I got invited to the Google Wave alpha the other day, and while it has almost everything it needs to supplant email, IM and facebook and everything else (aside from a critical mass of users, of course), it is lacking one thing at this early stage: a way to make my computer flash, ping, burp or otherwise inform me of new waves – pretty vital if it’s to replace IM or even push email.

Enter: Waveboard.

Waveboard is a site-specific-browser (SSB) that loads up wave.google.com/wave, so the experience is exactly the same as in your regular web broswer (sort of, more on that later). Once it’s loaded it can badge its dock icon, trigger a Growl event, or colourise its menu bar icon to let you know there are new waves or blips that might merit your attention.

It’s early days yet – Wave itself isn’t even ready for public consumption – so it’s quite excusable that Waveboard is missing some stuff I’d expect. The ability to make sounds is a key one, since pings, waves and new blips in a wave are all subtly different events and it would be nice to tell them apart audibly.

One nice feature is that it re-maps some of the keyboard shortcuts to more mac-like ones – to finish editing a blip in Waveboard you no longer type shift-return, but command-return, and bolding text is done with command-B. Smooth stuff.

I have reservations about SSBs – browsers are prone to running off with all your RAM if you leave one open long enough, and this is essentially a site-restricted browser that you would want to leave open all the time. That said, Wave seems to behave faster under Waveboard than in Safari 4, even animating transitions which just change immediately under S4. It uses less memory too, just about.

A surfeit of clients is going to be vital to Wave’s take-up, so it’s nice to see one available so soon. I can only hope that someone from the delicious generation will take up the challenge and make a truly mindblowing desktop client. And maybe an iPhone app that supports push, while they’re at it?

Overheard on the bus to Nottingham just this very second:

And he was like “I’ve not got a condom” and I was like “I don’t care!” and he was like “I’ll get you pregnant” and I was like “I don’t CARE!” and then I was like taking his trousers off and he was like “you sure you wanna do this?” and I was like “er… nooooo”. I was SO drunk!

Oh to be young and retarded again

I’ve seen a lot of commentary from people about the recent news that researches have used an actual quantum computer to factor a number. The comments have mostly been along the lines of “this is probably cool, but I really don’t understand it” and this saddens me.

As I’ve formally studied more than a little quantum physics in my time I thought it might be useful if this could be explained in simpler terms.

You know the Schrodinger’s Cat Experiment, right? You put a dead cat in a box and there’s a 50-50 chance the special properties of a radioactive isotope will bring it back to life to briefly shamble around the laboratory mewing for brains. It’s taught in primary schools these days, though the practical itself was removed from most curricula some time ago.

In this case what they’re doing is similar, but slightly different. First, you take a cat and show it a video of the above experiment so it might fully grasp the gravity of the situation. Then you put it in the box with a cryptography textbook and a number written clearly on a ruled index card. You waft in the smell of some fresh tuna and you tell it it’s only getting some when it factors the number, and until then it’s both alive and dead and hungry all at the same time. In short order you should find yourself with some prime factors and a very relieved cat.

Of course, it’s not quite so simple, because crypto researchers have been doing this for years with lab-sized apparatus. The real breakthrough of this discovery is that this team has shrunk the cat, the box, the aroma of tuna and the crypto textbook down to the size where it can all fit on a silicon chip and be attached to a regular computer. No doubt soon every mobile phone will have one, allowing two thirds of the world’s population to straddle the barrier between life and afterlife on their weekly commute.