Google WAVE is a gonner

No wonder Google pulled the plug on this. It was a confusing service to understand why to use it… let’s face it when you are thinking in about collaboration online you are looking for whiteboards with the use of voice and screen sharing. Editing documents online where you can text while editing, just didn’t make sense.

Anyway, more details on the un-plug:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704017904575409873762885194.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

How to solve the disapearance from the applications bar / menu from Xubuntu 9.10

For the first time today I have got a small issue that was painful to solve.

It’s quite hard to walk around on Xubuntu when you just can’t see the application bar and don’t have many shortcuts on Desktop to help you out.

Here is the situation:

- Pidgin Msgr or any other application suddenly stopped and forced the system to a lock.
- Forcing a reboot is necessary
- After successful reboot and logon, all you can see is the desktop icons. No application bar, no applications menu, nothing.

How to solve:

1. Open Terminal – if you don’t have it opened, click with the right click of the mouse on desktop and you will see as one of the options the terminal.

2. Now check if your applications menu, XFCE is running:

pgrep -l xfce4-panel

2.1 If there was something there, then you would see something as:

5535 xfce4-panel

2.2 Only do this next step if you have XFCE running

xfce4-panel --exit

3. Backup the configuration just to be safe:

cp ~/.config/xfce4/panel/panels.xml ~/panels.xml.old

4. Remove the old file

rm ~/.config/xfce4/panel/panels.xml

5. Now you can either do 2 things:

Run the applications menu from terminal and whenever you close the terminal so the applications menu will be closed
Add a launcher on desktop (recommended)

If you are going to run the applications menu from the terminal, then all you need to do is:

xfce4-panel

Now adding the launcher is a bit easier and whenever this happens again, you can simply click on the launcher on desktop.
Right click on an empty space on desktop and choose launcher. For the name and command you will need to enter:

xfce4-panel

Choose an icon to identify it (if you want to) and your application shortcut is ready. Double click on it and the menu should automatically appear up top.
Note: most of these steps where given by K.Mandla at 

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=312394