Title: A Personal View: Computing Anywhere

I often visit the Dartington international summer school of music in Devon. It is a bit like a complicated multi-track conference in that there are so many things going on (both officially and unofficially) and it is very much up to you to decide how to organise your time. I usually manage to make a fairly full schedule with lots of flute playing and meeting people from many different countries, and sometimes we stay in touch for a while afterwards. There are others who come for one class only and would rather not be distracted by anything else, and sometimes they get quite a culture shock when someone like me walks up and tries to be friendly.

As a result of a misunderstanding, this year I felt the need to write a note of apology in Japanese. Since my kanji skills leave much to be desired, this endeavour had to be computer-assisted. So I explained the situation to the office, and they kindly let me use a computer with a printer and Internet Explorer. On my Linux box back in Cambridge (which had been left running and connected to the network), I have a package called "mindterm", which is a Java-based SSH client that can make connections to the Web server it's hosted on. So I typed in its URL and before long I was at a nice Unix prompt, albeit in a font too small for me to read easily.

I started up a VNC-based X server, and manually typed all the necessary commands to put a nice desktop on it. I then opened a new browser window and put in the URL to my installation of Mindbright, a Java-based VNC client that works over SSH. (Mindbright is no longer maintained and is not distributed in binary form anymore, but you can compile it yourself from the Mindterm sources.) It took a while for all the classes to download, but soon I was using my normal X desktop, and apart from the screen being smaller, some of the key bindings being wrong, and everything happening a second or two later than you do it, you wouldn't know that I wasn't on my own computer.

I used XEmacs (together with the EDICT dictionary) to write my Japanese message, and I saved it as HTML. I then used my Web access gateway to convert the Japanese characters into images so that they could be displayed and printed by the local machine. The whole process took about 25 minutes (I had already worked out the outline of the Japanese sentences away from the computer). When I disconnected, I left the VNC server running, since I thought I might be able to connect to it later from the one library computer that was available for summer school students to check their email.

Wrong. The library computer just displayed the message "Class MindVNC not found" whenever I tried to load Mindbright. But I was able to use the Mindterm SSH client, so I checked the Apache logs to see what had been accessed. According to the logs, the MindVNC class had been successfully retrieved. So why was the browser complaining? I checked all the settings, and told the person waiting for the computer that someone must have tampered with the settings and that I was putting it right. She went to get the computer manager, who said that the problem was being caused by their firewall - the firewall monitors the HTTP downstream and blocks out anything that looks like a Java applet, but it didn't block the SSH client because it wasn't 100% effective. Firewalls are useful things but sometimes they can be annoying. Perhaps I should have asked him for the name of this product and written a review, but still. I couldn't stay any longer, but now I knew what to do next time.

From the SSH client, I told my computer in Cambridge to run a secure Web server, and I put Mindbright on the secure server. I was then able to download and run Mindbright without further interference from the firewall, since it couldn't monitor an encrypted connection. So much for clever firewalls. Soon I was back in XEmacs, checking my email.

I had over a hundred new messages, a fair number of them (but not all!) being from the ACCU committee list debating the pros and cons of paper publication. Well there was no way I could read all that with half a dozen musicians looking over my shoulder and saying they wanted the computer ten minutes ago, so I just deleted the lot. So much for the benefits of electronic publication. Don't get me wrong; I'm all for things being available electronically, especially for people with special needs and for searching and so forth (although there are some things I wrote when I was younger that now I'd rather people didn't find in a search), but there are times when it's just not practical to read reams of text from the Internet. Anyway, I rushed through processing the rest of my email, noted down a telephone number or two, and left for the next musical event (again leaving the VNC server running, of course).

One thing about an international event like Dartington is that it has people from places like China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Romania and Macedonia all wanting to check their email, and they tend to use Web sites that assume that the relevant character set is supported. The computer had been set up with a few character sets (I don't know if this was official or not), but they were somehow tampered with, so although some people had no trouble at all in using websites with exotic characters, others got the familiar gibberish you get if you try to go to yahoo.com.cn with the average English browser. My Web access gateway was not good enough; it was designed for browsing Web pages, not for operating email sites with an abundance of forms and buttons, all of which are difficult to convert to images, especially if you want interaction. You can't see which button is which, and you get chaos if you try to reply to a message quoting the original. This is not to mention the problems with missing characters (not all languages are properly supported) and sometimes incomplete support of character sets and encodings (the man from Macedonia was not very happy when I showed him my Cyrillic support). Obviously, I couldn't spend time fixing the code there and then, but I could sometimes use my SSH and VNC clients to help. To people who didn't know much about computers, I must have looked like an insane lunatic.

Back in my hometown in Dorset, I tried to connect to my VNC session from the public library, only to find that they had firewalled out any outgoing connections to anything other than Web servers, so I couldn't make an SSH connection. The library staff didn't know what I was talking about and could only suggest that I take it up with the head office, something which I didn't bother to do (after all, I don't suppose there are too many others in that area who know what SSH is, and I was going to be back in Cambridge the next week). I think it's possible to tunnel SSH through a Web server; if I have to do this sort of thing again then I might look into that, because getting the full power of your desktop is better than using some Web-based email program any day.

The industry standard has created an environment where you can expect to find an Internet-connected computer just about anywhere in the country, and often use it without charge, although there are restrictions on when you can do it and for how long. That computer is likely to be a 32-bit PC running an SSL-enabled Web browser with a Java interpreter, and if you have set up a server then you can do just about any computing task as though you were back at your desk, apart from the fact that things are slower, special hardware is unavailable, and you occasionally need to get round a firewall or two. However, the client setup is rarely secure, and I do wonder how long it will be before it is commonplace for people to install trojans on public machines so as to spy on each other's email.

Not long ago one couldn't rely on 32-bit Java-capable computers being available. When people think that computers are "all the same", it's hard to explain to them why your grandmother's BBC Micro and your family's 286 PC can't do what the library computer can. Well I could set up a modem-answering server and get to the Unix command prompt if I really had to, but a graphical VNC login might be asking too much - I can just imagine how awkward it would be trying to hack out a VNC client in 6502 assembler in the early hours of the morning, trying to run in 8 colours on a 320x128 screen with about 10K of free RAM (maybe a bit more if you have sideways RAM) and an analogue joystick in place of a mouse. I'd have to have a really, really good reason to do that.

One alternative to finding computers every-where is taking your own. Mobile phones can connect you from most places, and apart from concerns about the possibility of microwaving your brain, the main problem is the cost of the service. This could be made easier by the introduction of schemes that charge based on traffic rather than connection time, such as the general packet radio service (GPRS, which incidentally is not a new idea - iMode has been going in Japan for ages, and amateur packet radio has been going even longer), but given the availability of public computers, I still think you'd need to have a fairly big need to be connected in order to justify the expense. Another factor is battery life - a laptop or a pocket PC with integrated mobile phone capabilities may be able to do more fancy things than a Psion, but the batteries won't last nearly so long. I have an unconnected Psion 3mx that I use for note-taking and so forth (with some of my own software on it) and I don't know what I'll do when it breaks, since Psion have pulled out of the palmtop business; I haven't found anything else (especially anything compatible) that is similarly small and light (even in the hard protective case I got from Palm-Tec) and that has similarly long battery life, apart from "databanks" that are too simple, and pen-based computers that I can't use. Perhaps I should invest in a spare Psion while they are still available.