Funcoder Technology Blog

Syndicated from Some Brisbane Guy, by the same clown

I’ve just been trying Google Wave after I was graciously invited by someone awesome, and it looks like it’s really hard on your computer’s system resources when you’re trying to view a big Wave. Here’s my browser, struggling to render a big Wave:

Google Wave, trying to render a big wave

I was trying to read a random Wave that had 129 other users and 340+ wavelets, and it SMASHED my work laptop, which is fairly decent (Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM), so that I couldn’t even really read the Wave — it was too slow to respond.

Windows Task Manager while trying to use Google Wave

I am using the Firefox 3.5.4 beta but it was unusable in Google’s own Chrome, as well. Firefox actually seemed better as it would allocate memory and then release it but Chrome would just eat more and more memory until the machine was paging like crazy. Check out my Task Manager screenshot above, you can see the memory going up and down and one of the CPU cores maxed out.

I’m keen to keep trying Wave out, but is Google doing a Microsoft (see Wirth’s Law), and just expecting that as Wave catches on, everyone will have enough horsepower to run it? Or is it just that it’s beta, and performance will get better with optimisation — including Javascript engine optimisations in the major browsers? I guess we’ll see…

Google produce some amazing web app’s and Google Wave is a fantastic collaboration tool that I can’t wait to get into the beta program.

Here’s the preview video which is great to see.

I am currently working on an experiment to have most of my app’s I use on a day to day basis online.

Unfortunately this does not include my development tools but more productivity and social applications.

One of the features I needed was to sync my work calendar with my Google app.

You can do this with Google’s beta version of their sync tool.

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955

It’s very simple to setup and you can decide which way you would like to sync the calendars. I would have liked to choose which of my Google Calendars I want to sync with, but I doesn’t give you that option.

Suffice to say, it works very well.

Google have released the first beta of their open source browser extension to allow developers to create offline web applications.

The extension consists 3 modules:

1. LocalServer, which acts as an application server supporting HTML, Javascript and more.
2. A local relational database engine
3. WorkerPool, which is a cool way of running Javascript in the background (thread) and therefore not blocking the page.

You can find more about this new technology here

Was just using google this afternoon and noticed they have made a name change to the personalized Google page.

It’s like the new black, everyone want’s to start with an i.

Maybe I should purchase iFuncoder.com