2009-11-28
Posted in Web Wandering & Opinion
at 4:18
Well, I finally got an invite to Google Wave. I haven’t had much time to play around with it yet, but my first impression is that it could potentially be just the thing I need for collaborative story planning… once they add an export feature.
From most to least bothersome, here are the problems I’ve found so far which aren’t on Google’s list of known issues:
- Google seems to have no plans to open-source the web-based client.
- There is no export functionality.
- As with Google Docs, the design will eventually allow someone else to un-invite me from a Wave I forgot to save a local copy of.
- No end-to-end, public-key crypto offering.
Problems 1, 2, and 3 can probably be solved together by writing a custom, open-source client which treats the Wave server the same way git-svn treats a Subversion server. (Ideal, since I consider DVCS-like behaviour to be the ideal data replication model for most things)
Knowing Google, problem 4 will probably have to be solved using something along the lines of OffTheRecord which grafts crypto onto the existing system. The main issue I see being that it’ll be up to the endpoints to “induct” new clients into a wave by translating the existing encrypted history for the newly-added public key.
My overall opinion is that, until export functionality of some kind is available, Wave is a toy at best and, even with export functionality, it won’t replace e-mail or IM for me unless they offer end-to-end crypto. However, if a client-developer (Google or third-party) does offer some sort of export functionality, then it’ll be an ideal successor to Google Docs for me. (I use it only for collaboration since I deeply distrust cloud computing.)
Permalink
2009-11-11
Posted in Otaku Stuff, Site Updates
at 1:41
After far too long, I finally found time to make some of the planned improvements to my gender-bending index.
Beta 2 brings the following improvements:
- The detail expanders on the tables are now at least as comprehensive as the original “static HTML page” version of the site.
- The “Other Sites” list has returned, complete with icon-bullets denoting site types and a handy legend.
- I filled in author/artist/director names for almost every entry. (The remaining ones are a bit tricky, so they’ll have to wait)
- At least half of the data has been reworked to be per-character, per-incident-type rather than per-story. When searching is implemented, this will be very important.
The major remaining features left un-implemented are:
- Filtering and searching (You still have to make do with category grouping and adjustable sort orders)
- Spoiler-hiding (Occasionally, there’s a big plot twist that’s relevant to the nature of the gender-bending. This will require much thought because I need to decide how to classify something that seems to be X but is revealed to be Y.
- An interface for submitting new data and reporting errors directly rather than having to visit my usual contact form.
Enjoy.
Permalink
2009-11-03
Posted in Geek Stuff
at 1:49
A couple of weeks ago, I got it into my head that the death of Blinkenlights was a bad thing. My primary PC already has a little LCD on the keyboard (I got a deal on a first-generation Logitech G15 gaming keyboard… not just useful for gamers) and, combined with LCDProc, it makes a great diagnostic display for figuring out why your newest creation is freezing up the GUI before you kill it.
…so I went on eBay and ordered an inexpensive Chinese LCD display for my experimentation machine. The PCIDEA 20×4 USB drive-bay LCD. As the manufacturer claims, it IS fully compatible with the CrystalFontz driver in LCDProc… but they neglect to tell you which of the three CrystalFontz drivers to use and how to configure it. Here is your answer in the form of an LCDd.conf snippet:
The key elements which aren’t default and aren’t immediately obvious to the layperson seem to be the use of the CFontzPacket driver, Model=631, /dev/ttyUSB0, and a 19200 bitrate.
Permalink
