Fwd: Notecards running "in" a web browser

[Larry Masinter]

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LarryMasinter.net

Begin forwarded message:

From: Frank Halasz <fr...@halasz.org>
Date: August 2, 2021 at 12:42:20 AM PDT
To: Larry Masinter <L...@acm.org>
Subject: Notecards running "in" a web browser



Hi Larry,

I want to get some of the less technical folks that worked on Notecards at PARC (like Cathy Marshall and Ken Allen) to play with the revived version and hopefully revive some of their old Notefiles.  To this end, I set up a web portal thru which one can run Notecards (and hence Interlisp) within a web browser.  

Some details: the web portal is running on a Ubuntu instance on AWS.  I use xpra to serve the Interlisp X window to the browser.  Each user gets a separate docker container to run Interlisp with a separate docker volume to store changes to their Notefiles.  For now, no other changes are persisted between sessions.  A freebie Okta account provides the user auth/registration services.  Security is light, at best.  Tested only on Chrome and Edge on Windows.  Have not yet tested on Safari or on Chrome on MacOS.

Seems to work OK - with the expected screen update glitches here and there. 

You can go to http:/notecards.online to try it for yourself.  (Note just http:, no https: yet.)  Just register yourself (email and a password) and follow the links - not much to it.

Somewhat belatedly I realized that I should check with you on whether we have the rights to put Interlisp and Notecards online like this.  And if we do, do we have to limit access in any way?

Right now, it's set up for self registration so that anyone who knows about (or discovers) it can come and register an account and run Notecards/Interlisp in their browser.  I can easily change this so that you have to contact me to get an account & password.  (Although until I get https implemented and take some effort to tighten the security a bit, this would provide only a slight barrier to a determined attacker.)

-- Frank

  

[Larry Masinter]

That’s really exciting news! You might see a few logins from others.

I’m sure we’ll want to run something like that for other Interlisp applications.

Would you be willing to show & tell the setup some time this week

or next Monday 10:30?

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[John Cowan]

I signed up, but found the Okta dance substandard to say the least.  First clicking on the button in my email gave me a "page not found", which turned out to be because there was no "https://" in the URL, so I was looking at file:/// by default.  Once I got past that, there were various random errors that still left me able to log in.  Could have been worse, certainly.

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[Larry Masinter]

Don’t be so picky – a first proof of concept. Getting long-term retention of work is the key.

 

 

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[Frank Halasz]

Hmm. Not sure what went wrong with your registration process.  But I did not spend a lot of time putting together and testing the registration process.  I use the email address as a handy way to associate a user with a docker container and their persistent docker volume.  The password just provides some modicum of protection for the docker volume.  I suspect that most sites working with Otka create and host their own login/authorization pages and just use the Otka API.   That seemed to be the wrong thing for me to work on (for now), so I just used the Otka-hosted login/registration pages. 

That being said, I did find a misconfiguration in the notecards.online Otka account that caused a bad redirect after the user clicked the activation button in their activate registration email.  Fixed that and while I was at it, I removed the requirement to "activate" each registration via an email.  Now registration automatically activates the account and redirects the user immediately to the Notecards Online main menu page.

Did you manage to get Medley/Notecards running in your browser?  What was your impression about the performance / display quality?

-- Frank

[Frank Halasz]

I'll attend the zoom call next Monday at 10:30a.

-- Frank

[John Cowan]

On Tue, Aug 3, 2021 at 3:14 AM Frank Halasz <fr...@halasz.org> wrote:

That being said, I did find a misconfiguration in the notecards.online Otka account that caused a bad redirect after the user clicked the activation button in their activate registration email. 

That's exactly where things started to go wrong for me, and then from wrong to wronger.  I'm glad you simplified the registration process.  

Did you manage to get Medley/Notecards running in your browser?  What was your impression about the performance / display quality?

Eventually I just ignored all the noise and went back to the original link, which let me in peaceably.  Performance on my Macbook Pro laptop was fine, as was the display quality.  What I had forgotten is how much the WIMP interface has expanded since that time!  No double-clicking on the title bar to maximize things, etc.  Ah well, I'll get used to it.

