They made them good, back in them days

Well, not that good really, but okay. I'm talking specifically about a little hand mixer with two beaters, I'm not sure if it was a little Kenwood or a Sunbeam. However, back in those days (I'm talking about the 1980s here) they didn't bother putting on stupid secure screws so Joe So Lame Lewser couldn't get in and try to fix it herself. They just put on two Phillips screws, and left it at that. The reason I mention this is: I've just saved myself what could have been a very costly repair bill by repairing the mixer myself. Thankfully the fix was simple. If the mixer had those "other" screws in, the ones with the heads that only professional repair places should be able to undo, then I probably wouldn't have been able to repair what ended up to be a dead simple fault.

The symptoms: one of the two mixer blades would lock in, but the other one would no longer lock in, and kept falling out. I got a little sick of trying to use it with just one working blade, so I undid the two screws, hoping like anything I could get it back together again even if I couldn't fix what was originally wrong. Luckily I found what was wrong. Inside the mixer, a clip-washer had come off one of the rotor-gears, stopping it from working properly. After a good ten minutes which included removing the entire motor from the housing just to replace the clip washer, I finally got the clip washer back on, put everything back together again, making sure I put both springs back where they belonged (one had fallen off) replaced the washer I'd forgotten to put back on the first time, and shrugged my shoulders at the other missing washer, as there wasn't much I could do about it. As far as I could tell, the old mixer still worked in every other regard, so I had no reason to spend any more money getting a new one, so needless to say, I'm pretty pleased with myself. The only problem being, I still haven't finished the job, the other beater still flaps around like anybody's business, but hey, I did it myself. Chalk that one up to home repairs everywhere.

As long as you're extremely careful, and don't do anything stupid, a lot of simple faults can actually be repaired without having to cart the item off to a professional service centre. In saying this, don't bother with the repair if the item's still under warranty. And if the dead/missing/broken/faulty part involves items with more legs than you've got eyes, then forget it too. You'll only break the warranty, and you may end up with an item you can't repair (because you lack the tools/expertise/parts) and have to pay the full cost of the repair instead.

It’s all shiny, captain!

To be fair, I haven’t seen this message in Google’s Wave interface very often, but this is the error message you get from the Wave interface when something’s gone pear-shaped. They generally provide a input box where you can type in what you were doing (“Looking at a wave”), and submit that to the technical people. You then have to refresh the page. This is much simpler than some other things I’ve seen happen, where browsers promptly die, very occasionally taking the operating system with them. Yes Sue, I’ve seen that happen.

It’s certainly in a “closed beta” stage, though “semi-open” would be a more correct term, as Google have been handing gobs of invites out to those who politely ask, or to those who get given one by a waver who is already on line. And you can tell the functionality’s not all there, though there are certainly things you can do. Who would have thought you could stream video and music twenty years ago? GoogleWave reminds me of a house that’s just being built, so random decisions about the wallpaper are getting made before some of the walls are even up. They’re sort of stringing cabling through the joists to bring power to the plasma television they have up on the wall behind me. And they’ve already changed what goes on the floors about seven times before they standardised on white concrete. Or was that wood panel? Nope, it was ceramic tiles, I think. But I think you get the point. We’re still finding out how to tie in everything else from twitter to blogs, music to live video, email, MSN chats, and lots of other stuff. But the remaining problem is: how do we use it without referring to whatever else we’ve all been doing before Google Wave came along?

That’s a little trickier.

At the moment at least, I’m using it as a glorified IRC client with fancy formatting, and “paste-where-you-like” functionality. As long as all parties are present on a wave, and nobody stomps on anyone else, it can be even more fun than IRC, purely because of the removal of the linear input structure mandated by IRC. The same applies to any Instant Message services, because they present information to the user in a continuous stream of lines. Google Wave does that bit better than any of the other messaging services I’ve used, including jabber. But I’m still trying to use it as a series of lines to communicate. And I’m not entirely sure that that’s what GoogleWave is good at. The fact that a conversation is just there, is great. Nobody has to worry about archiving it any more. Of course, if Google Wave goes teats-up, then we may need to restart using somewhere else as a server. It’s definitely a server-client architecture, and probably requires a good understanding of the infrastructure of the server before you let your users loose on it.

