TI introduces a customisable watch which does HRM out of the box

Engadget have just reported that TI have released a hackable watch, which can do all sorts of things including HRM straight out of the box.  This is really interesting.  I wonder if I can make it work with Bleep.  Of course I should probably concentrate of finishing Bleep first. At $49 I reckon its a steal!  I might ask Santa for one for Christmas

Google Wave for EJA Enterprise Futures Forum 09

A lot of people are saying that using Google Wave to discuss conferences live is the new hotness. Given that there will be a special google wave announcement at tomorrow's Enterprise Futures Forum in Melbourne, I'm willing to guess there will be waves for the conference.

In anticipation, I have created a wave for the tech discussion session I am running on local implications for cloud computing. There's not much there at the moment. I'm hoping to bulk it out a bit this afternoon and tonight in prep for tomorrow's conference.

Abbe May at the Wesley Anne

Melissa, Courtenay and I went to see Abbe May perform a blues/rock solo gig at the Weseley Anne last night. We always try and see her when she's in town, and as usual she delivered. The style was a bit different this time, as she was on her own and had to adapt some of her songs to fit the format. Abbe also performed a bunch of covers, as she explained afterwards to "keep it fun for me", and you could tell from the performance. Especially good were the two covers originally by Willie Dixon, whom Abbe cites as a major influence. 'Twas great

She's playing the Edinburgh Castle (in Melbourne) next Friday, and she's back at the Wesley Anne on the 27th.  Go see her.  Its a bargain.

EJA Futures Forum, Nov 17th

Enterprise Java Australia are holding a conference on the 17th of November in Melbourne, with keynote speeches on the Broadband initiative, Green IT, SOA, and Google Wave.  I will be facilitating one of the afternoon tech sessions on Cloud Computing.  If you're at the event, come and say hi to me.


There's a 2 for 1 registration offer open until mid day on Friday.

Melissa's name is on the wall

Its not nearly as bad as all that.  In fact its a good thing.  Melissa's first solo show outside of the university system opened last night at Metalab in Sydney, and was very successful.  She sold some pieces, chatted with lots of people, and we had some fun.  The proprietors of Metalab are very welcoming and friendly and we all went out for Vietnamese food afterwards which I thought was a nice touch.

Apparently numbers for the opening were a little down on usual, but that is because both artists that were opening that night are from out of state, so the locals weren't brought in by the artists themselves.  Still, there were lots of people there even if they weren't spilling into the street so I thought it went very very well.

If you are in Sydney and you'd like to check it out, the exhibition is on till the 26th of November 2009 at 10B Fitzroy Place, Surry Hills, NSW 2010


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What should I do when google wave topics become too popular/cluttered?

The other day, I released a mind mapping gadget for google wave, and its proven to be quite popular. Popular for something I knocked together quickly anyway. There's an active wave discussing features, which also serves as the main description of the gadget. Its getting a bit long now, and I'm aware that there is a limit to how big waves can get before they start to slow down. It also gets to the point where I want to simplify things so that a new reader coming upon the wave doesn't get confused by the threads of conversation there.

The way that I am using wave at the moment is that there is a single shared document at the top (the root blip) which contains the topic of discussion, and in this case, a mind map of features and votes for features. The blips that come afterwards are a discussion list, much in the same way that comments can be added to blog posts. Whilst they form an important part of the wave, the value of information they contain decreases as they become less topical. It is really the latest comments and blips that are the important bit, at least to people that are returning to long running conversations.

Other systems show the most recent comments on the top, and show older comments on separate pages to stop the page from getting to big. I'm tempted to suggest that wave should do the same thing, but I wonder if its because we're all still figuring out the best way to use wave. Are there different usage patterns for waves that means it makes sense to have every single blip on the screen, even if it means the page is three miles long? I'm still mulling that one, but in the mean time I think there is a need to come up with a way of managing long running waves. Here's my thoughts on how it could be done.

Option 1: Create a new wave to "Continue Discussion". This is what most people seem to be doing at the moment, but it means that anybody who has linked to the page is now linking to (or embeding) a dead version of it, and would then need to click through to see the new version. It also breaks the fundamental principle of URLs in that a URL represents an object for its lifetime.

Option 2: Delete the old crufty posts. That's not very nice to the people that wrote those posts in the first place. Besides, those comments provide useful context for a new reader to be able to catch up with the rest of the people on the wave. In the end, you are removing information from the system, rather than presenting it in an accessible way, and thats never a good idea.

Option 3: Have an archival bot participant on the wave. This bot would monitor the wave, and when the number of blips starts to get high, it would progressively copy the older blips into an archive wave and subsequently delete them from the original. It would also add a link to the end of the root blip showing people where the archive wave is.

I've had a quick look to see if anyone has done this yet, and I haven't found anything, but I think its a great idea. The only technical issue with this approach that I see at the moment is that the archived blips would not have the same author(s) as the original blips, as it would be the bot that authored them. The bot could add some text indicating who the authors were, but its not quite the same.

I really like the idea of the archival bot. Once I get back from Sydney I might give it a go.

Mind Map Gadget for Google Wave

As you can probably tell by my recent posts, I've been mucking about with Google Wave for the last week or so.  It shows a lot of promise, but we still need to work out the best way to use it.

Some colleagues and I were discussing some practice development the other day.  One of them said that they had created a mind map on mind42.com and had shared it with us so that we could map out some ideas.  Mind42 is a great tool and normally I would jump straight on it, but it seemed unnatural to leave the context which we had created in the wave.  It would have been much cooler if we could have had the mind map directly in the wave.

Google has thought of this, and have included the ability to incorporate gadgets into your wave, which allow essentially any web application to participate in waves.  A Mind map is a natural tool to include in waves as it forms the start of a lot of collaborations, which is exactly what wave is for.  Rather than wait for mind42 to change their application so that it could be embedded in google wave, I decided to write my own.  Mind maps are relatively straight forward applications, and I wanted an excuse to use GWT in anger.

The result is my newly released google wave component.  I've uploaded it to the Google Wave samples gallery, but if you have access to the wave preview then you can go directly to the source (With a sample) at this wave link.  Install, have a play, and make suggestions for improvements.  I'm hoping we'll start using it within our organisation as well.

Here's a video of it in action: