TATTVUM - Dreams for this quarter and beyond
Some thoughts on the content model for the site
S V Ramu (2002-04-14)
The Weekly Site Hosting
For seven weeks continuously now, the TATTVUM site is going strong, content wise. For now we are unable to concentrate on publicity, nor are keen. This has been a big learning experience, and we intend to perpetuate this weekly hosting, may be, for ever!
As of now, this site will be re-hosted every week (like a weekly magazine), but will also update with corrections and minor modifications in between the week (unlike a weekly magazine).
We have vowed that whatever we share here will be only what we found inspiring. If a week goes by without any 'Aha' experience, there won't be any updates either, other than the keep-alive status reporting.
The site will not replicate what is well presented in other sites. Of course we will offer our opinions about other good and bad sites, with proper external links to their pages. This means that we will not be publishing any tutorials etc., unless we have something new to offer, or that we are the pioneers and nobody else have a decent tutorial on that area.
Our main intention is to explore a robust and open framework to think about, and work, with distributed clients (ideally peer to peer), and manage them in a highly controllable, profitable and yet delegatable manner.
We will publish articles on seemingly unrelated subjects like mathematics, physics, Economics, History etc. to broaden our vision and to explore automation possibilities in them.
In many sense this site will be like a community thinking aloud; with democratic opportunities, but mercilessly competitive roles and rewards. We really want to push open source and distributed development to its limits and see how the natural human selfishness accepts it. We are very hopeful and keen about this model.
Archives - Some old, some new and some planned
With this week's hosting we are introducing a new archive. Before this April end, we intend to add two more archive.
Article Archive (Already available)
The mainstay probing section to find the real crux of distributed computing and management. Most of the articles are informative, some speculative, and some even dreamy.
Homepage Archive (Already available)
Sometimes I feel that it is only due to my possessive mind that I'm archiving the old homepages (with properly adjusted hyperlinks). But we also hope that this will complete the information content of the site, if and when people wish to explore with us.
FAQ Archive (Staring this week)
FAQ has always been a nice format for analyzing and understanding a concept. Whole of Upanishads is a dialogue. We hope this archive will complement and concretize the ideas explored in the Articles Archive.
Standards Archive (Within this month end)
These are the standards that we follow, with an open eye to world standards. This archive intends to simplify and summarize the best practices that we as a community will be finding and accepting together.
Software Archive (Within this month end)
Initially we will be sharing our small software utilities and novelties. But, as of now, our intentions are to keep all our software products in opensource and only differentiate on service and attention.
The Mailing Model
From this week onwards we'll remove all links to Yahoogroups. Instead, all (three) group email links will be redirected to TATTVUM ids with appropriate subject line prefixes. We do this change for the following reasons,
Sending and receiving mails through a mail client is an easy and elegant solution. Since POP protocol is open, no client can lock us in. And hence any mail account that doesn't give us POP access is essentially locking us in.
Of course we cannot blame Yahoo, as they still allow POP access if we pay them. All the same, their cost is very high for an alien domain name. If we register our own domain name, server space and mail ids in it, it will work out to just little bit more money, but there will be no lock in.
Oh yeah, Yahoo does provide many service like Groups, Briefcase, Notepad etc. But again all are locking services. By lock in I mean, that our public profile has to change if we opt to stop our relation with yahoo. That is, if the TATTVUM group decides to change its group provider to some other vendor, all our group ids have to change, and also yahoo will not allow exporting our data in a simple way. At the same time if the group mail ids are with our domain name, we can transfer our vendor at will and yet continue with our public profile with no change.
Of course we need to pay slightly high this way, and with some reduction in ease and services. Nevertheless, this way we have our freedom, and hence can grow in our own pace and style.
So, by next week, we intend to delete all the three yahoo groups of TATTVUM. Namely Discuss, Announce, and Feedback. I'll also send an alert mail this week to these groups and current members will be automatically added to the new groups.
There is not much change in what you need to do,
If your mail client is configured in your machine, as usual, you can click the appropriate (mailto) hyperlinks in any of the pages in TATTVUM site , and send us all, your message.
Or, if you want to use it in web or otherwise, please send your discussion mails to the same mailto address, group@TATTVUM.com.
Software archive postponed
Once again the software archive has been postponed. Last week I browsed for some GNU free utilities for windows, and found some treasure troves. We intend to share them with you all, with some elaboration about how they can be used together with other free tools. It is important that we exhaustively explore the existing open source tools before we create our own.