There is a windows nuisance which seems to be getting nearer crisis point.

These are overheads, or if you like computer maintenance, which comprises of several wasteful mechanisms which sap you computer productivity, speed, responsiveness and your personal time.

What I’m talking about is everything on your system that isn’t core to your service. There’s always been this in effect in various ways. For example, boot up, shutdown, time to launch an application etc.

But now we have a whole new layer. It all started with antivirus updates and Windows update which were at least loosely useful. They became automated, mostly because the majority of computer users would never update unless it was automated.

But then everything else jumped on the bandwagon. MS Office updates. Silverlight! I didn’t even install Silverlight yet there it is pooped on my Windows system. Windows media updates, what a joke! Windows media has stunk for perhaps a decade now. And windows updates is excruciatingly slow.

And it isn’t just Microsoft, no. Quicken and Google and Abode and you name it have updates galore too. Even games do it. It’s not just updates, it’s the advertising, the known and unknown info passed back via the net, the forms and permissions and terms of agreement and read the privacy document first. How about discovering the hard way the program only runs in admin mode. ‘Error 412, Would you like Microsoft to try and find a solution to the problem?’ We all know how hard they try. It is indeed very trying. How about the User Account Control (UAC)? It ensures installing something takes much longer and locks up your system more than the installation process itself. And that’s not even including the never ending permission prompts.

Then there’s the need for antivirus, anti rootkit, anti trojan, link blockers and spam canners. Defragmentation which takes hours, cleanups for files and sloppy registry entries.

All in all there so much superfluous rubbish in Windows it’s no wonder Linux is so much faster. It’s not just the software it’s the focus on getting things done rather than making money from the masses.

Linux does have some of these issues too but on the whole it’s not near crisis and each problem is better managed. So what I want done gets done. On Windows the capacity to do what I want is hampered by amazing levels of inefficiency.

I got an invite from a friend and I am indeed thrilled to get a look at it. If you are one of the extremely lucky people who have escaped the hype and know nothing about Google Wave, allow me to corrupt you.

Google Wave is a new communication tool;

Real time – what you see is updated as people type. Yes you can actually see the text inserted etc. Which makes for great visibility of your spelling errors but also helps the free flow of communication.

Collaborative – built from the ground up to let you work together with people to cocreate.

Embeddable – much like YouTube videos you can insert them anywhere. For example into a blog. I might even try that. It can also have stuff embedded into it like photos, videos and also;

Extensions – Like FireFox, Google Wave has extensions you can add in to make the experience as feature rich as you like. There’s aren’t many yet but I’m sure it will balloon. I’ve seen suduko, a simple poll, Google maps and conferencing

Another way to look at it is to compare with other communication tools. Despite what Google might claim it’s not really anothing new. What is new is that it has taken to best feature from many online communication tools such as email, twitter, instant messaging (MSN), facebook, etc

Now that I’ve actually seen it, I remain excited. It’s going to be a the huge improvement I had hoped it would be. It will replace many communication forms. Time will tell which ones but email at least.

It’s layout is similar to email. There’s contacts you can drag to add to waves (think of them as enhanced email message threads). The waves are sorted by search, folder or inbox, for example. For now Google Wave is preview and terribly unstable with large waves which have many people involved and ‘blips’ which are pieces added to the wave. It seems to run better on Chrome as one would expect.

I see it becoming a common collaborative tool and intend to use it as such myself.

Google Wave is grossly overhyped but only in the marketing mememe sense.. The sheer number of people who want it without having much clue what it actually does is staggering. The content is solid and not overhyped. The waves are coming.

In approximately 2 hours it will be time for a minute of silence.

Today we remember the fallen of World War I. It’s Remembrance Day here and in other Commonwealth Nations. We observe silence for 1 minute at 11AM on this 11th day of the 11th month, and ‘The Last Post’ is played.

Remembrance Day also has services around the country usually at war memorials and serves as a reminder of the sacrifice the soldiers during WW1 which ended in 1918 on this date. It’s not a holiday but it is widely observed. It’s less about the right or wrong of WW1 or war in general and more about the sacrifices made by diggers and others during that awful war.

I’m sure I’m not the only one struggling with the maintenance of an enormous internal database of passwords. Well… enormous by human standards.

