LabSpace Stuff I'm Doing

NB: A lot of the links here won't work if you're outside of CCS or MCS. Just pretend for now that they lead to something really interesting. The documents will be made generally available as they are finalized.

What I'm Doing

I'm working on developing infrastructure and architecture for LabSpace. Translated, this means I'm developing stuff that's mostly user-invisible and provides the network-level support for the collaboration tools we're building, including

• A distributed name service to provide global symbolic names for devices and clients
• An authentication and authorization scheme for devices
• Binding Nexus to MOO to allow us to have a function-call interface between the virtual environment, its clients, devices, and other Nexus applications
• Building MOO and client support libraries and sample clients which make use of the architecture
• Documenting our infrastructure work
• Other random network and client hacking.

What I've Done Already

Well, broadly I've built some random MOO toys and compiled some uninteresting stuff; as the year goes by, I'll fill in weekly status reports here. It'll be exciting.

• Ok, so it's not exactly weekly: Report one
• Week of Oct. 26 - Nov. 2
• Very late report 3
• The final nMOO documentation

When I'm Doing It

This is a broad outline of how I'll be spending the next year on LabSpace; it should probably provide a general guide to what you will find in the weekly status reports, but it's more for my benefit than anything else.

1. nMOO Design
   by Monday or Tuesday, Oct. 16-17, probably
   The first thing we need to do is get a solid idea of what Nexus-in-MOO should look like. I'll be doing design with Bob and Ivan at MCS to figure this out and produce a design document to guide the implementation.
2. nMOO Implementation
   by late October
   How this will go precisely depends on the outcome of the design discussion mentioned above. I anticipate it will involve
   • Implementation of Nexus Global Pointers and types in some sensible MOO fashion
   • Support for the Nexus remote service request protocol, both in initiating outgoing service requests and binding incoming service requests to MOO code
   • Constructing a toy Nexus app for testing
3. Video Server support
   By late November, some time before SC95
   I'll be building MOO support for Bob's video server
4. The Broker
   Winter quarter
   Building the LabSpace Broker, with nameservice and authentication support
5. MOOtv
   Late winter quarter
   A complete sample video client, controlled from the MOO.