Other posited uses of it have been:

• Live meeting notes
  While a meeting is happening, you can have a large number of meeting participants also taking notes, all on the same page. This requires some discipline, to make sure that you don’t have a catfight. Certain people need to take charge of specific areas and not step outside those boundaries, at least not without good reason. Other people probably could cruise through, correcting any obvious mistakes that don’t get picked up in the first five minutes or so.
• Wiki, or live F.A.Q.
  GoogleWave doesn’t have quite the same formatting abilities as a matchbox, but you can at least use highlight, bold, italic, strikethrough, underline, and choose font, size and colour. Paragraphs come for free, so does paragraph formatting. Images come through as links, or occasionally pasted as inline images with a border to them. All other files seem to be relegated to attachment status. Most of the time, these are all the formatting items you need in a wiki, at least. F.A.Qs aren’t much better.
• Document collaboration
  If a more complicated document is required, somebody can set up the structure of the document, somebody else can concentrate on the subject matter, and somebody else can get the formatting (yes, that’s separate from structure) of the content correct. Takes a bit of work, but nothing that others aren’t used to already.
• Show Off Page
  Needless to say, there are those of us who just like to browse the gadgets. Gadgets are gobs of code that provide anything from simple functionality a step up from lists of sets to fullblown applications embedded into the middle of a wave. They provide anything from simple twitter feeds, to maps from GoogleMaps, to included youtube videos, to … well, you can pretty much come up with anything you like. But, you need to get your code correct. If you don’t, well, it’s recorded for all eternity afterwards. If this worries you, then stick to what others have written. As long as it’s well written, and doesn’t stomp all over other content, then it’s acceptable to put small amounts of gadgets into a wave. Some of them don’t play pretty with other wave content though.
• And …
  Well, the sky’s the limit… or at least the coding quality of the Google Services upon which GoogleWave is based.

That’s a really short summary, and doesn’t provide anything like a full summary. At the time that GoogleWave was announced to the world, there was a video released (a long 82 minute video) that described many of the features present in GoogleWave at that time. Since that time, there have probably been advances in the stability of the underlying code, as well as other people making gadgets. On top of all this, of course, is the content in the very large number of waves present when you enter with:public  into the search box. People are obviously confident enough to take their content public, and not hide it away in a bunker somewhere. Of course, most of these are low-bandwidth, but there are probably a few examples of really good content. And with that I take my leave and wave goodbye.

See ya.

Trading on down

What? More books?

Oh yeah, but these are some classics. Not in the true sense of the word of course, I have enough Dickens and Dumas for the moment. But these will do. As you can see from the pic (yes, I know it's not a very good one), I got some Bond, James Bond. While I was at it, I also picked up the last James Clavell book I didn't already have in my collection. I've yet to gain what isn't in this list (Moonraker, Diamonds are forever, and a few others) but these are in okay condition, considering that they're all printed in the 1960s. I note that some of them aren't written by Ian Fleming, but rather by John Gardner. I haven't read any Bond books written by this author yet, so I'd like to know how the debonair spy is handled.

The Clavell is also in reasonable condition—it's also been looked after. They were all a pretty good price too, only $15.00, and that's including the cost of getting them here. Nine books, for that price, less than $1.67 per book. Should keep me happy, once I start (again) the Clavell series from the beginning with Shogun, and go all the way through to the last book, Whirlwind. Only this time, I'll finish each book before I go on to the next one.

Waving goodbye

Google Wave allows embedding of waves now. The only problem being that if a user that comes to the website to view this blogpost isn't logged into Google Wave, then they don't see any content within that box at the bottom of the post. Seems strange, but never mind. I've been having enough fun just trying to get my head around all that Google Wave can potentially be—watch this space for more details. I may even paste the static content from one of my waves here, that way everyone can at least view it, whether they're a 'waver or not. I just won't allow modifications from non-wavers.

And that's a wrap from me.

On the other hand...

Books are one of those things I tend to like reading, though these days books have to compete with online attractions like blogs, music, online games and www.youtube.com, as well as other activities such as television, movies and boozing with your mates. Err, I mean drinking.