I don’t know about you but I have passwords for a gaggle of online games, passwords for even more social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Some for Linux and Windows Admin. There’s forums, emails, the ISP, my host, MSN, Google Everything, the banks, wikis, everywhere you turn they want your details and a login.

As they say; “Please sir, may I be excused? My brain is full.”

Of course, the main reason for passwords is to provide a barrier to the hoi polloi which they have oh so graciously allowed you to get past. More and more often, especially nowadays, it is an excuse to grab your details for marketing.

Have you come across this scene before? Upon revisiting a website you joined oh a few months ago.. or something.. to check up, you have to enter your username and password… and you stare. Now whatwasitagain? Something with a ‘t’? Did it begin with an ‘s’? Oh I can’t even remember the username…..

It is here you go for the backup plan. Maybe, god forbid, you shared the password with actual humans and ask them whatiswasagain. Perhaps you trawl through an army of emails, a little black book of supa sekrit passwords. Failing that there’s always the dreaded ‘forgot your password’ link.

I’m sure most readers here know the importance of relatively long complex passwords. Which means upper and lower case, numbers, as well as avoiding common words, girlfriend’s names and your date of birth.

There are solutions to this dilemma of course. All of them half baked.

1. You can use one of the plethora of software password (and often form) automaters. Kubuntu has one builtin called kWallet. Meh. Many internet toolbars also have one.

Of course the problem with this is you often need a master password, though one is better than many, need to very much trust the software, and toolbars are often not high on the trustworthy scale. There’s also the possibility that you might loose access to it for some reason and there goes all your access to everything else.

2. Most browsers have a password storage system similar to the above which is probably not terribly secure from any perspective but I suspect used heavily, especially for passwords which aren’t too important.

3. Some people use a ditty. It can be as silly as you like as long as it results in a complex password. Let’s see if I can make one up on the fly.

‘we All 8 more icecream when 3.’ which would go as wA8micw3. Which is probably ok. Don’t use this example. Really.

The extended problem is that instead of passwords cramming up our internal database we’d have a plethora of ditties instead. It’d be enough to turn you into Patsy Biscoe.

4. A fairly new and very hopeful idea of OpenID. Basically this involves registering yourself under OpenID standards. Much like a software password automater, you then have a master password to access it. You then get your OpenID which is effectively a website address. To use it you simply pop the OpenID into the login for your desired website and it then talks to the OpenID where you give it access to the details you want

There are quite a few benefits. You’re less likely to loose access to your OpenID, you don’t have to enter a username and password, just the OpenID. OpenID can give your details with your permission to an enabled website during a registration which makes for fast and easy signups.

The other interesting thing is that you may already have an OpenID if you use one of the many social networking sites such as Myspace, Google, Blogger or Flickr. For OpenID is a standard usable by anyone and you can even host your own OpenID if you know a bit about webhosting.

The main problem is that not all websites with passwords are OpenID enabled.

So there’s no easy way out but there are things that can help. There’s also a silver lining to all this technochange, we’ve had a significant reprieve from the telephone number database required in the past thanks to phone memory. Of course, then loosing the phone can mean social disaster.

When you want to explore ideas it’s often useful to use a graphical form. Because though text has flexibility and is often easier to create our minds seem to absorb graphics elements more easily. An obvious example is the conversion of reams of data into pretty graphs. It is in this graphical format that trends are primarily conveyed to the wider world.

Though I’ve known about MindMaps for quite some time I’ve not paid them much attention and haven’t played aroudn with them till recently. MindMaps are an interesting way to explode central ideas into its many fragments in a way that combines text and graphical elements. This is immensely useful. One of the core elements of Engineering is problem solving and one of the core elements of that is breaking things down into manageable pieces. So MindMaps are really good at working through ideas.

A problem with MindMaps is that it lacks sufficient flexibility to link one node to any other node the way you like. Naturally there are some solutions.

Concept maps is one of them. Cmaps, as they are known, lets me make make nodes and link them however I like. The only issue with Cmaps so far is you have to move elements manually which could be a real pain with large Cmaps. I am playing with these things and will let you all know how it works out once a have a bit more experience with them.

In the meantime here’s a nice mindmap about mindmapping software.