worrbase

Yeah, that’s right. Just got an account. Well, by just, I mean I got one on Friday. Don’t even ask for invites, because they were gone by Saturday morning. Also, if you don’t know what Wave is, you should really go to this site and watch the video. I know it’s long, but it’s well worth it.

So Google Wave is pretty awesome. It’s ridiculously buggy, but it works well enough if you aren’t using it in a production environment. I have yet to try out any of the multimedia stuff beyond embedding YouTube videos in Wave, but I imagine it works just as well as everything else does. I’ll probably talk more about that when I’ve played with it.

What I’ve really been playing with is the Wave API, in Python of course. The jist of what I’ve been reading is that the Java API isn’t as up to par as the Python API. Also, I hate Java, and I hate writing code in Java.

The Wave API is built off of Google App Engine, and has all the same limitations as App Engine. My roommate and I kinda half started working on an NNTP gateway to Wave. Unfortunately, the limitations App Engine sets makes this a little more difficult than we’d like (no sockets or anything of the sort).

The one thing I’ve come across in the API that I don’t like, is that you *must* include the entire Python Wave module in the app directory that you upload to App Engine. Not a huge issue, but definitely a bit of an annoyance. The only real problems I see are the possibility for people to modify the version of the Wave API they upload, and that the version of the Wave API they upload is outdated.

Another issue with using App Engine as the platform for all of the Wave code and such, is that you *must* use Python 2.5. App Engine doesn’t work with anything higher than that. So even though the Wave development site says you can use Python 2.5 or above, the above part is really a lie.

The good news: Google Wave won’t forever be reliant on App Engine. Sometime in the future, they will be allowing Apps from anywhere. This is will be awesome, and I can’t wait.

Oh, and I had other productive things I was gonna do this weekend, but they all got shot to hell when I got my Wave account.

Now you can wave me at ay1244@googlewave.com

Yesterday ended up being extraordinarily productive for me. I learned GTK+ in perl, and wrote the GUI for my Omegle app. It’s looking decent, although there is this annoying issue with the menu bar that’s bothering me a bit. It’s very simple, but I can’t really think of any other features to put in the GUI.

I also got a bunch of the abstraction for my CS project done today. But that wasn’t that much code. Oh well.

Also, in the middle of this post, got roped into helping fix our Xen management interface. And by help, I meant I installed Ubuntu server (ugh) on a machine and installed openssh. Woo.

So CSH is holding its first “Project Work Weekend” of the year, and so far, it’s kinda been productive. Personally, I got a lot of work done. I’ve been kinda productive. I worked a little bit on my Omegle application that I’ve been playing with in my head, and I definitely got some of my CS project done.

For my CS project, me and a partner have to write a game playing framework, and then a bunch of pluggable games for the framework. It’s a lot easier than it sounds, as they’re all little command line games like take away, kayles, or connect 3. It’s still pretty cool though. It’s weird to be working with objects again after mostly programming in C this summer. But yeah, so the project is coming along. It’s nice, because right now I only really have to write the abstract framework while my partner writes the game parts that inherit from my framework. Also I have to fix the old game. But whatever, that should be easy.

My Omegle app is coming along slowly. Trying to figure out perl GTK+ while figuring out perl OO while figuring out the ill-documented WWW::Omegle perl module. Fun times. Actually, typing this made me realize I should OO it up a little more. Gonna go back to work after this post.

I definitely need to finish up the slides for the presentations I’m gonna give CSH. I’m gonna publish them on here too, under a new “Presentations” section. It should look pretty hot.

Anyway, I should go back to being productive, cause I haven’t done as much as I wanted.

Hey, totally writing my first post on my new blog. This is totally hosted and run by me. Working on writing my own CMS for it in Perl, but I’m pretty busy, so Wordpress will have to do til now.

I plan to post about things I’m working on, including projects and presentations; bits from my daily life; and maybe even an opinion piece or two. Probably mostly projects and such. Hopefully anyway.