The other day, I released a mind mapping gadget for google wave, and its proven to be quite popular. Popular for something I knocked together quickly anyway. There's an active wave discussing features, which also serves as the main description of the gadget. Its getting a bit long now, and I'm aware that there is a limit to how big waves can get before they start to slow down. It also gets to the point where I want to simplify things so that a new reader coming upon the wave doesn't get confused by the threads of conversation there.

As you can probably tell by my recent posts, I’ve been mucking about with Google Wave for the last week or so. It shows a lot of promise, but we still need to work out the best way to use it. Some colleagues and I were discussing some practice development the other day. One of them said that they had created a mind map on mind42.com and had shared it with us so that we could map out some ideas.

I've been spending some time recently thinking about Google Wave, and how it can be useful as a method of communicating and working with multiple participants at the same time, which is what Wave is for, but with a robot as one of those participants.  Wave provides an easy way to incorporate a computer participant in a conversation with people, getting it to receive all updates to the wave and provide its own input.

In the last week, two people have independently told me about an Australian government sponsored conference to create interesting mashup applications from government data.  I love the idea, and I'm really glad that the government believes that its data should be freely available.  I think most app providers are realising the power of providing open access to their data to drive adoption now.  In my opinion however, independent transformation of data between web applications is still missing as a generic tool to mashup creators.

I’ve been thinking over the last few days about what Google Wave could be used for. Obviously it can be used as a document collaboration and review platform. It can also be used as a multi-user chat program, although there are probably other existing programs that are just as good for managing that. Some people have claimed that it isn’t anything revolutionary. In and of itself, this is true, as it just takes concepts already available in email, instant messaging and collaborative documents and puts them together.

Gizmodo have an interesting article on the price of iPhone applications, how they have dragged the consumer's expectation of app pricing down, and how this might not be a good idea in the future. I can certainly say that I won't be expecting to make much money out of Bleep. Its taken longer than expected to develop, and I don't think I'm going to sell lots of copies. How anyone can make a business out of developing these things is beyond me.

There's another company that is producing a heart rate monitor device for the iPhone. Its outlined at fastcompany.com, and looks great. Its exactly the sort of thing that would render Bleep irrelevant. Sadly, its not going to be made into a product at this stage :(

When I started Crimson Cactus, I started up a blog for it. It seemed to make sense, and I could keep the company posts separate from holiday pictures and musings and whatnot that way. As its turned out, I find that I want to cross-post. That is, I want to be able to post to both of my blogs. There are a couple of ways of doing this, but I think it just goes to show that I'm doing it wrong.

Engadget have released a review of the fitbit networked pedometer. I remember first seeing this about 12 months ago, when it had just launched at techcrunch 50. I like the idea of the device, but it is yet another thing to carry around, and yet another thing to charge. It makes me thing of the belt valet computers in David Marusek's Counting Heads (Thanks for the reccomendation @doctorow). One day, not too far away, we will have computers that we carry, strapped to our person (perhaps in belt form), that can handle all of the biometric sensing that we want.

Melissa and I went to a Royalty themed fancy dress party last night, so we went as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Here's a couple of photos.

Gizmodo are running a theme of playing with balls this week, which fits right up the alley for Bleep. In the linked article, they mention heart rate monitor gadgets in particular. At least my approach will be relatively inexpensive. What a pity that Bleep isn't ready for the publication yet. I'll be following their posts with interest.

I was operating under the impression that nobody had created a heart rate monitor system for the iPhone yet. This seemed illogical to me as it is such an obvious thing to do. As it turns out, there is one. I found it today at Smheartlink's site. It looks like a great product, but it is a lot of money to spend, especially after you have already purchased a HRM belt.

I saw an article on gizmodo a few minutes ago that says that apple approved almost 1400 iphone apps last friday. Even on the slow days they approve hundreds of applications. Its massively impressive that Apple have got so many applications. It just goes to show how much of a runaway success they have on their hands. I can't help wonder though how hard it will be for anyone to find the app that they want when there are so many apps to choose from.

