Python for iOS

I do a lot of traveling, and I don't always like to lug my laptop around with me. Even when I do, I'd rather leave it in the bag unless I absolutely need to get it out (or if I'm setting up my mobile workspace). As such, I tend to use my iPhone for just about everything: reading, emails, calendar, etc.

So, imagine my delight, when I found out (just after PyCon this year) that I can now run Python 2.7.2 on my iPhone (and, when I get it, my iPad 3 ;-) ). This is just too cool for words... and given what pictures are worth, I'll use those instead :-)

I've put together a small Flickr set that highlights some of the functionality offered in this app, and each image in the set describes a nifty feature. For the image-challenged, here's a quick list:

• an interactive Python prompt for entering code directly using the iPhone keyboard
• a secondary, linear "keyboard" that one can use in conjunction with the main keyboard, extending one's ability to type faster
• multiple options for working with/preserving one's code (email, saving to a file, viewing command history)

I can't even begin to count the number of times such an awesome Python scratchpad would have come in handy. And now we have it :-) At $2.99, this is a total steal.

Thanks Jonathan Hosmer!

(And thanks to David Mertz for pointing it out to folks on a Python mail list.)

Some Thoughts on the Mobile Device Interface

Smartphones: Yesterday's News


As some of you know, I started 2010 by working in a new position at Canonical: Ubuntu Project Manager. I've been having an absolute blast; working my butt off has never been more fun, challenging, or interesting. I'm finding that nearly every side-interest I've had in the past several years is coming to the forefront in my project management work.

There were all sorts of adjustments I needed to make before PM'ing again, and one of those was catching up on communication technology. I now live by email, calendars, IRC, Skype, and phone conversations. Gone are the days of going heads-down into some code for a week or two. I need to stay connected, 100% of the time. I needed to get a smartphone.

What I really wanted was a Nokia N900. Sadly, T-Mobile's not offering one, so I got an Android phone with a physical keyboard instead: a new G1. Yeah, out of date, but considering that I was still using a Razr, the G1 is cutting-edge ;-)

I gotta tell you, this little phone has changed my life. The craziest thing is not the apps, the Market, the features, etc.; it's the touchscreen that has made me a believer.

You Can Touch This


I can't believe how radically the touchscreen phone has changed my computing habits and preferences. When I sit down at my laptop or desktop to do something quickly, I don't want use the keyboard or mouse. I want to point, swipe, and tweak with my fingers. When I'm on the phone, my brain has my speaking and text-processing faculties tied up. To easily multitask while talking, I need to be able to use a different part of my brain: that part involved in motor control.

I like using the touchscreen so much that I will often use my G1 for tasks that are better suited for my laptop, merely because of the joy I get from using the interface.

Touch, tap, drag, push, swipe. I love it. Can't get enough of it.

The best thing of all? This is really silly: I love the virtual desktops and being able to navigate between them with a swipe. Whose idea was this? That designer or engineer needs to be promoted! I have never experienced a more intuitive way of switching virtual desktops. I didn't even know how much this was important to me until I used the G1. I want this for my laptop!

Having such a positive bias towards tactile technology, you can imagine my joy when I saw this Ubuntu blueprint. And then when I was asked to work with Bryce and Andy on the PM portion of multi-touch support, I was quite delighted. This will give application developers and device engineers what they need in order to start creating new exciting stuff for the Ubuntu world. You will be able to have an iPad-like experience on your Linux devices (that have the proper hardware).

The thing is, as much fun as tactile interfaces are, I want way more now. I've been given a taste... now I want the banquet.

An Interface for the Future


So the iPad has been getting lots of press. It's bigger than a phone, I like that: I could replace my pen-and-paper medium-sized Moleskine with one. The thing I like the best though? Yeah, you guessed it: the interface. Curling pages and apps that have been re-worked specifically for the new format/size. I love it when a device lets me use it in a way that is natural and intuitive, and provides visual (or other sensory) feedback on my use.

