Matt Richards

Last couple of posts have been about my Pandora progress. I’m still patiently waiting for the email saying its going to be shipped, but while I wait I’ve got to occupy myself with a couple of side projects.  One of them is Google’s  Chromium  OS, the developer side of me has always wanted to build an entier operating system from source. Being involved with the Chromium OS project has helped me establish this need and I love working with Google.

I’ve been tracking the Chromium OS project from the day Google made the announcement to open the code to everybody. That day (or maybe it was the day after) took the plunge and downloaded the source code and built an entier operating system from source. It was very daunting at first, but I struggled through it and now I build Chromium OS at least once a week to see what Google has done to improve it.

(Btw, you’ll notice that I’m not saying Chrome OS. It is the  same operating system, but as I’m NOT Google nor will I be bundling the OS with a net book I’m creating.. I will not call it Chrome OS.)

Now that there’s some history, here’s what I really wanted to say.. According to the Chrome developer mailing list there might be some vmware based builds available for anybody to test. Though, Google has not released any official binary builds at this point, they might just keep them internally.

Testing Google’s Wave embed.

While a few weeks back, in early November if you were to search the interweb the new fad would be to try and dig up a Google Wave Invite. I’ll admit, even I fell into the trap when they announced the grand opening back on September 30 2009. Here’s how my story goes.. essentially when this announcement hit, I knew I wasn’t in the first round as I did not go to Google I/O. So I went and applied for Developer Sandbox access and the Preview invite as well.  However, by a stroke of luck in one of my IRC channels somebody was giving away Invites. I was jumping up and down when I got the word my invitation was on its way. I was nominated on the October 17th, and about a week later my invite came my way.

Now, when I was first given access to Wave, I had no clue what to do with it, so I did what I do best.. Asked around the IRC channels I hang around in. They gave me the “with:public” search pointer, and I was off on my way investigating all these fun Public Waves, and learning all about what Wave really was. Wave is a very intriguing concept, but I see no practical purpose for it at this time. Bottom line, Google has really opened the doors to Wave, its very easy to get invited to the preview these days. Nobody cares about them now. It was OVER HYPED AS GOOGLE DOES BEST.