Category: Technology

Google Lively

Other than the Apple iPhone 3G, the launch of Google Lively is indeed one of the hottest news this week. So just three days after the launch of the beta version, how is it doing ? Here are some good and bad things I found so far.

  • I managed to download the Lively plug-in, installed it, set up my avatar, designed my first “room” and got hanging around the room within an hour. It’s better than my Secondlife experience on this.
  • The plug-in runs pretty fast in Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 7, and feels faster than Secondlife.
  • I can set up “gadgets” easily to feed my own photos and a video feed from Youtube.
  • You can embed the room into your own website, blog or Facebook account (yet to be tested, but the application is here).
  • The chat messages and avatar expressions appear in rooms you visiting almost instantly.
  • I can easily embedded to my WordPress blog.

Here is a screen shot of the room I created – 80 Days Cafe.

google-lively-2.jpg

As you can see, I added …

  • An avatar with new hairstyle, t-shirt and jean …
  • Two red colored sofas, a coffee table, a standing lamp and one potted plant.
  • A wall mounted picture frame that gets a feed from my photo album and a click to the picture will link to a website selling my photo album (neat !!)
  • A LCD TV on top of a bench, with a feed from a selected video (Wicked Game guitar solo by Greg Reiter) from YouTube (neat neat !!). The sound is great as well …

And the problems I encountered are …

  • Whenever I click the objects (avatar or furniture), a dialogue box pop up to let me edit the properties. However, the dialogue box keep “flashing” and I have to drag the box outside the room estate to stop the flashing. Interestingly, it happens only on my XP computer, but works perfectly in a Vista computer.
  • One of my rooms disappeared after login, but reappeared later on. I suspected it is caused by the fact that I ran Lively sometimes in Firefox, and sometimes in IE.
  • I don’t think there is enough items to dress up the avatar and not enough styles of furnitures.  However, I believe the situation will improve later.
  • There was one time the avatar “locked in” with other objects in the room, I have to use another view (toggles in the upper left corner of the room) and move the avatar away from the object.
  • There is no way to stop, adjust the volume, and mute the video feed in the LCD TV gadget.
  • There is no way to resize the photo frame gadget, and in fact other furnitures as well.
  • [Update] Google disabled the gadget function …

All in all, not bad for a beta version. And just in case you wanna know more about the application, here is a video trailer …

Obsession

Couple of days ago, there was a blog post about how Gmail team improved the loading sequence, trimmed the 24 http requests down to just 4 requests. A few utilities and tips were covered in the post, but I think the key messages they sent across were “the need for speed” and “the obsession of great performance”.

In the good old days, we measured the greatness of a program by how fast it could run, how small the runtime file was and how smart the logic we coded. It’s the obsession of great programming, you know. Compare this to the generation of developers we have now, the first question they usually ask about a new task of programming is “where can I copy it ?”. What a difference ?!

I can understand the merit of DRY (Don’t repeat yourself), but really, there is no shortcut to be a great developer. The only way is – obsess to your work !!

In plain English

Really wanted to find a solution to take GTD with me even outside office and with no access to computer. The solution shall be the stuff that carry with me or I can easily access to – i.e. PDA / smartphone / phone and its software, notepad, stack of index cards, or remote voice mailbox etc. etc. … something that I can jot down the actions as efficient as possible.

One service I am evaluating closely for the moment is Twitter. The idea is to send an SMS with my phone to one Twitter account and then I can “follow” the tweets back in office. What is Twitter, you may ask ? Understand that some of you are living in another planet, so here is Twitter … in plain English, by Common Craft.