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…

Syndicated from Some Brisbane Guy, by the same clown

If you’re lost in a big city like, say, New York City, a very effective way to be sure that strangers will help you find your way is to be a small, helpless, cute cardboard robot with a flag that has your destination written on it.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

I love this. I love seeing the ways people conceive of using technology to make art. It’s not just that the technology exists, but that it’s affordable and readily available to be used by anyone who really wants to make it happen. The artist here “conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination,” but it didn’t matter because they were cheap enough. She was also able to preserve the authenticity of the situation by having a video camera small enough to fit into her handbag, so it wasn’t obvious she was recording people’s interactions with the robots. Try hiding a camcorder from the 1980s in a handbag!

So remember: next time you’re lost in a big city, be a little cute cardboard robot.