[Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite!

Russell Allen mail at russell-allen.com
Wed Nov 25 05:47:32 UTC 2020


The short story is:

4 cheap cloud servers, running in Sydney, Silicon Valley and Tokyo and one in Sydney as a manager. When you start a trial Self world through the webpage, the Self management code connects to one of those servers, and runs Self with your snapshot in a security jail. The Self VM connects to a X11 server, which is turned into a VNC remote desktop connection, which is then carried over a WebSocket to your browser. There are quite a few moving parts unfortunately. 

There are a strictly limited number of Self instances which can run at any one time, but there’s scope to scale up or out.

So what you see in your browser is effectively a X11 desktop with a full screen window open, which is why when you started the spy it covered up the Self desktop. I think there is a key combo which you could have used to switch back and forth.

I hadn’t thought about ui1, but it it should be possible to get it to work since it uses X11. If I get some time I’ll try it out.

On the back end, ie not the trial worlds, each running Self instance has access to a persistent directory which can be used for the transporter so I have been developing the system recently entirely through the web. I can export modules to a git repo then push that to GitHub, and can also rebuild my snapshot from those sources from within Self (or by cheating and ssh-ing into the server). 

What you probably didn’t try was the morphic multiuser code. Jason Grossman and I did a test the other day and it worked nicely. The system gave us both a username/password and a url to log on. We then each got a view of the shared desktop etc. It would be interesting to see how many people we can do at once.

Russell


> On 25 Nov 2020, at 3:46 pm, David Ungar <ungar at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm amazed! I was able to get a gas tank going. And turned on the spy, but it obliterated the desktop, till I turned it off with the console. Wow!! 
> 
> What would it take to get ui1 to work?
> 
> Where is this really running? How is it working??
> 
> Thank you so very much!
> 
> - David
> 
>> On Nov 24, 2020, at 8:29 PM, Russell Allen <mail at russell-allen.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I’m reasonably confident that although it might not always work, the OurSelf code won’t screw up my servers in a way which is hard to fix, so I’ve  removed the need for an invite to try out an online Self world.
>> 
>> https://ourself.io 
>> 
>> Let me know if you try it and it works (or doesn’t!). As a reminder, you choose a server near you and get a link to a morphic desktop, and also to a console. After 20 minutes or so the trial is deleted so don’t worry about breaking anything.
>> 
>> Also if you are interested in playing more seriously (saving snapshots etc) or want to try a shared world, send me an email.
>> 
>> The existing trial world is very boring! My next step is to start to add interesting applications to play around with.
>> 
>> :) Russell
>> 
>> 
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