Google Wave, initial thoughts

So our team has been playing around with Google Wave over the last week since being invited to the preview. Technology wise it is quite remarkable, the Google developers have created a life-like conversation application that goes way beyond the standard messenger or email format. However through lack of documentation things can get confusing fast and also I am not convinced (yet) that the system is anywhere near ready. The writers of lifehacker.com have made the first attempt at clarity however with their excellent book completewaveguide.com and I recommend reading that before you start.

Time will tell if this is a workable solution, it may just be that Google has over-complicated something that didn’t need fixing. Replacing email is a big task and I am not sure in it’s current form Google Wave offers an alternative. It is entirely possible that the conversation style will make it hard to follow which will make the tool unproductive and a non-starter. They also have to convince everyone to have a Wave account to communicate and this is something that could seriously damage the rate of adoption. You can’t, after all, teach old dogs new tricks!

Google Chrome OS – Should we believe the hype?

‘They even had it on the news
Don’t believe the hype…’ Public Enemy

Hang on a minute, everyone seems to be talking like Google Chrome OS is going to change the world. Surely it would be better to wait until more than a handful of people have seen or indeed used it before we label it a major player? Although I anticipate many people will be early adopters of a suspected very long beta program there will be limitations and in reality it could take years for this product to mature.

In short, Google don’t walk on water, I’d prefer to see and experience Google Chrome OS in action before the hype. However if they make it Open Source that should be applauded.

Let’s see what happens….

Instant Applications with TurnKey Linux and VPS.NET Cloud

We’ve been using VPS.NET for a short time now and mid-june they introduced appliance images from TurnKey Linux. This makes deploying Drupal, WordPress, Rails and Apache servers amongst others quick and easy. Take a look at the following video from the guys at TurnKey Linux demonstrating how quickly VPS.NET can be used to launch Open Soruce appliances into the cloud.

Appliance features:

• Auto-updated daily with latest security patches.
• Webmin easy to use configuration console and web management interface
• Minimal footprint (typically around 150MB) – each software appliance is carefully built from the ground up with the minimum components needed to serve its role with maximum efficiency and security.

Appliance list:

• Core
• Google App Engine SDK
• Tomcat
• phpBB
• Wordpress
• LAMP
• LAPP
• Ruby Rails
• Joomla
• MediaWiki
• Drupal 5
• Drupal 6
• Django
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL

Overall we think this is a simple way to get applications running fast. When you are looking for something out of the box you can’t fail.

VPS.NET has data centres in the US and UK with billing in both currencies.

Quick Tip: Efficiently Manage Your Email

If you are anything like me you process most information through your email inbox. Reminders, tasks and requests flow into my mail client at an incredible rate and traditionally I’ve used an elloborate filing system to process it.

After reading (and then re-reading) David Allen’s Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity it dawned on me my futile attempt to manage it this way was utter madness.

Here is my simple email process as it now stands.

1. Do the action for anything that will take 2 mins or less.
2. Create a new task and define the next step (important!) from each email that needs action.
3. Create a new task as a reminder for anything that can be deferred until a suitable time.
4. Forward anything that needs someone else to action and delete it immediately (trust others).
5. File anything that you may want to pick up in the future but don’t have time for at the moment.
6. File anything else under clients or suppliers, don’t use sub folders as a good search tool will find any specific email you may need in the future.
7. Delete everything else.

Ongoing and this is important, review tasklists from no.2 and no.3 daily and do, file or delete as above. Monitor folder created from no.5 on a monthly basis.

I’ve not had an empty inbox since 1994 and now it is. I’ve even gone as far as archiving all email that is older than 6 months and I now have a happy, clean and manageable mailbox. Reducing stress of it being there and the backup requirements on our infrastructure.

I’m off to tell our clients.