Google Wave

So sad to see Google throw in the towel on Google Wave.

In retrospect the obvious is pretty clear - the way to get mass wave adoption was to build a really solid bridge between SMTP, IM, and Twitter/ostatus worlds.

Yes, I know people did build those all of those connections and more but the wave team was a fairly small team and they didn't focus on making any of those Google production ready which would have led to people coming to depend on them as a primary inbox type of application.

I still think the concept of a live, read/write, communicating web world is where we are headed.  Wave was definitely ahead of its time.

iPad

Review -- I think this is a great way to surf at very low power.

Also - reading is immersive enough that I have gone through a couple of books on the thing.

Salt Fork 2010

HP PSC 1200 Airport Extreme Leopard

I'm posting because I hope this might save somebody else some time.

Problem - a bunch of USB printers don't work out of the box with the Airport Express base station.

In my case it was an HP PSC 1200. I just bought an Airport Express and thought this thing would be plug and play particularly since I had it printing via Linux CUPS shared via Avahi (bonjour)

Anyway - it was recognized immediately but it wouldn't auto select the driver and the list of manual driver choices didn't include a driver.

The built-in Leopard driver supports direct USB printing. I'm guessing my previous setup was using the Linux CUPS driver but I don't know for sure because so much Mac stuff Just Works :-)

Anyway - the easy fix for HP printers is to run the open source HPIJS driver. See this page

Install ghostscript, then foomatic-rip, and then the HPIJS driver package in that order.

Once that is done, make sure you close out and restart System Preferences and then when you go back into System Preferences the driver should auto detect.

Enjoy!

Where in the world am I

Playing with location apps

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

I don't like to be a fawning fanboy but this operating system is the most killer thing I've used in quite a while.

The attention to detail is extraordinary.

I'll be interesting to see if I still feel this way a month or a year from now...

Hello Intel

I bought a Core 2 Duo today.

It's my first new Intel processor since 2002.

Verdict: Thumbs Up!

Documents as a web service

Office on the web.

I'm trying out Google docs.  Spartan but functional.

Update: The title doesn't seem to come over even though I've got it set to include that "when possible".  Rats!

Slicehost

I've been trying out various Xen providers.

I have to say slicehost seems to be really good right now.

Of course they are new so we'll have to see how they fair over the next few years.

Back

I'm back to write more info.

Busy day today - ran into problems with an upgrade to ESX 3.0

Webmail

I tried out Roundcubemail - it's an newer webmail IMAP client written in PHP.

It's pretty damn slick for a beta.

I'm going to look into contributing Japanese strings - they aren't in there yet although the client has no issues dealing with Japanese content in UTF-8.

FC5 Xen

Got FC5beta2 Xen guests working tonight. I got caught by something stupid - the FC5guest kernel xennet support was built as a module. I like to get modules working last but in this case I needed to get them going first, build the initrd, and alias eth0 to xennet in order to get networking started during boot. :-(

New Honda technology this year

Honda's finally got a hybrid powertrain that can run electric only at low speed. This should help their sales because Prius has been kicking their butt.

They've also got a an improved gas engine for the Civic chassis now which ups efficiency by 6%.

My Civic will be due for replacement in a year or two - I've been so happy with the Corolla that I've been thinking Prius all the way but I'll be taking a look at what the new Civic owners think next summer (after the hype dies down).