Sandals and Socks

Sometimes I think of a web application that would involve “Travel through geolocated IP web”. MaxMind offers an open-source geo-locator with bindings in several languages such as C, Python (requires the C dll), Apache (uses the C dll), PHP (pure) and javascript (uses the maxmind host service).

• Dimdim is an interesting web-based desktop sharing (web meeting) application. It comes in both an Open-Source and Commercial version. Support for OS version is through forum/community. Help forum has about 1-5 posts/week, with over half unanswered. Can use dimdim server, or a dimdim server can be installed on your Intranet. However, there is no installation guide (unless one is available after installation). Last version was from June 2007.
• Even more interesting is Zoho Meeting. This uses the zoho server to create a meeting environment in which one “presenter” can share her desktop and any number of viewers can see, do text chatting, and take control if allowed by presenter. Note however that this is not very different from having one VNC server and many VNC viewers, but with the disadvantage of having to pipe all data through a server. Zoho claim to encrypt comms but who can verify that they aren’t decrypting stuff while it is going through the zono servers? (it’s fairly easy to verify that data leaving your desktop is encrypted but the encryption might be trivial). I’ve had mixed results with VNC when it comes to openGL, but Zoho Meeting was able to handle it even including GLSL shader effects. Given that Zoho involves an activex control downloaded from server, plus a server connection, it seems crazy that VNC wouldn’t be able to do an even better job with openGL.