How to : Google Wave

Yes, Google wave is a significant improvement over email and I’m glad to be having it already.

Whenever a person opens Wave for the first time, he is greeted by a 2 minute video of Dr. Wave who gives a brief explanation of what wave is about. When I compare that with the welcome email I got when I first signed up for Yahoo! Mail, I’ve already watched technology come a long way.

For those who are not familiar with Google Wave, I’d like to recommend a few excellent articles.
1. Mashable’s Google Wave : A complete guide
2. Mashable’s The top 6 game changing features of Google Wave
3. http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-wave-review-first-impressions.html
4. Google’s own guide
5. List of Robots for Wave

There is even a Firefox addon, here.

Now briefly, let me write down a few things that are absolutely simplistic about wave – rephrazing Google’s own wave on wave.

1. Like you use gmail to send emails, you use wave to create and edit waves.
2. Think of a wave as document that you create and the document is available in a sever somewhere for another person to see.
3. You cant edit an email after you’ve sent it. But a wave is sitting there so that it can be edited any time. So hypothetically, you could have just one wave per person and keep on editing it to add more content. One wave can thus be equivalent to multiple emails.
4. Wave represents a closed set of users. Whatever is created remains within the closed set of users. A person who doesnt have a wave account, cannot send a email to a wave account.
5. A wave can be both a document and a conversation.
6. Like recipients for email, you have participants for wave. All participants on a wave can edit any part of the wave, at the same time.
7.  A wave can have blips in it. A wave with blips is a rough equivalent of an email thread. To quickly read through unread blips in a wave, hit the spacebar.
8. You can have your own wave profile to help to help your contacts recognize you on a wave.
9. You can use the playback feature lets to move through the history of a wave. Awesome!
10. Extensions let you add rich content and interactions to waves, or integrate with other systems.
11. To attach a file to a wave, start in edit mode. Then either:
* Click the paperclip and select the file from your desktop or
* To drag and drop right from the desktop into a wave, install Gears in your browser.
12. Google Wave’s spelling correction uses the context of your message to correct your spelling.
13. You can remove waves from your inbox in two main ways:
* Archive: takes a wave out of your inbox until someone updates it
* Mute: takes a wave out of your inbox unless someone adds a private reply to you
You can always find these waves again by searching for them.
14. Tags are an easy way participants can share organization of waves. Any participant can add or remove a tag.
15. You can create folders to organize your waves.

So there are the basics. Happy waving!

WP-Hive upgrade prevents WordPress login

I upgraded the wp-hive plug-in to version 0.5 earlier today. It wasn’t an active plugin for me and I needn’t have upgraded it. But I did it earlier today and didn’t think twice about it.

Later, I found out that I could not login into WordPress as an administrator. Everything else seemed to be working fine. Site was up and running as usual, but I couldn’t access my dashboard.

When I checked the WordPress database through phpMyAdmin the wp_options table was perfect. I was soon able to figure out that this was not a WordPress problem.

So I started troubleshooting by trying to undo my last set of actions, one of which was upgrading the wp-hive plugin. Renaming the wp-hive folder gave an serious error and brought the site down. With that I was able to narrow down the problem to the file

/wp-contents/db.php

I remmed out the line

/*require_once( WP_CONTENT_DIR . ‘/plugins/wp-hive/do-prefix.php’);
*/

Everything is back to normal for me now because I dont use wp-hive.

I didn’t find anything about this problem in Google, so I decided to write this down.

How to: Carry Wikipedia content on a USB pen drive

This instruction is meant for Windows users.

You’ll need atleast a 16 GB pendrive to carry Wikipedia.

Method 1 : Easy method
For those who are not willing to go through a lot of pain in learning new things, this is the simpler method

1. First download the latest content from Wikipedia. This is a single file of size 5.1 GB as on today and downloading could take hours.
2. The latest dump is presently at http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2. Copy the downloaded .bz2 file to, say C:\wikipedia.
3. After this 5.1 GB download is complete, it is necessary to download the software that can read this huge file.
4. The simplest is wikitaxi. Download Wikitaxi and unzip to the same folder, C:\wikipedia
5. You should see two executable files now. The wikitaxi executable is the one that should be used to run wikipedia. The wikitaxi importer executable is the one we need to use to convert the .bz2 file downloaded into a .taxi file.
6. Run the wikitaxi importer executable and let it convert the .bz2 file into a .taxi file. This takes a long time and produces a single 9.2 GB file with a .taxi extension.
7. Once .taxi file is made run the wikitaxi executable and open the .taxi file. You should be able to browse  the content of wikipedia, but with a slightly different look.
8. Now copy the C:\wikipedia folder to a pendrive and you have a portable version for personal reference.

Method 2: For the geeks
You probably don’t need to read this, but the best way is to clearly to host the entire content on the same platform that Wikipedia does.

1. Install XAMPP on a pen drive
2. Install Mediawiki on XAMPP
3. Download the latest Wikipedia dump
4. Import the dump to Mediawiki.

Voila! You have the portable and perfect replica of Wikipedia.