In order to get my feet wet with Google’s Chrome OS (in it’s current developer build state, Chromium OS properly) and test a real world workflow with this “web only” device I figured I’d put together a blog post with some photos courtesy my new DSLR never leaving the Chrome “browser” now grown up to an OS… let’s go.

Getting Ready

It wasn’t much of a chore to get Chromium OS up and running on my Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook, I decided to go with @hexxeh‘s build and run it directly from an SD card rather than build Chromium OS from source on my Ubuntu box for simplicity’s sake. I only had one small hiccup moving Hexxeh’s image file to the SD card in Ubuntu which was cleared up by visiting his wiki, he has instructions for loading the USB/SD card from Mac and Windows too.

Start Up

I booted from the SD card and in less than 10 seconds had a login box, wow… much quicker than my daily stand by Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Currently with most Chromium OS builds the first thing you need to do is log in as an admin user and fire up your wifi before restarting and logging in as yourself with any Google account, no problems here. Once you are logged in the Chromium logo in the top left shows you the menu screen with a nice launcher, it also loads up your GMail and other Google tools for you right off the bat.

More Than Meets the Eye

The web app I use for photos on this blog is Flickr so I fired it up and popped my memory card into the card reader not knowing exactly how a “web browser” would handle that… not to my surprise but certainly to my delight a slick little content browser popped up auto mounting my card and allowing me to view the files in what else but Chrome. Using Flickr’s uploaders on Linux in general is not the prettiest endeavor but it all worked I quickly discovered the ESC key is the key to closing full screen windows and all was well.

Conclusion

I easily fired up WordPress and threw together this post of no more than a little geek and eye candy just to see how it all held together and I would say for Chrome OS’ current young vintage that things are very well. Hardware support was awesome, no tweaking for me (some of that likely is credit to Hexxeh, thanks!), the software and its all web based workflow work well for the cloud residents like me and I think the simplicity will appeal to the current desktop bound user who’s lost files, gotten burned by viruses and simply doesn’t have time to understand all the bells and whistles those boxes are now full of…

…I didn’t miss semi-transparent flying minimizing windows or things “snapping” to my screen once during the writing of this post.

Browser testing is critical to any web developer, designer… really any web professional. You need to know how your users or customers are seeing your work through the multitude of browsers and devices available to them, new ones become available every day.

About a year ago I wrote a post walking you through installing the Google Android SDK on your machine to use as a mobile web browser. This time I am doing it on Mac OS X but I might just make a Windows version too if I get a little time… let me know if you’d like to see that happen.

Let’s get started…

Get the SDK…

1. Go to the Android SDK page.
2. Download Android SDK for Mac OS X (intel)
3. Unzip it and move it to the root of your home directory.

Set it up…

1. Open Terminal, enter the following commands…

   cd ~
   nano .bash_profile
   

2. Paste this into the new file, or add it if there are existing contents.

   export PATH=${PATH}:~/android-sdk-mac/tools
   

   

3. Press “Control X” and save the file.
4. Close Terminal.

Load up an Android OS…

1. Open Terminal, enter the following command…

   android

   The Android SDK and AVD Manager will open.
   

2. Choose “Available Packages”
3. Click the arrow beside “dl-ssl.google.com…”
4. Check one or more Android Platforms, I chose Android 1.6 and 2.0 for good measure you can choose whatever versions you are targeting.
5. Click “Install Selected” and then “Install Accepted”
6. Your SDK is now complete and ready to run… Stick in your Android SDK and AVD Manager let’s make a device!

Getting your virtual Android device ready…

1. Chose “Virtual Devices”
2. Click “New…”
   
3. Give your AVD a name for this tutorial I chose “default2.0″
4. Choose one of the Android platforms you downloaded in the “Target” pulldown, I chose Android 2.0.
5. Give the SD card some value, let’s say 25mb.
6. Click “Create AVD”
7. You should return back to the home screen, click your new Android AVD’s name and press “Start”
8. Success!
   

Create an icon of sorts to launch your new emulator…

1. Open Terminal, enter the following commands…

   cd ~/Desktop/
   nano Android.command
   

2. Add this command to the new file…

   emulator -scale .7 -avd default2.0
   

   

3. Press “Control X” and save the file
4. Run this final command….

   chmod 755 Android.command
   

5. Close Terminal
6. Double click on Android.command on your desktop… Success!
   

This is a test!