Apple has made, in my opinion, a good and interesting product. But certainly not a revolutionary one. It's a natural progression from what folks are already doing with smartphones and netbooks.
So let's talk about revolutionary :-)

Imagine you've got a crazy new shirt, one whose fibers convert your movements to electrical current and can power your devices. Perhaps it comes with a "battery net" for literally flexible power storage. Now imagine that some clever sod has equipped your shirt with sockets for micro-SD cards (or something similar). If you've read my "After the Cloud" posts, then you probably know where I'm going with this :-)

Now add some embedded micro-controllers, and bluetooth, a smart phone with cloud-controller software, and you've got a personal S3 with potentially terabytes of light-weight, wearable storage. And your phone controls the nodes, redundancy, failover, etc. Maybe your phone runs Ubuntu and you're pushing backups of your personal cloud onto your U1 account.

But how do we interface with all this great storage? Here comes the banquet I mentioned :-)

I want to be able to reach "into" my phone, grab an icon (application, file, contact, whatever) and put it where I want. But I mean really put it: I can pick up some data off my desktop, and throw it over my shoulder or at my feet. With appropriate sensing equipemnt on the power shirt's sleeves, my arms and hands are now the perfect "mice."

In fact, there's no more virtual desktop (that's old skool). One of the new primary functions of your mobile device is to peer "into" the halo of data that surrounds you now. You can either spin your virtual storage space around you like an inverted, 3D lazy susan, our you can physically move your phone around, like a diving mask peering into the water.

Closing Thoughts


The more data I have, the more I feel that I live in it. The problem is that our current tech forces us into tiny sardine cans and we have to consume our data with the equivalent of a single chop-stick. If I'm going to live in my data, I want to have the best possible experience of immersion that I can. I want an interface that can handle my future.

I could go on and on... I love this sort of thing. The important thing to know now is that the community is working on the building blocks for our technological future. The first steps are being made in open source software that will allow us to take giant, insanely cool steps in the not-to-distant future.

After the Cloud: Open Heaps

After the Cloud:

1. Prelude
2. So Far
3. The New Big
4. To Atomic Computation and Beyond
5. Open Heaps
6. Heaps of Cash
7. Epilogue

Refresher

Up to now, we've considered technical explorations and possible related future directions for the technology surrounding the support of distributed applications and infrastructure. This post takes a break and returns to thoughts of provisioning resources on small devices such as mobile phones. As stated in To Atomic Computation and Beyond:

This could be just the platform for running small processes in a distributed environment. And making it a reality could prove to be quite lucrative. A forthcoming blog post will explore more about the possibilities involved with phone clouds...

But first, I'm so tired of the term "cloud," so I did some free-association... from cloud to clouds to "tons of little clouds" to "close to the ground" to cumulus to heap (Latin for "cumulus"). Heap! It's irresistible :-)

"Open" is such a terribly abused word these days (more so than cloud), but using it as an adjective for a wild collection of ad-hoc, virtualized process spaces satisfies some subtle sense of humor. Open Heaps it is.


Starting Points

Let's think about the medium in our example: cellular telephony. Is there a potential market here? Here are some raw numbers from Wikipedia:

By November 2007, the total number of mobile phone subscriptions in the world had reached 3.3 billion, or half of the human population (although some users have multiple subscriptions, or inactive subscriptions), which also makes the mobile phone the most widely spread technology and the most common electronic device in the world.

I think we can count that as a tentative "yes."

Can we do this the easy way and just use TCP/IP? In other words, what about using WiFi phones or dual-mode mobile phones as the communication medium for devices in our open heaps? Well, that would certainly make many things much easier, since everything would stay in the TCP/IP universe. However, the market penetration of standard mobile phones is so much greater in comparison.

That being said, how many currently operating phones are capable of serving content on the internet, running background processes, etc.? Maybe only a small fraction, perhaps even enough to justify supporting only devices such as handhelds, smartphones, MIDs, UMPCs, and Netbooks.

Two possibilities for ventures here might be:

1. A startup that developed an Open Heap offering for any Internet-connected device.
2. A company that formed a partnership with one or more mobile carriers, acting as a bridge between the carrier-controlled network/device-management capabilities and the Internet.

