Geekpost

Last night I went to a Google Wave presentation, the comedy highlight of which was Pulp Fiction, Wave Edition:

The talk was given by Lars & Steffani, who gave the Google I/O talk earlier this year. I think everyone there was secretly hoping for an exciting announcement, but it was essentially an adoption-so-far talk. Very interesting, but no new revelations.

The Q&A section was mostly, "Can we get feature X?". I felt for Lars during the Q&A, who was forced to answer a stream of questions with, "Yes, we're working on it, but no, I can't give you a release date."

Anyway, here are some snippets I did glean:

• Speed seems to be their number 1 development priority. I was surprised quite how much the speed was bothering them - I find it fine.
• There's a team of about 60 people, of which 50 are engineers.
• They really want people to press Shift+Enter a lot.
• The biggest reason they're losing new users is the classic network problem - when you first arrive, none of your friends have an account yet. It's scaling well, and they're opening a vast number of new accounts every day. Something in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Demand for invitations is still outstripping supply though.
• The second biggest 'leak' is a lack of notification. People don't know when they have new messages, or when friends are online, so they're not drawn back in.

That last point is the real thorn for me. When I've used wave with friends I've found it to be a terrific product. It really makes online conversations easier. It's as interactive as instant messaging - better even - but it keeps the 'threadyness' of email. A topic sits in one place, and you can keep chatting about it and coming back to it over the days & weeks.

It's a great user experience, but it's sadly hard to come by. It's rare that I'm online and one of my contacts is too. I really need an iGoogle gadget that says when people are online, and when I have new messages. I'll gladly build one as soon as they build the API.

In the pub afterwards I got to speak to Lars very briefly. I apologised, but asked when there'd be a notifications API. He rolled his eyes and said, "Soon, soon." Poor guy. He's probably going to spend most of their European tour saying that...

So YouTube now supports video downloading, but only if you're browsing in the United States. A bit of a bugger, since I want to get some of the Google I/O 2009 talks onto my iPhone.

But all is not lost. I ran into this problem last year when NBC wouldn't send the latest episodes of Heroes over to Blighty. Here, in brief is the recipe:

You will need

1 cup SSH.
1 US-based server/mixing bowl.
1 Firefox.

Instructions

$ ssh -D 9999 me@myusaserver

Firefox Preferences->Advanced->Network->Settings
* Manual proxy configuration
* SOCKS Host: localhost Port: 9999

Now the world will think you're browsing from the US.

Other recipes you may like to try

Getting through to iPlayer from outside the UK, using a UK-based server.

I've been trying to use Flash components in a GWT project running under Ubuntu, and I've been having a devil of a time getting flash to work. Flash works fine in my Firefox install, but not in the GWT hosted-mode browser. I've just found a fix, so here it is for Google & the world to find:

The trick is simply to copy¹ the flash plugin that Firefox is (successfully) using to the right directory, so that GWT can find it.

  # Find the plugin
  $ locate libflashplayer.so
  /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

  # Find the Mozilla directory.
  $ find $ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins -type d -name 'mozilla*'
  /home/kris/eclipse/plugins/com.google.gwt.eclipse.sdkbundle.linux_1.6.4.v200904062334/gwt-linux-1.6.4/mozilla-1.7.12/

  # Copy the plugin to the mozilla-1.7.12/plugins directory.
  cp /usr/lib... /home/../mozilla-1.7.12/plugins/

Restart the GWT hosted mode task, and Bob should be your uncle.

¹ Or symlink, or a bit of mucking about with LD_LIBRARY_PATH would probably do it too, but I'm just going for a straight copy here.

...that if I put a blog entry in here, it’ll bounce through to twitter, and then to facebook. Is that good? Of course it is, it’s tech.

“Customers who bought this also bought: Davina’s Superbody Workout”

...well, those customers are weirdos. Kindly keep them away from me.

Gordon has become my new role model of change-driven design. Or design-driven change. Or something. Here's his latest brilliant statement:

"If there is a change to be made in the system and the system has failed, we will change the system."

