Technology

Killer Screen Saver in HTML/CSS/JS: TV and News mashup of XML-TV and Google News using XWiki

It's been a long time that I wanted a beefed up screen saver which shows relevant information to me. I like very much the RSS Screen Server of Mac OS X (or the Time Machine version which is also nice) which can display an RSS feed but found it too limited as it does not display enough articles and enough of the content of the feed.

My initial idea is to have a nice graphical display of relevant and LIVE news, which would scroll news and use as much of your screen real estate. In my vision, I'd like ultimately to see this application running on an external screen (a big LCD or an iPad) in my home.

Gartner analyzes OT used by Google Wave and detects WOOT (the algorithm used in XWiki Concerto)

In an article called "The secret sauce behind Google Wave" (via onGWT), Gartner Analyst Ray Valdes analyzes OT (Operational Transform), the algorythm that Google Wave uses for doing real-time synchronous editing of a document and conversation in Google Wave. 

He did a pretty complete article on the subject, but what is even more interesting for me and XWiki is that he picked up WOOT the algorythm developped by INRIA which is what XWiki Concerto uses at it's core to replicate Wiki on a P2P network. Actually XWiki uses Wooto, and optimized version of WOOT (explained in the PDF here: http://www.inria.fr/rrrt/rr-5580.html)

This is quite cool to see that a similar technology is used in Google Wave. It is very nice to see an implementation on the client side, especially if they publish it as open source as it seems intended. 

Seeing Google pick up the need to work at the same time on Wiki style documents and work on conversations at the same time and all this in real-time is great. In the last few years we have worked on multiple technologies to enable this:

• our new XWiki GWT based editor released in XWiki 1.8/1.9 (see in the XWiki 1.9 screencast) which provides quality editing and a plugin architecture allowing to plug-in real time synchronisation, which we have done with an experimental Sync Plugin which we demoed here.
• XWiki Concerto our P2P and Mobile Wiki Research project which uses WOOT to perform Wiki replication.
• XWiki Annotations which allow to comment inline (which are part of the Scribo research project we are working on).
• Integration of Instant messaging in the Wiki for which there is a Google Summer of Code project.

All these principles are also there in Google Wave, and we look forward to see the open-source code to see how we can join the effort and connect our technologies to the technologies and protocols that Google has developped. 

Google Wave seems to be a great individual productivity tool which allows to launch and run conversations and integrate more than just messages but documents and application inside the conversation. Now we believe that Wikis have a very big role to play in the mix, as they are needed to really organize the information in the Way the team wants to interact with it. Waves should be inserted and published inside a Wiki so that newcomers can navigate in them in them and that everybody in the team can view the content's organization in the same way. It will be very exciting to see how we can integrate the discussion flow in the process of creating share knowledge.

Picasa Face Matching: the hidden son of Lenine

I'm testing Picasa for Mac and therefore also Picasa Web Albums. I've started using the face recognition feature which is quite fun. \

I have a breakthroug discovery to share with you. Thanks to Picasa face recognition matching two photos, we have found the hidden grand-grand-grand-son of Lenine. \
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And this guy has been working at XWiki for almost 3 years now, and we had not noticed anything. Isn't technology great ?