[-empyre-] leander seige - tdfsb

[legoland@t-online.de (Leander Seige)]

hello everyone,

i've been invited to post an article about my project tdfsb
on the -empyre- mailinglist, so here it is.

tdfsb is an open source program. it reads directory information
and displays it as a 3D world. the user can walk and fly through
his own filesystem. http://www.hgb-leipzig.de/~leander/tdfsb/

first of all, tdfsb seems to be a gimmick or toy. and in its
current version it probably is. the idea behind tdfsb was to let
the user see the content of her/his harddisc in another kind of
way; to build a multimedia environment that combines all kinds of
content the user deals with. i would like that one day it analyzes the
whole disc and dynamically creates a kind of 'show' containing
significant media files , e.g. from the users work directories,
browser and email caches, media collections (audio,still/motion
pictures, texts or even 3d model files) and so on. it should be-
come a kind of mirror. probably this will not be named tdfsb
anymore.

on the other hand tdfsb is a program that visualizes computer-
inherent structures. the strcuture used here (the filesystem)
is well known to the user so she/her can easily recognize all
the shown objects.
so most of the tdfsb-users request features like copying/
deleting/moving/linking files. this would be a step into the
direction of a complete 3d filemanager/desktop environment.
maybe i'll implement such things one day but this is not my
real goal.
one user told me about his idea which is - as i think - much
more interesting. he wanted, but afaik didn't implement it,
to turn the tdfsb into a portscanner. each computer/server
would be one room and every port would be one object. for each
known port the appropriate (external) client application
could be started in the background, grab its output and map
it onto the representing 3d object.
another idea is to generate 3d worlds out of operating system
inherent structures; e.g. library functions, data types...

i registered tdfsb and one other project at www.freshmeat.net
and other open source portals. i think this is a good way to
publish artistic software because by its nature this kind of
stuff is most suitable for an audience which is familiar with
setting up software and operating systems and can understand
how a filesystem works.
so i requested the creation of an category 'artistic software'
which has been finaly founded. http://freshmeat.net/browse/901/

at last i have to say that my interest in the tdfsb is not
very high anymore. from time to time i do something on it
because i like it anyhow :) but my main interests changed
to other facets that you can examine on my homepage.


bye,
Leander Seige


http://www.hgb-leipzig.de/~leander/


ps
i apologize for any english mistakes i probably made.