#Wave does not work with a bare IE

I am at my sister's home today without my laptop. I wanted to finish a blogpost .. I tried to start Wave and I got the following screen. As I never use Internet Explorer, I do not really know it to be new. In a time where the problems with IE have had the German government advise on its use, I think it is significant..
Thanks,
     GerardM

Thinking about ChromeOS

I have read what many pundits have to say about the Chrome OS. I have read what they had to say before and after the press conference and, there is a bewildering array of opinions.


The computers that comply with the hardware specifications, will have to deal with Wave and as netbooks are often considered as computers with insufficient specifications, I expect that there will be a range of hardware ready for "must have" applications and I expect that they will all do nicely. Wave has improved a lot in stability and performance in the last months anyway..

There is much ado about "market share". I do not really care except that I expect it to become important for the adoption of open standards. Important as well is that Chrome OS is a Linux distribution, it is open source. As developers of Canonical are involved in the development of Chrome OS, it is obvious that Linux development in general will benefit.

With Chrome OS user data will be very much stored on the web, local storage will be very much a cache that can and will be deleted when need be. My "wet dream" for Wave is still a possibility, I however want it not just as part of a Chrome OS, but also as part of the browser and not just the Chrome browser.
Thanks,
GerardM

MediaWiki conference uses Wave to work on minutes

Last weekend there was a get together of people involved in the media repository of the Wikimedia Foundation, "Commons". This was the kind of meeting where people work/discuss and when a session is done, someone is to report on the proceedings.

Given that MediaWiki is what the Wikimedia Foundation develops, it was interesting to learn that most people had a Wave account and, preferred to use Wave for its collaborative editing ability.

It sure did make us a group more productive.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Federation is tested at WaveSandbox.com

Federation is about how do you get multiple Wave servers to share and synchronise content. Conceptually, it is one of the aspects that makes Wave relevant. With federation and it being Open Source, it means that we will be able to have our own Wave servers and just like with e-mail we decide what we share.

In his post to the wave-protocol group, Dan Petersen announced that experimenting with federation can now start. At this stage it is only for developers and as I understand from Tom, it is still pretty rocky; the code does not want to compile on our box.

For the MediaWikiWave project it is important that we will have our own server because in this use case Wave is connected to a MediaWiki publishing back end. Changes may originate on another Wave server, but ultimately the robot will only run on the local server.

The one question I have about the federation protocol is how Wave will recover for the other servers when the server who originated a wave crashes beyond repair.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The Complete Guide to Google Wave

The dust has not settled, the code is still being written, the software / functionality is still very much alpha but the first book for Wave has arrived. The Complete guide to Google Wave does a good job at explaining about what Wave actually is today.

Defining what Wave is, is hard because it means different things to different people. At first it was "e-mail redone with the experience of today", it proved necessary to cut the link to e-mail so that it could become its own thing and for me, I concentrate on Wave as the editing front end to a MediaWiki back end.

The book as it is available today, is the "preview edition", it has its home on a MediaWiki wiki and, it is billed as a work in progress. At that it fits in nicely with the collaborative editing that is the great strength of Wave. Consider, the people that find this important are likely and fall in love with Wave are also the people what are interested in writing the book on Wave. The GoogleWave extension allows for the inclusion of a Wave on a MediaWiki page show Wave to all the people who have not been invited yet.

When you want to learn more about Wave, do read the book, it is well worth it.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Wave is not to replace e-mail ... yet

At the Google meeting in Amsterdam, one of the most interesting fact about Wave for me was about Wave and e-mail. While it has always been said that Wave is "how we would build e-mail today", today Wave keeps its distance from e-mail.

Wave presents a different paradigm from e-mail and this paradigm needs to evolve. In order to do so, it needs to keep a distance because otherwise it is particularly the e-mail associated aspects that improve.

Lars and Stephanie explained that in an earlier incarnation, Wave did include much functionality with e-mail in mind but that proved to hinder rather then help the development of the Wave paradigm, so they binned it. Similar functionality may be added later and will probably be added by another party.

This is similar to what we do with MediaWiki, our approach is that Wave provides superior editing while MediaWiki provides superior publishing. Our challenge is to appreciate these different strengths and bring them together. As long as we do not need to touch the MediaWiki functionality, there is the easy upgrade path for Wikipedia that we seek.

Our challenge is to find ways in Wave to leave MediaWiki alone and interface and provide necessary functionality in Wave. Some things are still missing; internationalisation and localisations is crucial not only for the core product but also for the robots. The use of MediaWiki authentication and authorisation, including blocks, is crucial. As crucial is the availability of the Wave code so that we can play with the look and feel, add toolbars and add to the toolbars. The fun thing is that our use case provides the Wave developers with concrete challenges. It has already served to punch holes in some theories and help improve them.

All in all, Wave is awesome and it was wonderful and productive to meet in person.
Thanks,
GerardM

15 features in five minutes

A nice video that demonstrate 15 features in five minutes... Well worth it !