Let's just see that again in code:

if (
  calculateAllPossibleChanges( system ).getSize() > 0
  &&
  system.getErrors().getSize() > 0
) {
  change( system )
}

protected void change( MutableSystem system ) {
  // TODO
}

Woo-hoo – my first app is now up on iTunes. The imaginatively-named “Gold Price” app lets you track the price of gold bullion live:

If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod touch you can download it now for free.

At least, that's the plan[1].

fn1. The queen of evil Evian made me post it.

Idea for a TV show: Britain’s Got Torrent! – In which ordinary people up & down the country download something more interesting than a variety show.

“The University of Nottingham is delighted to invite you and fellow alumni to an evening with Sir Richard Hadlee, one of the greatest all round cricketers in the history of the game.”

Oh, good-oh. Terrific. Tell you what – you let me know when there’s an evening with the inventor of the BBC Model B microcomputer, and I’ll buy some tickets.

There are eight people in our office, so yesterday I played this game: “If everyone in the office was one of the incarnations of The Doctor, which one would they be?”

Now you don’t know the people in my office, so there’s no point me telling you the results, except to say that if we want to complete the set, the next two people we hire have to be either Colin Baker or Patrick Troughton.

Supplemental bonus game you can play at home: Which assistant is my partner?

I think we’re all agreed – scanning for things is fun.

But at the moment, there’s simply not enough stuff you can scan for. At the best, you can wander down the High Street and scan for wireless networks and Bluetooth-enabled devices, but it’s simply not enough. I want to be able to scan for beta particles. I want to be able to scan for abnormally-high tachyon emmissions. I want to be able to scan for lifeforms, even if it’s faster just to count the things that are wearing flip-flops.

I want to be able to choose between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ scanning, even if active scanning runs a risk of rendering the populous of Hammersmith infertile. I’m willing to take that chance if it means we get better data.

I want more data. I need more data. And I need it in a pocket-size device that goes ‘bloop’.

If you thought that by looking really closely at your mortgage deal for a few days, you could find a way to reduce your payments by 90%, I think that'd be a pretty exciting prospect.

If you knew that with a bit of time and effort, you could make your car run on ten times less petrol, or get it to move ten times faster, that'd be worth doing.

If took the books you write, or the songs you produce, or the paintings or the whatever, and found a way to be ten times more productive - at the same quality - it'd be enormously artistically rewarding.

This, ladies and gentlebens, is the reason that as a geek, I find performance-tuning about the most exciting part of the art. It's actually possible. Look at a system closely enough, think clearly enough, and you can often find a way to make things run an order of magnitude faster, at no extra cost. I'm not talking the dumb route of "Buy a faster machine". Any idiot can suggest that, and it's usually not half as spectacular as you hope. I'm talking the same system, 10 times more efficient. I'm talking ingenuity. And when you nail it, it's about the most fucking satisfying thing there is.

But if you reduced your mortgage by 90%, you'd be called a financial genius. At least by your partner. If your car ran ten times longer or ten times faster, you'd be hailed as the engineer of our age. And even if your art wasn't the best in the world, you would at least be go down in history as one of the most prolific creators of our time.

But you make a computer system run ten times faster, or even a hundred times after a particularly fine think, and sometimes the best you get is that people stop complaining. Somebody will say something along the lines of, "About time. Why wasn't it this fast in the first place? Are you lazy? I would have typed FAST ages ago."

And that's why performance-tuning is the least fucking satisfying thing there is.

Says the BBC. Well, yes, I suppose they would really. NES sales aren’t going to be a big contributor to their bottom-line, are they?

...and I know there are a few of you out there.

Will you do me a favour, please? Will you try out The Widget Wot I wrote? It’s a little gold price tracker for work that I dashcoded together over Christmas. I want to release it, but I need some beta-testers.

If you’d install this widget, try it out for me and leave a comment or two, I’d be most gratitudinal.

If it works correctly, you should see something like this, auto-updating the price every 10 seconds: