Sean’s Mental Walkabout

• The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You | Cracked.com
  yes, platipus can kill you
  (tags: cool science nature funny)

Popularity: 26% [?]

• Linksys.com - Products/Wireless/Entertainment/Music, Picture, and Video Links/DMA2100
  If I could sort out if there was a way to use this without Windows, I’d pick it up in a heart beat. Hardware vendors tying their appliances to Vista is really brain dead.
  (tags: linksys mce)

Popularity: 27% [?]

Unfortunately no one has made ubuntu packages yet, however here is a script that I built based on Dirk’s post to automate mono 1.9 installation onto Ubuntu environments.

#!/bin/sh

# This is needed to pick up our built mono for commands
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH 

apt-get install build-essential bison gawk
apt-get install libglib2.0-dev
apt-get install libpng12-dev libx11-dev libfontconfig1-dev
apt-get install libfreetype6-dev libjpeg62-dev libtiff4-dev
apt-get install libungif4-dev libexif-dev libcairo2-dev
apt-get install libpango1.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libglade2-dev
apt-get install libgnome2-dev libgnomecanvas2-dev libgnomeui-dev
apt-get install libgnomeprint2.2-dev libgnomeprintui2.2-dev
apt-get install libpanel-applet2-dev libgtksourceview-dev
apt-get install libgtkhtml3.14-dev

BUILDDIR=~/mono-build
mkdir -p $BUILDDIR
cd $BUILDDIR

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/libgdiplus/libgdiplus-1.9.tar.bz2
tar xvf libgdiplus-1.9.tar.bz2
cd libgdiplus-1.9
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/mono/mono-1.9.1.tar.bz2
tar xvf mono-1.9.1.tar.bz2
cd mono-1.9.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..

wget http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nant/nant-0.86-beta1-src.tar.gz
tar xvf nant-0.86-beta1-src.tar.gz
cd nant-0.86-beta1
make install --prefix=/usr/local
cd ..

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/gtk-sharp210/gtk-sharp-2.10.4.tar.bz2
tar xvf gtk-sharp-2.10.4.tar.bz2
cd gtk-sharp-2.10.4
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/gnome-sharp2/gnome-sharp-2.16.1.tar.gz
tar xvf gnome-sharp-2.16.1.tar.gz
cd gnome-sharp-2.16.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/gtksourceview-sharp2/gtksourceview-sharp-2.0-0.12.tar.bz2
tar xvf gtksourceview-sharp-2.0-0.12.tar.bz2
cd gtksourceview-sharp-2.0-0.12
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..

cd mono-1.9
wget  http://go-mono.com/sources/monodoc/monodoc-1.9.zip
unzip monodoc-1.9.zip
cd monodoc-1.9
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ../..

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/mono-tools/mono-tools-1.9.tar.bz2
tar xvf mono-tools-1.9.tar.bz2
cd mono-tools-1.9
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..

wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mono-debugger/mono-debugger-0.60.tar.bz2
tar xvf mono-debugger-0.60.tar.bz2
cd mono-debugger-0.60
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..

wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/heap-buddy/heap-buddy-0.2.tar.gz
tar xvf heap-buddy-0.2.tar.gz
cd heap-buddy-0.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..

wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mono-addins/mono-addins-0.3.1.tar.bz2
tar xvf mono-addins-0.3.1.tar.bz2
cd mono-addins-0.3.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..

wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/monodevelop/monodevelop-1.0.tar.bz2
tar xvf monodevelop-1.0.tar.bz2
cd monodevelop-1.0
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..

Popularity: 53% [?]

• security.itworld.com - Gone in 2 minutes: Mac gets hacked first in contest
  I’m always amused that Macs seem to fold first on things like these.
  (tags: apple security)
• Adobe Photoshop Express
  The #1 complaint in our LUG for an app lacking on Linux is photoshop. If photoshop is moving to the web as a flash app, that changes a lot of things.
  (tags: photos software linux web2.0 photoshop adobe)
• Slashdot | Amazon EC2 Now More Ready for Application Hosting
  EC2 seems to have gotten an upgrade in features. I still need to sort out something useful to do with my EC2 account.
  (tags: ec2 amazon hosting aws)
• NVIDIA drivers responsible for nearly 30% of Vista crashes in 2007 - Engadget
  NVIDIA #1, MS #2 in crashing Vista.
  (tags: funny windows vista)
• Linode Blog » Linodes in Xen
  linode fully converting to Xen for hosting. Nifty
  (tags: xen linode hosting)

Popularity: 28% [?]

I just did the upgrade of my linode (which hosts mhvlug.org, planet opensim, dague.org, and a few other sites) to Xen. I had put in the request to join the beta for Xen a couple weeks ago, got in, and was slow on my side to actually kick off the migration (which was painless, but required about an hour of down time). It turns out that all of linode is now going to Xen. Based on very simple latecy tests, the box feels much snappier on serving up wiki pages.

Popularity: 38% [?]

• 260 - You’ll Never Moonwalk Alone « Strange Maps
  really cool map of the walking paths on the moon
  (tags: map visualization science)
• Mercurial 1.0 released!
  nice to see the 1.0 release for hg
  (tags: hg scm)

Popularity: 31% [?]

• DirecTV DVR clampdown: a sober reminder of DRM suckitude
  DirecTV probabably just gave Netflix a nice subscriber boot from this.
  (tags: video media drm)

Popularity: 23% [?]

• OpenOffice.org 3.0’s new features, an early look - OpenOffice.org Ninja
  The one massively missing feature in OpenOffice (tables in presentations) is finally coming in version 3.0! Can’t wait (and can’t believe I’ve been waiting this long for it).
  (tags: software openoffice)

Popularity: 22% [?]

After a bit of playing around with gtkmorph tonight, I came up with this morph between myself and my Second Life avatar Neas Bade. I haven’t quite figured out where I’m going to use this yet, but it seemed like something handy to have. I need to actually replicate my avatar shape into the various OpenSim environments that I use, which I haven’t gotten around to yet, but will soon.

Popularity: 26% [?]

I was just lucky enough to be a participant in the Open Source, IP and Privacy in Virtual Worlds Life 2.0 panel in Secondlife. I would have to say being on the floor with such incredibly big names as Zero Linden, Eben Moglen, and Zha Ewry was rather humbling, even if I know Zha pretty well in real life. All of them have incredible thoughts on the space, and I personally learned quite a bit through the panel. An additional thought occurred to me after the panel, which isn’t all that fleshed out, but worth at least jotting down (I’m sure I’ll have a few more of these random thoughts over the next few days).

Freedom to Leave in Virtual Worlds

Eben talked very eloquently on the two powers provided by participants in an environment: Voice and Exit. While we explored both of them on the panel, something occurred to me is that Exit is really not all that possible today in any Virtual World sense. You can decide not to participate, but you don’t really have the freedom to leave.

“freedom to leave”, an open-standards based assurance that users can move their data easily between interoperable platforms and services.

Today, if you decide to leave any virtual world platform (even OpenSim), you pretty much have to leave you data behind. I think that one of the features people will be looking for in the virtual worlds of tomorrow is the same freedom to leave that they get from any standard web or mail infrastructure provider today. Part of what has made Google successful in the application hosting space is by ensuring it’s easy to leave the platform.

One of the biggest reasons I left LiveJournal was that it was hard to leave, and the longer I built up content in that environment, the harder it was going to be for me to get it out.

Popularity: 25% [?]