
BPC's proxy is poxy. The less said about it the better.
Telstra charged like a wounded bull for traffic, having one of the highest rates
in the world for domestic cable access, but they didn't charge for traffic between
BPC users. Everybody had a MB allowance per month, which was free, over that and
you forked out big time. Traffic was charged in both directions. I calculated
once that it was theoretically possible to pay over half a million dollars per
month for this `service', even if it was just someone else ping flooding you.
The login client they supply sucked big time. The service had lots of reliability
problems. The `support' was a joke.
On the BPC news server was several internal news groups for the users. A very
friendly and helpful community formed in those news groups, and we were a part
of that. With all the clever, helpful people in that news group, it wasn't long
before various work arounds appeared. BPC users setup and ran internal proxies,
file servers, games servers, news servers, NTP time networks, documentation, and
software. All of it was far superior to what Telstra supplied. The NTP network
was the best setup network in the country, with the guy that runs the US Naval
Observatory's atomic clocks offering to help supply us with a stratum one server.
A stratum one server is the source of time, everybody else in the world syncronises
to one or more of them. Their would have been two stratum one servers in Australia,
the official atomic clock at CSIRO, and the one in my lounge room.
Telstra screwed up in a major way once, and they bribed all the users to keep us quiet.
Everybody got about three times their usual allowance for the next month. dvs1 (AKA
onefang) organized the FTP mirror project to capitalize on
that.
pontiac and runestone, who ran one of the larger file servers, got together and planned
a distributed file system to help solve some of the BPC problems. dvs1 was the author
of the most portable and robust BPC login client, organizor of the mirror project, and
a few other things, so they invited him to help. At a meeting, an overall structure
for both the software and the group was planned.
At the time, Australias draconian Internet censorship laws were being pushed through
by the government, so they could win the support of Senator Harradine on some other
issue. Only Mr Harradine actually wanted the laws, but the government pushed it
through anyway (democracy at work). This is why we invented the "Harradine barrier".
The BPC technician that was in charge of security jokingly refered to himself as the
"security nazi", which is why the above image shows a "nazi node", that was where we
planned to keep him B-). We jokingly decided to name the guy in charge of coding
for matrix-DFS as the "code nazi".
We decided that the things we need to do to bypass the router blocks, reduce
billable traffic, and work around an unreliable network, would also do good
things out in the real world (non-BPC Internet).
A few months later, Telstra made major changes to BPC all at once. While they
removed the router block, they started charging for internal traffic. They
also lowered prices across the board, and changed the name. Telstra assured
us that the fact that a second cable operator had finally started up after
years of testing had nothing to do with any of these changes. Pull the other one.
dvs1 was kicked of BPC.
This file was last modified on Friday, 12-Nov-2004 10:07:38 EST