Wulf's Web-Den

I am moving blog-home. From now on, I will be posting on my new Wordpress-powered Web-den site so head over and join me there (don't forget to update your news feed if you use that - I've put the link on the new site).

Last week Google announced that they were going to cease development of Wave and withdraw the site early next year.

It is a shame that they cannot just leave it to be, potentially building a ground swell of users. Every now and then I come across a place where it is useful so I will miss it when it is gone. In particular, it excels as a tool for collaborating on developing information that is not quite formal enough to make a shared document fit as a solution.

Never mind. At least the technology is open so perhaps others will pick up and run something similar.

I am not especially interested in the World Cup but I am a sucker for for online information tools and so I can't resist telling you about the World Cup Calendar from Marca.com (which seems to be a Spanish-language online sports magazine).

Using Flash, it allows you to query by team, date, venue or group, with results shown in the middle and all involved data elements highlighted round the edge. For example, I can see that today's matches involve eight countries across four stadiums, taken from Groups A and B. All in all, a very admirable piece of information interface design.

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world cup

flash

user interface

design

In my role as a moderator on the Digital Photography School Forums I find myself repeating the same reminders again and again, such as "Please don't quote other pictures in the assignment". It would be ideal if the forum software could hardcode all these little rules but, in the meanwhile, I have come up with some bookmarklets to ease the pain:

• NoQuote
• 740px
• FlickrMedium
• XPost

These are little nuggets of javascript that can be saved as bookmarks and clicked on to perform an action (in this case writing some text into a form box).

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dps

bookmarklets

You can now embed a Wave into a blog or other webpage using a Wave Element. It's free to try, so here goes:

Why not have a go at chipping in?

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wave

google

communication

Google have now taken away the requirement to be invited to join its Wave — it is now available for everyone.

They also promise that it is faster, more stable and otherwise refined. I hope this will give it a boost because, as I wrote last month, I think it is a great communications solution. All it needs is more people deciding that it answers their problem!

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wave

google

communication

I attended a fascinating talk at Oxford's eResearch Centre yesterday on a device called RepRap, a replicating rapid prototyper (or 3D printer).

Dr Adrian Bowyer of the University of Bath explained why he thinks this machine, which he and his team have developed and shared under a GPL licence, is significant. It is affordable — about £300 for the parts plus a computer to drive it and some expertise to wire it together — which contrasts with much more expensive commercial 3D printers. It can even print most of it's own parts, allowing it to contribute to copying (replicating) itself and also encouraging refinements to be designed and tested (rapidly prototyped), leading to improvements in areas such as as speed, accuracy and simplicity.

Printing is done with a range of plastics; it may not be long before it can even act as a plastics recycler, accepting something like a feed of shredded plastic milk cartons. To be honest, I think it might be a little beyond my engineering skills at the moment but I would love one of these or to know somebody locally to whom I could take designs to print into reality!

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reprap

3d printing