I've finally received the last book I'd ordered from fishpond.co.nz (Dan Brown's first book, Digital Fortress), and I thought I'd best make some comments. It's the first time I've actually bought second hand books from the Internet, though it's not the first time I've ever bought books second-hand. A good condition second-hand book has the advantage of lasting nearly as long as a new book does, with appropriate care. It can often cost a third of the cost of a new book, and provide just as much enjoyment. I normally buy new where I can, but these three books were too good to pass up. I'm glad I wasn't too disappointed.

For the price, the books pretty much meet the criteria specified on the website, and though they don't exactly meet their online description of condition, they're okay for the price I paid. I get a copy of the text, none of the pages are ripped/falling out/mutilated and the spine isn't "broken", a pet peeve of mine with some readers "splitting" the spine so the book will stay open at the page they want it to. It's a quick read for one of the books; you might think that 510 pages would take a while, but I've finished it in roughly six hours of on-and-off reading.

I suspect that Dan Brown will never become a favourite author, as there are simply too many inaccuracies in his books. I have to deliberately forget about that, and just treat them as stories. As such, Digital Fortress reads okay, but Angels and Demons is far better. I liked that book so much I ended up buying the illustrated version of it and The Da Vinci Code, both well worth the price (new, but discounted) that I paid for both at Paper Plus Books. I just hope that his latest shows the polish that Angels and Demons has, but I suspect not, as he takes pot shots at the Masons. It's also the third book to focus around a central character, Robert Langdon. Anyhow, 'nuff said from me. I think I'll dive into my other book tomorrow.

One mouse to rule them all

It's all a matter of style

How do you control multiple computers? Some of us do it with fancy little KVMs. That can work well, though they're not cheap when you start looking at more than two computers. Then there's easy free software that can shift the mouse pointer focus between two computers running XFree86/Xorg. This has the advantage of switching the keyboard focus too, though it doesn't do the monitor switching for you. Oh yes, and there's the two-computer limit, unless you happen to run the software in daisychain mode; start it up on the first computer, point that at the second computer. Start it again on the second computer, pointed at the third computer, etc etc. That tends to get ugly though, and still requires that you have authentication (at least as far as Xorg is concerned) for each client. I decided to combine what a KVM does with what x2x does, though I seem to have slightly mixed results.

On both my computers, I'm lucky enough to have a video card with two outputs, though with the KVM I'm using, I can only switch one monitor. So—I plug a monitor into each computer as the primary output (yes, I have multiple monitors), start up the x2x program on the first computer and point it at the second computer's X server, switch the keyboard focus over to the second computer, and work with the applications over on the second computer with the same keyboard and mouse. Except now I've struck a problem.

The newest version of Xorg in the latest version of Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) doesn't support the XTest extension that x2x uses to operate with. Because of that, I can't use x2x any more from the Mandriva to the Ubuntu machine. I could probably get it going in the other direction, but once Mandriva removes the XTest extension from the Xorg setup they have, I also lose that advantage. So. What do I do then?

I suspect I'll be left with options such as Synergy. That has the advantage of being somewhat platform-agnostic, where clients work on both Windows and on Xorg. I've never used it, but the people who have told me of it say good things of it. So, let's see what happens.

Tennis, anyone?

On its own, the mouse isn't a very good gaming device, not unless you get one of those fancy multiple-button laser mice that report at twice the normal rate of other mice. That's a bit academic to most of us, however. Put simply, at least for me, joysticks aren't much use either. The trend these days tends to be for gamers to use multiple inputs, often using the mouse to point, then using an ancillary keyboard to call up all the other functions. These extra little keyboards (sometimes users use the ordinary keyboard instead) are USB devices, and wired into the Windows input layer or the Xorg input layer where games can see their key events and act upon them. Think of a key for each specific function, so you're probably dealing with up to thirty extra keys on a keypad on the opposite side of the keyboard from where you have your mouse.

Looking back at input devices, one of the original ideas was a 5-fingered chorded device to provide up to 31 separate events. As I've mentioned before, you often had to be quick on your ... fingers to use one of these well, so it was eventually scrapped and replaced with the mouse that we love (or hate) today. But it seems that we've almost come back to the idea of extra keys, though at least we're not always chording any more.

Quake, anyone?