Below I embedded my first Wave “Hello World… I mean Wave!”… The first of many likely… let’s see what it looks like out in public… I know many of you probably can’t see it… This is a test!

UPDATE: I believe and claimed this as the first Google Wave embed in a blog outside of the Googleplex! My claim on Twitter.

For those not in Wave yet here was a screenshot from 4pm 6/3/09.

Here we go…

(click into post to see it)

I was very excited to not just attend but be a part of Google I/O 2009, Google’s annual developer conference. A Best Buy contingent of Steve Bendt, Gary Koelling and myself as well as uber developers Curtis Thompson and Thomas Bombach made the trip and were part of the Developer Sandbox.

I/O’s Key Points

The keynotes (day 1, day 2) were both great heralding Google’s confidence in the web browser centric future (woo hoo!) powered by what is possible in HTML5, open communications and collaboration systems like the introduction Google Wave and the cloud based power plant that is Google App Engine… among so much more. The whole time they hit hard their belief that developers outside their company, like the ones in the room, are the only way all this becomes possible. They left us inspired for where the web is going and future open architectures we can share versus build ourselves allowing the user, be it the end user or developer, the portability they need… great to see that becoming a reality.

Best Buy and App Engine

Best Buy was asked to come speak about App Engine and our point of view, that we have shared many times, that it projects a strong model for the future of web development that allows the creativity of a web developer to shine through and takes huge infrastructure and scalability best practices from Google and gives them to you on a sliver platter… no pagers to carry and drastically less system set-up and runtime headaches… growing into a true platform as a service not just boxes in the cloud. The Google crew shot a few videos of us, we’ll see what was smart enough to stay off the cutting room floor!

We talked to many in the Developer Sandbox, answering the question “Best Buy? Like you mean the retailer?” more times than I could count
but once we got through that relayed the message that we are out there, experimenting, trying, showing our company what is becoming possible on the web via new methods of getting things done, notably App Engine and open APIs like our own Best Buy Remix. It’s a great time to experiment even… no especially at a large company that can easily slow down as I’ve said here before…

Google App Engine and Open APIs clearly show where the web is going, the playing field is leveled… get out there and deploy those ideas you say you have scrawled on those napkins that you say are going to revolutionize the world, the tools you need to prove it are out there right now.

…these movements only further speed up rapid evolution on the web, jump in now with two feet because it’s not slowing down any time soon. Experimenting out in front is the key no matter your size.
-Ben

Act I: Bigger != Better

From the first installment: The Web Development Elves

These great little sites didn’t require a multi-million dollar creative agency. They didn’t require a creative brief. And they didn’t require a million dollar investment from a major corporate client. They just needed the curiosity, ingenuity, creativity, time, and effort of one clever tinkerer.

I really appreciate that Mike, dead on. Mike writes on the same vein I am about theses applications, it’s not the change in technology that’s critically important here it’s the openness and pervasiveness of the new tools… anyone can do this… it’s no longer just the game of big IT or big agencies.

Small websites, tools, and online services, built by independent developers will eventually dwarf the contributions of the major digital creative agencies.

Act II: Efforts playing outside influence the day job? – Benefits to Best Buy (my employer)

In the second installment: Web Development Elves II: Double Agent Mike picks up on the excellent article in the Economist “Generation Y goes to work” that mentions some of our work at Best Buy and sees:

Another Net Gener at the company cobbled together a mobile-phone version of Best Buy’s website for fun in seven days in his spare time.

Mike got in contact with me and asked… yep, he got me again… turned it into this post: Web Development Elves II: Double Agent Read the whole post, but this was his final flurry and I couldn’t agree more!

Big corporations are so used to working with big agencies on big projects that it’s difficult for them to adapt to this new way of working. Small projects. Iterative process. Limited bureaucracy. But, best of all, small budgets and limited risk.

Every corporation in the world should be seeking out this kind of embedded intelligence, and making effective use of it. Create systems for discovering these talents. Create regular rewards for employees who share these talents. And create ways for groups of employees to find each other and begin collaborating.

More and more you will find that this is how people expect to work – flexible interests, collaborative, non-hierarchical – because this is how the internet works. Adapt.

Fun stuff! …Now back to the lab…

I’m throwing this post out there that brings together the things I learned as I worked to get the free Windows 7 Public Beta running on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex via VirtualBox. Hoping this post helps those trying to do the same, in all my Google queries on these issues information was sparse… a few hours wasted on my part will hopefully save you time. This is written in a “just the facts” style and not a full “how to” but should get you where you are going avoiding some of the pot holes.