The Business Problem

So, let's say we've got the technology ready to go that will allow users to upload a process hypervisor to their phones, and that this technology provides the ability for users to allot process resources (e.g., RAM, CPU, storage). There are still a couple basic principles to address to justify a business in this area:

1. How will people be better off with this than without it?
2. How will this technology generate revenue?

In general, I believe that consumers are always better off with more choices. I also believe that balanced systems run better than those that are rigged to benefit just one group. As such, I have an idealist's interest in things like Open Heaps, as they will empower interested consumers to earn revenue (however small) on their own property (mobile phones and other devices with marketable resources). What's more, if there are billions of devices available as nodes in Open Heaps, and there is a computing demand for those resources, then there will inevitably be competitors aiming to capitalize on them. Generally speaking, I also believe that increased competition provides a better chance for improved quality of service.

Conversely, imagine that Open Heaps don't happen, that the idle resources of mobile devices (or any other eligible equipment) either remain untapped of their potential or, worse, are put to use by corporations that only desire the end consumer to have limited power over their own property and how it's used. Dire scenarios aren't difficult to imagine, thanks to various examples of anti-consumer behaviour we've seen from large corporations and special interest organizations in the recent past.

So, yes -- I think we can make a case for this being of benefit to consumers (and thus a marketer's dream!). The more prevalent mobile devices become, the more they will integrate into our daily lives... and the more important it will be that these are managed as the rightful property of the consumer, people that have the right to rent or lease and profit from their property as they see fit.

But, how could this generate revenue?

Next up: Gimme da cash!

After the Cloud: To Atomic Computation and Beyond

After the Cloud:

1. Prelude
2. So Far
3. The New Big
4. To Atomic Computation and Beyond
5. Open Heaps
6. Heaps of Cash
7. Epilogue

To restate the problem: we've got cloud for systems and we've got cloud for a large number of applications. We don't have cloud for processes (e.g., custom, light-weight applications/long-running daemons).

Personally, I don't want a whole virtual machine to myself, I just need a tiny process space for my daemon. When my daemon starts getting slammed, I want new instances of it started in a cloud (and then killed when they're not needed).

What's more, over time, I want to be writing my daemon better and better... using less of everything (memory, CPU, disk) in subsequent iterations. I want this process cloud to be able to handle potentially significant changes in my software.

Dream Cloud

So, after all that stumbling around, thinking about servers in the data center as the horsepower behind distributed services, and then user PCs/laptops as a more power-friendly alternative, the obvious hit me: phones. They are almost ubiquitous. People leave them on, plugged in, and only use them for a fraction of that time. What if we were able to construct a cloud from cell phones? Hell, let's throw in Laptops and netbooks, too. And Xboxes, Wii, and TiVos. Theoretically, anything that could support (or be hacked to support) a virtual process space could become part of this cloud.

This could be just the platform for running small processes in a distributed environment. And making it a reality could prove to be quite lucrative. A forthcoming blog post will explore more about the possibilities involved with phone clouds... but for now, let's push things even further.

When I mentioned this idea to Chris Armstrong at the Ubuntu Developer Conference last December, he immediately asked me if I'd read Charles Stross' book Halting State. I had started it, but hadn't gotten to the part about the phones. A portion of Stross' future vision in that book dealt with the ability of users to legally run programs of other's phones. I really enjoyed the tale, but afterwards I was ready to explore other possibilities.

Horse-buggy Virtualization

So I sat down and pondered other possibilities over the course of several weeks. I kept trying to think like business visionaries, given a new resource to exploit. But finally I stopped that and tried just imagining the possibilities based on examples computing and business history.

What's the natural thing for businesses to do when someone invents something or improves something? Put new improvements to old uses, potentially reinventing old markets in the process. That's just the sort of thing that could happen with the cloudification of mobile devices.

For examples, imagine this:

• Phone cloud becomes a reality.
• Someone in a garage in Silicon Valley buys a bunch of cheap phones, gumstix, or other small ARM components, rips off the cases, and sells them in rack-mountable enclosures.
• Data centers start supplementing their old hardware offering with this new one that lets them use phone cloud tech (originally built for remote, hand-held devices) to sell tiny fractions of resources to users (on new, consolidated hardware... like having hundreds of phone uses in a single room with full bars, 24/7).
• With the changing hardware and continuing improvements in virtualization software, more abstraction takes place.
• Virtualization slowly goes from tool to prima materia, allowing designers not to focus on old-style, horse-drawn "machines" like your grandpa used to rack, but rather abstract process spaces that provide just what is needed, for example, to enable a daemon to run.

