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Whisher and a Catch-22

Yesterday I downloaded Whisher, the brand-spanking new wlan community thingy, and tried to set up an account. It didn’t work, which I blamed on my advanced state of tiredness.

So I tried again today. Even got as far as entering the WEP key for my router. But when I tried to login, the login screen told me there “might not be an internet connection available”. Strange! My router showed up on the list with a whole bunch of green bars, which according to the step-by-step setup meant it was connected to the internet. I tried to login anyway, and sure enough the system told me the login failed. Sometimes it also told me my password was wrong.

After a couple attempts I gave up and decided to ask for help in the Whisher blog.

Guess what: You have to be logged in to comment on the blog! So I try that using the login details I just set up in the Whisher application, but apparently the site doesn’t know me yet because I haven’t been able to use the Whisher application to create an internet connection, which is why I’m trying to ask for help in the first place.

Naturally there is no way to register on the website. You have to register through the Whisher application.

OK. So I moved over to the whisher forum to ask for help there.

You guessed it: I have to be logged in to post about not being able to connect whisher to the internet. Login, of course, only being possible after having managed to connect Whisher to the internet, in which case I wouldn’t need to leave a message asking for help about connecting the application to the internet in the first place.

A classic. Catch-22 at its best. I think I’ll pounce the next best Whisher guys I locate at LIFT, where they are apparently sponsoring the WLAN. Good luck with that!

An afterword: I might sound thoroughly frustrated and fed up with Whisher. Not true! The whole situations is actually quite entertaining, not as entertaining as Catch-22 the book, but close. I bet it’s a great tool once I manage to use it, and I expect the LIFT conference rooms to be full of Whishers having a whole lot of fun. So here’s to The Eternal Beta and The Premature Launch! Web 2.0, I love you!

3 Comments

  1. Laurent wrote:

    I’ve had a similar experience, it seems like Whisher needs a bit of polishing, especially on the mac version. The LIFT sponsoring will be a non-intrusive one: you’ll get free wifi without being forced to use whisher. But Ferran and his team would like to propose all LIFTers to test the product, and give them some precious feedback to take things forward

    Saturday, February 3, 2007 at 01:00 | Permalink
  2. Ferran wrote:

    Hi Matthias,

    Regarding the blog&forums you are completely right, we apologize. We are small and the last 3 days couldn’t cope with all issues on the plate. I hope in a couple of hours they will be up and running.

    Regarding the problems you have to create an account and log in, may I ask you to give me more details about your operating system so that I can help you?

    Regards,

    Saturday, February 3, 2007 at 01:00 | Permalink
  3. Matthias wrote:

    @Laurent, thanks for the info, I’m testing I’m testing :-).

    @Ferran, thank you. I can imagine you’re all working like crazy. I’m on a MacBook, running Mac OS X Version 10.4.8. And wouldn’t you believe it, I just fired up Whisher… and it connected! So far, so good. Whisher crashed when I tried to register my access point, but I tried again and it worked. Now all I need is more whishers in the neighbourhood :-)

    Saturday, February 3, 2007 at 09:31 | Permalink