| Accounts | Clients | Documentation |
Students taking the Computers and Society Class have the opportunity to participate as endusers in an opensource development project with the goal of designing a democratic, student run virtual community. A small group of programmers work on our development machine making basic modifications of the Collaborative Virtual Workspace software developed by the Mitre Corporation for the U. S. military. Users of our stable version, upayaCVW, deal with the social issues of how to organize a new community, how to give its groups and individual members access to resources in a democratic and responsible way, and how to create interesting spaces and objects. In other words how to create virtual spaces for different kinds of real groups to collaborate in.
You are welcome to visit us on port 8888 of the host
machine upaya.soc.neu.edu by telnet, by mud or MOO client, or with a specialized CVW client
program
with a graphical interface for file sharing via our document server. If you do not have an account you can
use the command:
connect guest
Professor Perrolle will be making accounts for Soc1485 at the beginning of the quarter.
The original CVW design assumes that virtual workspace resources are owned by a hierarchical authority. We are experimenting with ways to decentralize the process of creating accounts and giving groups and individuals space of their own. In the meantime anybody who wants to create an account for themselves or for a group that they are willing to be responsible for will have to walk to 538 Holmes and sit down with Professor Perrolle to create accounts and make people rooms.
Text Clients
As part of our committment to maintaining accessibility to the visually impaired users of screen readers or to those with low bandwidth connections we support text-only access. You can use any telnet client to connect to upayaCVW at the host machine upaya.soc.neu.edu port 8888
This will usually be the command:
telnet upaya.soc.neu.edu:8888
or
telnet upaya.soc.neu.edu 8888
If your web browser has a telnet application configured you can also reach upayaCVW with the url telnet://upaya.soc.neu.edu:8888
When you reach upayaCVW type connect username password
You can use emacs as a client from College of Computer Science machines. Put this .mud
file in the root of your home directory and use the command:
emacs -f mud
Many other MOO and mud clients will work as a text interface to CVW. If you have a Mac try the free BetterTelnet, a significantly enhanced version of NCSA Telnet 2.7b5. Or pay $26.89 for the even better Rapscallion.
However, if you use a text client you will have to access the docserver with a separate web browser. URLs for imported documents are
http://upaya.soc.neu.edu:8889/view/n
where n is a document's docid number. There is currently a permissions problem with the .docid property so you will have to ask twiga to find out what your group's docids are. Also, since you won't be able to get a file lock on the document, you will not be able to edit docserver documents. You can use notes (try: help notes).
Note: We are using Version 3.2 of the CVW software. The new version 4.0 client will not work with our software.
For windows download CVW32Installer.exe and
upaya.cvw. Doubleclick on CVW32Installer.exe to begin
the installation wizard.
Note: When the installation is completed you can connect to upayaCVW by doubleclicking on the upaya.cvw file (or a shortcut to it). If you start the program cvw.exe it will use the default Server.cvw configuration file and try to connect you to a non-existant server. Also if the upaya.cvw file is not in the same directory as the cvw.exe file the program won't work.
Our client program is now available on NU's InfoCommon machines and is running on the machines in Judy's NT lab (538 Holmes). On the InfoCommon machines it may have to be installed from the sociology applications menu (in the NUNET menu). Once it's installed you run the program by clicking on the upaya.cvw icon in the sociology menu. On NUnet machines the java program starts very slowly; be patient.
For linux and unix get version 3.2 client and configuration information from our development machine, kasha. (If kasha's webserver is down uou can get it instead from SourceForge. Be sure to get version 3.2 not version 4.0.) Read the installation documentation, noting that you will have to configure the cvw.res file to point to the location of upayaCVW and it's document server and configure the mime-db file to associate file extensions with applications on your system.
The client has been installed on CCS solaris machines, courtesy of CCS Systems. The path (which should be in your default) is /arch/com/packages/cvw-java-client-3.2.1/startcvw
When you are connected to upayaCVW you can use the command help to get much useful documentation. [Note: If you are using the Windows client you first have to enter command mode with the Control-z keystroke combination.]