As I was listening to
Anil talk about
daemons spawning processes and sysadmins killing them, I thought,
"What a great user interface!" Imagine running around with a shotgun
blowing away your daemons and processes, never needing to type
kill -9
again.
In 1981, Vernor Vinge introduced the concept of cyberspace to the reading public in his short story True Names, in which characters could plug into a virtual universe where their actions in a fantasy world mapped to performing sophisticated actions on the network. For example, walking along a tricky path through a swamp would be the same as going through a firewall.
The mapping of abstract operations to an intuitive environment is a difficult problem. There are two distinct obstacles: the environment must be intuitive and the mapping must be accurate. If the environment is not intuitive, it can alienate users. In a good environment, the user would instinctively do the right thing. The quality of the environment is for naught if the mapping is not accurate. For instance, if certain natural actions lead to detrimental results or if desired results can only achieved by performing contrived acts, the mapping to the underlying processes must be learned.
The difficulty of the mapping is evidenced by the paucity of good user interfaces that use physical metaphors. The only widespread example is the "desktop" interface, where files are held in "folders" which may be "opened" or "thrown away". This is a fairly good mapping, but there are certainly problems. For example, the user must understand what "links" are to figure out why some folders are not always accessible. The user must also realize that one can close a folder and still see the contents of its sub-folders.
I am proposing a new mapping for managing system loads. As mentioned above, people frequently talk about "blowing processes away", and the Unix command to destroy a process is "kill". This suggests a metaphor for process management. Each process can be a monster, and the machines can be represented by a series of rooms.
Id Software has generously released the source for Doom, which has been ported to Linux. I downloaded one of the many versions and added a few lines of code that would spawn a new soldier for each process, renice the process when it is wounded, and kill the process when it dies.
Some of the potential benefits of using Doom as a tool for system administration:
ls
just as easily as rm -rf *
,
which is kind of unfortunate.
In a cyberspace environment, the players are not omnipotent,
so performing large actions takes time and effort.
A few of the problems of using Doom as a tool for system administration:
csh
, csh
was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh
or xv
, and my session was abruptly terminated.
I'd like to thank the Adaptive Computation Group at UNM for providing a supportive environment in which one can claim one is doing research while playing Doom for two days. This work was funded by the National Science Foundation (without their knowledge) through a BIO Research Training Group in Ecological Complexity (NSF 9553623).
If you really want to try this yourself on a Linux box, you can. The application is very touchy and development is hindered by guys with shotguns killing my shell windows. I have only tested it on an Intel. A great deal more work is needed to turn it into a useable product. I don't expect to work on it much more, so I am releasing the source so hackers can play around with it. I made very few changes to the original Doom source, so if you already have a favorite Doom port, it would not be hard to adapt my changes to it. Here's how to turn your Linux box into a battleground:
patch -p1 < path of my patch file
Mail me your insightful comments. I would especially be interested in hearing about implementation changes that you have tried.
Dennis Chao
dlchao@unm.edu
October 17, 1999