I had hoped to finish Bleepto the point where it could be submitted to Apple over the weekend. Sadly, I’ve run into some problems causing the application to crash on the iPhone, even though it runs fine in the simulator. I’m also trying to polish the user interface to make it a better experience for users. In the mean time, I’ve uploaded a sneak peek video of Bleep in action. Bear in mind that this is an early version of the software, and it is still being tweked.

I just got back from 5 days in the Snow at Mt Hotham in Victoria. Despite the weather forecasts looking like complete arse all week, we got to ski 4 days out of 5 which is not a bad for Australia. Only friday let us down with bucketing rain and howling wind. Given we were due to head back to Melbourne on Friday anyway, we packed it in and headed back early.

Recently, I found out that Yarra Trams has published a web service interface for finding out information on tram arrival times. This is awesome, and I've been trying to think of cool little apps that I can write to take advantage of it. As I'm also playing with GWT at the moment, so perhaps I could do something that way... There is a problem however, in that the Same Origin Policy will block any attempts by my javascript code to access the webservice, as it will come from a different origin.

I've been using my google account to store mail for a while now, including forwarded mail from client organisations, where this is allowed. The only problem that I've had so far is that when I'm sending mail as another identity (like a client one), it would always come up as "from me@brucecooper.net on behalf of me@the.right.domain" Its a bit annoying, but thats what Google had to do in order to be good email citizens and not get everything marked as spam.

I'm a fan of the TramTracker iPhone application. Its a little doohickey that fetches information from Yarra Tram's real time tram arrival service to tell you when your next tram will be coming. Having used it a lot over the last couple of months, I wondered last night how the app got its data. What service did it contact to fetch the data. So I hooked up a logging proxy to my iPhone and traced the calls it was making.

Melissa and some of her colleagues are launching their new collaboration, the brown paper collective at 'this is not a design market' in Melbourne in July. The Brown Paper Collective is a group of artists from the fields of drawing, glass and jewellery, and the market at which they will make their first group outingwill be happening in Melbourne on Sunday the 19th of July at The Factory, 500 La Trobe St, Melbourne from 10am - 5pm.

I was going to write a blog post yesterday about where integration platforms were going, which seems to me to be online webapps without the need for an IDE at all. some products like Oracle's Aqualogic ESB are pretty much already there. I couldn't quite gather my thoughts properly though, so I thought I would do a mind map. I was going to use FreeMind, but considering I was talking about web-apps, I thought I'd do a search for whats out there.

Moments after taking this shot, the passenger folded up his Elvis cut out and got off the tram. Given that the cutout had well worn fold marks at the hips and knees I can't help wondering if he takes the king with him on all tram rides for company (or deterring other people from sitting next to him) Either way it's hilarious

UPDATE: I've now created a service to make this much easier to forward email. If you are interested in this, please have a look at the service's site. I've got a million email accounts. Every time I start work on a new client site, I get given yet another email account. Its a pain in the butt to manage all of these, so wherever possible I forward the mail onto my main gmail account where it can get filtered, stored and searched easily.

I'm an IT consultant. As a result, I spend the vast majority of my time at work doing one of the followingReading or Composing EmailReading or writing Word DocumentsEditing our corporate WikiResearching stuff (or skiving off) on the WebLooking at Microsoft Project plansVery occasionally coding... very occasionallyTo perform these tasks, I lug around a quite heavy laptop. Its not a particularly special laptop, but it does the job. I would like to exchange it for something lighter and easier to work with in order to save my back, especially when I ride to work.

Melissa and I just got back from our holiday in Tasmania. We spent 5 nights in Cradle Mountain, 2 in Launceston, and traveled on the Spirit of Tasmania. As long as you don’t mind loosing a night, the Spirit of Tasmania is not a bad way of travelling. Below are some blurry iphonecam shots from the trip Tasmania