Tracks of Distraction

Bryan was kind enough to send me an invitation to Google Wave, and I’ve been trying it out for the past two weeks. Unfortunately, I don’t get to send invitations unlike those people who got their accounts directly from Google. It is quite lonely to have a Google Wave account but only a few people to wave with. But I like what I’ve seen so far, even if I encounter bugs every so often. Bryan created this game gadget called Pick-up Sticks, and I find myself refreshing the game each time I get stuck with whatever I’m doing. It get’s exciting if a lot of people are playing it simultaneously. We played it so much, we ended up getting “wavelet too large” errors. Aw. Another side effect of trying out Google Wave: I now find regular chat to be too slow. Seeing the character-by-character edits can really make things a lot faster, because sometimes I can already figure out what the other party is thinking even before he/she finishes typing the message. Some people might be too conscious with their spelling, but I don’t mind at all. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived in a country where they don’t speak English that well.
I discovered that Google Wave works best with Google Chrome. (Geez, I wonder why?) I find it too slow with Firefox, and it really gets on my nerves when I tried opening those huge public waves. My friend uses Safari, and she had problems with loading the Pick-up Sticks gadget. Forget Internet Explorer, even the Google Wave Team gave up on that one. I can’t wait to start using Google Wave for collaboration. But to do that, first my adviser has to get a Google Wave account. :p Also, I need true LaTeX integration. By “true” LaTeX integration, I mean that we would type in the wave just like how we usually begin our LaTeX documents, and there’s a gadget or a robot that allows us to see a preview of our code. I wonder if this is possible? So far, all that Google Wave can do is to replace the equations encoded in LaTeX with images (via the robot Watexy). Preview of the Watexy robot. You have to add it as a contact to make it work. And since it is a lot more fun to test Google Wave instead of doing work, I am now trying the Wordpress plugin Wavr. So here is a test wave embedded in Wordpress:

Happy waving!

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