Proof it’s possible!

Tips

Getting the Install Media – Downloading ISOs

Ok, so Microsoft is having trouble serving download demand thus I tried many paths (torrents, 3rd party links, etc.) to download these multi-gigabyte files trying to avoid the rush… Don’t! Getting partial or corrupted files is rampant even from the right source. I found the cleanest path was to download through the TechNet Customer Preview pages, they don’t have near the traffic pointed to them and seemed reliable. Follow all the steps and save your key to a text file on the desktop when you get it. I suggest downloading the 32 bit version for VirtualBox use, although 64 bit is supposed to work in the latest version unless you are going to give it a ton of RAM (4GB plus) I’d just stay with 32 bit.

Second tip here… no matter how much you want to use Linux/FireFox/wget to download, I tried them all… Don’t! Follow their rules, fire up a copy of Internet Explorer however you can to download the ISOs and then copy them over a network or large flash drive back to your Ubuntu machine. The ActiveX (I know, gross…) downloader appears to have less issues corrupting files which just plain saves you time.

Getting VirtualBox Ready

Either…
You already have VirtualBox running on Ubuntu and have run a number of virtual OSs without any issues… Great!… Nope, thats what I thought… Make sure you force an upgrade to the very latest VirtualBox available, doing anything on older version causes blank screens, “Aborting” of the OS and other things that waste your time.
Or…
You are new to VirtualBox, in this instance you are probably better off, go to VirtualBox.org and grab the latest version.

Setup a new VirtualBox “machine” choose Windows Vista as the type and give it at least 1GB of RAM and 20GB of hard drive. In the network area I suggest you choose the “Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM)” adapter rather than the default, Windows 7 seems to like it better from scratch. Connect your downloaded ISO to the CDROM and it should boot from it by default. You won’t even have to ever even burn that DVD, beautiful.

Installation Bumps and Bruises

Install speed, blank screens, file expanding… Installation will be SLOW don’t shut it down and restart when you are impatient, I did that about 5 times, it is working unless the VirtualBox aborts of the installer throws errors.

Can’t find “install.wim” – Your ISO is corrupt, you are going to have to download again unfortunately please make sure you download if from Microsoft directly and via Internet Explorer and the custom downloader. I downloaded two corrupt version before I gave in and followed the rules too, thats 5+ GB of wasted time and downloaded bytes.

Virtual machine crashes and returns to Virtual Box with the status “Aborted” – For me, all these issues were due to running and old version of VirtualBox and corrupted ISOs.

I hope some of those issues I dealt with help you get you copy up an running, now go beat the tar out of it and let Microsoft know if you will be using it in the future or sticking on the Linux side of the fence.
-Ben

So lets say you are a web guy at a big mid-western corporation and you at the Web 2.0 Expo this year and pick up a handful of cool stickers, then you see folks like Scoble (Mac, PC) and everyone up in the Blogtropolus with their laptops stickered end to end… you need to use those stickers… you need to be like those valley guys… you need to show where your allliances lie and spread the word… but can you? You’ve got the standard leased HP laptop, even with the barcode right at the top formally proclaiming you as a cog in the machine.

I think you can… You just need some Responsible Corporate Laptop Stickering!

How to

Grab your Clear Contact paper (available at most general home goods stores like Target and Wal-Mart, it’s usually used for covering old cabinet shelves) and a scissors, choose a size bigger than your sticker, cut cut cut…

…place your sticker on the face of the Contact paper and cut around the sticker, peel off the paper backing and spread on your laptop cover as you like.

Ta da!

Now you have a canvas for showing off your stickers and if worse comes to worse you can peel it right off.

Re-positionable, removable you’ve got it all!

Shortly after the keynote by Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week we were treated to a talk with Clay Shirky author of Here Comes Everybody, his talk for me crystallized why the phenomenon of social interaction, sharing and co-creation is thriving on the web today and why this “little” emergent concept might just be getting started changing the world.

Thankfully the talk was captured on video by NewsBlaze.com: Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo (Video 17 minutes) and just now transcribed by Clay himself.

Foundation

Clay began foreshadowing this story with a story from the early industrial revolution as we put our collective minds and “civil surplus” to use creating libraries and museums, education for children, and electing leaders; that massive change from rural to urban and industrial ways of life taxed the minds of everyone involved… he told us the “cognitive heatsink” in that time was gin, dissipating the brain cycles and complication of changing from overwhelming our minds.