Note: I just tried notecards.online and can't connect to it.  As soon as it's up again, I'll announce it in IRC.  There is no #interlisp channel on Libera.Chat (the de facto successor of Freenode), but I will mention it on the #lisp channel, which is about all the Lisps together.

[Larry Masinter]

Please hold off announcing it until we get the account maintenance set up and we have more to show for it.

 

The “non-profit company” will take a while to set up if it happens at all.

 

 

 

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[John Cowan]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 1:51 PM Larry Masinter <L...@acm.org> wrote:

Please hold off announcing it until we get the account maintenance set up and we have more to show for it.

No problem.

 The “non-profit company” will take a while to set up if it happens at all.

As you know, I'm opposed to us taking on that headache when there are good alternatives.

[Larry Masinter]

 The “non-profit company” will take a while to set up if it happens at all.

 

As you know, I'm opposed to us taking on that headache when there are good alternatives.

 

 

That’s why I put it in scare quotes.  I don’t have a good name for the problem I’m trying to solve…. “Get more organization for the project”, “allow us to take donations, sponsor workshops, hire some consultants for projects with no volunteers, get advice from interested people that a ‘board of directors’ would be a model.

SPI looks interesting except for their warning about hiring

The CHM would be a possibility, fit in with the Smalltalk Zoo

although our ambitions for future Medley might exceed the scope of what would constitute “computer history” within their focus areas (History of AI, History of Web).

The LFG foundation might be a possibility (as a project to support LFG on Medley).

An academic institution might be if we can interest someone –

Stanford (close, tied up with Stanford and https://saildart.org )

Members of the “Software Preservation Network” (home of EaaSi Emulation As A Service) and SPN Technical Infrastructure group.

GW (Steve)

RIT (Bill) – work on long-term archiving

 

I’m not sure we need one “home”.  Perhaps different sub-projects could be done in coordination with different institutions.

 

[John Cowan]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 2:10 PM Larry Masinter <L...@acm.org> wrote:

SPI looks interesting except for their warning about hiring

I missed that: can you point to it?

I also looked at the Software Freedom Conservancy, but I think we are too small for them, at least right now.  Portability between non-profit fiscal sponsors is easy.

The LFG foundation might be a possibility (as a project to support LFG on Medley).

Again, a pointer (or at least a full name) would be useful.

[Frank Halasz]

notecards.online is back up.    I hadn't yet wired it up as a system service that restarts automatically if it crashes, etc.  That's now done.

We might want to get some "close in" experience using the portal before we announce it too broadly.  I built this as a kind of proof of concept and  I made no attempt to make things efficient (e.g., the docker image is probably 5 times bigger/slower than it has to be).  So I am not sure how the thing will scale.  Plus I am running on AWS medium instance with only 100gb of storage.  So I have to figure out how many registered users we could support, given that every registered user get a unique docker volume.

-- Frank

[John Cowan]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 8:29 PM Frank Halasz <fr...@halasz.org> wrote:

notecards.online is back up.    I hadn't yet wired it up as a system service that restarts automatically if it crashes, etc.  That's now done.

Great!

Plus I am running on AWS medium instance with only 100gb of storage.  So I have to figure out how many registered users we could support, given that every registered user get a unique docker volume.

EBS persistent storage is cheap:  US$0.08 per GB per month.  We can also switch to Elastic Container Service, where Amazon deals with allocating containers to hardware as needed.

[Larry Masinter]

A “full” sysout / lisp.virtualmem takes 10mb uncompressed (4% of available address space).

Compressed medley-nightly with all sources, fonts, lcoms/dfasls, Lispusers, tedit doc files is 27.4mb

 

Release nightly-210804 · Interlisp/medley (github.com) (scroll down to ‘assets’)

 

100gb is huge in comparison

 

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From: lisp...@googlegroups.com <lisp...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of John Cowan
Sent: Wednesday, August 4, 2021 6:39 PM
To: Frank Halasz <fr...@halasz.org>
Cc: Larry Masinter <L...@acm.org>; Interlisp core <lisp...@googlegroups.com>

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