A friend of mine - technically interested, but not particularly knowledgeable - asked me about Chrome OS stuff. I wrote her a short lecture in return, and thought I'd dump it here as well :)

We'll start with 'cloud computing', which is actually an appropriately nebulous term... It's been traditional for a long long time, particularly when teaching computer networking, to use a cloud in a diagram to represent "all the stuff which happens on the network between computer A and computer B" - http://www.yourdictionary.com/computer/cloud - we don't care how the communication happens between A and D, we just assume they can talk to each other. This usage has been changed a bit, in the past 5 years or so, to add the idea of *services* which live in 'the cloud' - we don't care where they are, as long as we can communicate with them over the Internet, using standard tools from anywhere. A simple example would be using gmail/hotmail/yahoo for your email, rather than an email system supplied by your employer, school or ISP. Another simple example would be Facebook - you don't know anything about how it works, you don't have any relation with them other than being a user of the service, you can access it from anywhere...

So 'cloud computing' is the idea of taking things which previously ran either on your computer, or at least on your local network, and shoving them out into the cloud. It relies on a combination of 2 or 3 technologies, which are just about available now, but weren't 5 years ago - ubiquitous broadband, standard network protocols, and, to a slightly lesser extent, cheap/ubiquitous computing.

Chrome OS is what falls out of all that, if you're Google. It's an OS designed to run on cheap portable computers (i.e. netbooks) which are always on-line (wifi or 3G) and running a standard platform called a 'web browser'. It assumes that you use Gmail in your web browser, rather than Outlook connected to an Exchange server. It assumes that you use Google Docs rather than Microsoft Office. It assumes that you stream music and even video (TV, etc.) from the web, rather than storing and playing it locally. It assumes that you're using Google talk through your browser, rather than running a local chat program. It assumes that you're doing all of this on a 'secondary' computer.

They're not claiming that you can or should run your life like this yet. What they are saying - correctly, in my opinion - is that if you are willing to trust the 'cloud services', you can move a lot of what you do online without losing very much, and gaining ubiquitous access in return. You've got a big heavy laptop... I've got a little handheld phone... they both access the same online data, to a great extent, and my phone has a longer battery life, built-in 3G, and lacks the potential for spraining my back by carrying it.

As for running Chrome OS to take a look at it, there are a couple of options. You can't run it directly on your Mac, because it only runs on netbooks, and a small specific list at that. What you can do is run it under virtualisation - same same way I, for those rare occasions when I need it - run 'Windows in a window'. VirtualBox is a virtualisation tool, which will let you run Chrome OS in a window on top of your Mac OS. Alternatively, and much more simply, just load up the Chrome browser - technically, the chromium open-source browser, which is the core of Chrome, since Chrome is still Windows-only. Chrome OS is, in essence, a modified form of the Chrome browser running on streamlined Linux OS, so if you want to know what Chrome OS looks like today, running Chrome (or chromium) will get you a lot of the way there...

Chromium is pretty usable as a browser - I've been using it as my main browser for a few weeks now, with little trouble. Chrome OS, however, is not usable yet. It's expected to be released to hardware manufacturers sometime around the spring, and be on the market latish next year.

Anyone looking to feel like a minor celeb or rock star, and who happens to be a) white and b) fat (and possibly c) male) should head to Lan Kwai Fong (henceforth LKF) on Halloween. It gets very very very busy, and you'll be pretty popular with the crowds.

For minor background: LKF is the leading nightlife district in Hong Kong - it consists of two L-shaped streets on a hill just south of Central, Hong Kong's main commercial area. The bigger of the two streets is called D'Aguilar Street, and the smaller one, which fits into the angle of the bigger L, is LKF itself. The area holds many 10s of bars, pubs, restaurants and nightclubs, is moderately busy on a random weeknight, can be very busy at the weekend (when it's pedestrianised) and insanely busy on holidays like New Year (both 'secular' and Chinese), Christmas and - yes - Halloween. It can get insanely busy enough that in 1992 a crush formed at New Year and 21 people were killed, ever since when there have been police crowd control measures on holidays.

If you were a cynic, you might ask why Halloween even features in Hong Kong, which is a largely Chinese city with a Christian minority left over from colonial days, but it has absolutely zero religious connotation here. Hong Kong is nothing if not a party town, and Halloween is the sort of party they like - dressing up, going out, special offers and decorations in shops and restaurants - and LKF is the epicenter of party life in Hong Kong. Every bar, pub and restaurant is fully-booked, and the the streets, well, they would be a crush if the police crowd control didn't calm things down slightly. As for the crowd control, it's typical of the Hong Kong police - it's reasonably effective, while still being relatively laid-back, friendly and pragmatic. In theory, once the crowd control is in action, you can only enter LKF at the bottom of D'Aguilar street (the bigger L) and leave at the top, and you will be moved through slowly and smoothly. In practice, as long as there's no trouble, they don't work too hard to move people along, and you can easily walk against the official direction. There are plenty of officers around, and I'm sure they'd tighten things up if needed, but as things weren't too mad tonight they weren't too bothered. They had recorded announcements playing in Cantonese and English (slightly randomly, quite clearly Scottish English), as LKF is a central point for expats in Hong Kong, but other than half-heartedly moving people on every now and again if knots were forming, they mainly held back and kept an eye on things.

Costumes. A small minority of the crowd (including my gf, and a friend of ours) wear 'serious' costumes, some traditional Chinese things, some pop culture (at one point, there were two rubber-suited Batmans having photos taken together) and some more traditional costumes - witches, cats, policemen/women, etc. Most of the rest of the crowd have something small, a token nod to dressing up like some horns on a headband, a bit of fake blood, or just something silly. Having worn a large foam rubber wig in the form of a quiff last year, I kept things simple this year - just a novelty oversized green bow-tie and a novelty oversized green plastic glasses frame. Also, a non-novelty oversized green(-clothed) stomach. I was asked a few times if my stomach was real, which is a little disturbing, but other than that it was pretty much the star of the show.

Everyone in the crowd has a camera. Everyone in every crowd has a camera nowadays, of course, built in to their phone, but quite a lot of people in this crowd had real cameras, from point'n'shoots, to DSLRs, to serious pro cameras, as well as cheap handheld video cameras, and one or two professional video rigs. A lot of the people who aren't in serious costumes are there to take photos of the people who are, and that's where the minor celeb feeling comes from. Standing with my gf and our friend, both of them in full-face makeup and costumes, I was at least as popular a photo target as they were. Even in Hong Kong, which genuinely has different norms for privacy and public behaviour from 'the West', it's not common for a local to approach a stranger and ask to take a photo with them, but at LKF on Halloween, it's perfectly normal. I spent maybe 2 hours standing in the street, having my photo taken, mainly with completely random strangers. Young, old, male, female, dressed-up or not, there were times when I had 2 or 3 people asking for a photo at the same time, virtually queuing to have their photo taken with me. It's quite odd, quite enjoyable in small doses, and I can imagine it would be quite infuriating if it happened all the time, wherever you went.

This is the second year I've been to LKF at Halloween with my gf - she has been going in costume for years - and I had a look around online last November, and found not only photos of her from that year, but from previous years. There's something slightly creepy about strangers publishing photos of her online, even if she does go wanting to be photographed...

Photos of the event are available on Facebook, or by request :)