Fast forward to the 20th century as more and more of the workforce started working 8 to 5, Monday to Friday a new concept emerged… free time. With this new free time, we were taxed to figure out what to do with it. We needed to fill it… along came the new “cognative heatsink” television “dissipating thinking that may have built up and caused society to overheat”, successfully filling our time with entertaining stories and calming those pesky brain cycles as we adapted to the new way of working.

Human thought… burnt to a crisp.

Clay tells us today our “cognative heatsink” of choice, television, consumes 200 billion hours of human thought in the US alone, to put that in context Clay did some back of the envelope math that tells us the entirety of Wikipedia, all the pages, edits, talk pages, lines of code and the translation of every language is the equivalent of 100 million hours of human thought… That’s right, our “cognative heatsink” today burns about 2000 Wikipedia’s of human thought a year, in the US we spend 100 million hours (1 Wikipedia) a weekend just watching the ads.

This all builds to the premise, how do we harness this cognitive surplus and really to what magnitude could this change our society? He believes that media is a triathlon – “people like to consume but they also like to produce and they like to share”… but often we, the creators of the current web, don’t always allow or design for all three. Clay says “The interesting thing about a surplus is you don’t know what to do with them at first, you can’t… hence the sitcoms and the gin…” and that’s ok, but now that we are realizing it and there are a few good examples and experiments out there, but what are we ready to do now to put this surplus to work?

“Even a small change could have huge ramifications, lets say that everything stayed 99% the same, people watched 99% the television they used to but 1% is carved out for producing and sharing, the internet connected population watches roughly 1 trillion hours of TV a year that’s about 5 times the size of the US in terms of consumption… that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects a year work of participation… I think that’s going to be a big deal, don’t you?”

Exposing the possibility of participation.

Clay’s premise: “It’s always better to do something than do nothing…”

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan screws something up and they didn’t? I saw that one; I saw that one a lot when I was growing up.

Grown men sitting in their basements pretending to be elves [referring to World of Warcraft]… At least they were doing something!

Even Lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter by little captions, hold out a invitation to participation, when you see a Lolcat what it essentially says is if you have some san-serif fonts on your computer you can play this game too… And thats a big change, right?

I could do that too…

Building to a crescendo, what are we doing here? “We’re looking for the mouse.”

Clay tells a story from a guest at his dinner party:

“… a dad sitting with his 4 year old daughter watching a DVD, in the middle of the movie she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen… seems like a cute moment, maybe she was seeing if Dora was back there, but that isn’t what she was doing… she was rooting around and the cables, Dad said ‘What are you doing?’… she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said ‘looking for the mouse’”…

“Here’s what 4 year olds know a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken… Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for…”

“It’s also become my motto, when people ask what we [the collective industry] are doing… ‘we’re looking for the mouse’ we are going to look every place a user or reader or listener or a viewer has been locked out has been served a passive or fixed or canned experience and ask ourselves if we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus we now recognize could we make a good thing happen… I am betting we can.”

Building My Context

Clay’s story is both easily relatable to what we are seeing on the web and eye opening at the same time when you realize we haven’t even scratched the surface. The amount of time we burn off is staggering and the problems we could solve with that surplus are great. Working every day on the web we all know that Wikipedia itself along with other examples will be huge markers of our time, the level of collaboration and connectedness of the world it took to build these initiatives is unprecedented but the question always is creeping around “is this a fad?,” “who really does this stuff?,” “is this sustainable?,” “would I let those people edit my stuff? they’ll wreck it.” Clay’s story in part shows that the collective brain that is our society is looking for some exercise and genuinely wants to contribute; they need us as to open up, give up control and ask for help… to build participation and collaboration at the core of what we do and not as a bolt on non-integrated side forum to burn off their cycles.

Much of what we do, even as for profit corporations, is play in markets of quality of knowledge, quality of perspective and trust all of which could be bolstered significantly by listening and participating in an unfiltered way with any collaborator willing to pick up the mouse and keyboard. In the next projects I consult on, I promise to find a way to include “the mouse” in the box as a design goal rather than a reactionary bolt on.

Thank you Clay for the great talk…

Just returned from the Web 2.0 Expo, learned a lot, talked to and heard many smart folks talking about what is going on today on the web and where we believe it is all going. By writing this I am committing to distilling much of what I heard in order to better build my context for my work and join the conversation rather than being an observer.

Me:
Twitter
FriendFeed
Blog