Once you've gotten that far, you're just inches from producing a meta operating system: process spaces (and other abstracted bits) can be built up to form a traditional user space. Or they can be used to build something entirely different and new. The computing universe suddenly gets a lot more flexible and dynamic.

Democritus Meets Modern Software

So, let's say that my dream comes true: I can now push all my tiny apps into a cloud service and turn off the big machines I've got colocated throughout the US. But once this is in place, how can we improve our applications to take even better advantage of such a system, one so capable of massively distributing our running code?

This leads us to an almost metaphysical software engineering question: how small can you divide an application until you reach the limits of functionality, where any further division would be senseless bytes and syntax errors? In terms of running processes, what is your code atom?

Prior to a few years ago, the most common answer would likely have been "my script" or "my application". Unless, of course, you asked a Scheme programmer. Programming languages like Scheme, Haskell, and Erlang are finding rapidly increasing acceptance as solutions for distributed programming problems because functional programming languages lend themselves easily to the problem of concurrency and parallelism.

If we had a massive computing cloud (atmosphere, more likely!) where we could run code in virtual process spaces, we could theoretically go even further than running a daemon: we could split our daemon up into async functions. These distributed functions could be available as continuously running microthreads/greenlets/whatever. They could accept an input and produce an output. Composing distributed functions could result in a program. Programs could change, failover, improve, etc., just by adding or removing distributed functions or by changing their order.

From Atoms to Dynamic Programs

Once we've broken down our programs into distributed functions and have broken our concept of an "Operating System" down into virtual process spaces, we can start building a whole new world of software:

• Software becomes very dynamic, very distributed.
• The particulars of hardware become irrelevant (it just needs to be present, somewhere).
• We see an even more marked correlation between power consumption and code, where functions themselves could be measured in joules consumed per second.
• Just for fun, let's throw in dynamic selection of fuctions or even genetic algorithms, and we have ourselves one of the core branches of the predicted Ultra-large Scale Systems :-)

I mention this not for cheap thrills, but rather because of the importance of having a vision. Even if we don't get to where we think we're going, by looking ahead and forward, we have the opportunity to influence our journey such that we increase the chances of getting to a place equal to or better than where we'd originally intended.

From a more practical perspective: today, I'm concerned about running daemons in the cloud. Tomorrow I could very well be concerned about finer granularity than that. Why not explore the potential results of such technology? Yes, it my prove infeasible now; but even still, it could render insights... and maybe more.

A Parting Message

Before I wind this blog post down, I'd like to paste a couple really excellent quotes. They are good not so much for their immediate content, but for the pregnant potentials they contain; for the directions they can point our musings... and engineerings. These are two similar thoughts about messaging from two radically different contexts. I leave you with these moments of Zen:

On the Erlang mail list, four years ago, Erlang creator Joe Armstrong posted this:

In Concurrency Oriented (CO) programming you concentrate on the concurrency and the messages between the processes. There is no sharing of data.

[A program] should be thought of thousands of little black boxes all doing things in parallel - these black boxes can send and receive messages. Black boxes can detect errors in other black boxes - that's all.
...
Erlang uses a simple functional language inside the [black boxes] - this is not particularly interesting - *any* language that does the job would do - the important bit is the concurrency.

On the Squeak mail list in 1998, Alan Kay had this to say:

...Smalltalk is not only NOT its syntax or the class library, it is not even about classes. I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea.

The big idea is "messaging" -- that is what the kernal of Smalltalk/Squeak is all about... The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be. Think of the internet -- to live, it (a) has to allow many different kinds of ideas and realizations that are beyond any single standard and (b) to allow varying degrees of safe interoperability between these ideas.

If you focus on just messaging -- and realize that a good metasystem can late bind the various 2nd level architectures used in objects -- then much of the language-, UI-, and OS based discussions on this thread are really quite moot.

Resources

• Petri Nets
• π-Calculus
• Ambient Calculus

Next up: The Business of Computing Atmospheres