opensim:viewer:development [MJM Labs Wiki]
Nice, and opensim retargetted secondlife viewer! It even defaults to osgrid for login.
Git, the Frugal Project’s Repository | Times New Rohan
Good setup instructions
Popularity: 4% [?]
UgoTrade » Blog Archive » Realizing the Potential of Virtual Worlds: Why and How to Support OpenSim
Really good article on OpenSim and OSGrid. Tish does a great job of explaining a lot of different efforts that have been spun off of the base project.
Popularity: 2% [?]
YouTube - Newtonian N Body OpenSim Demo
Really cool thing you can do with OpenSim by replacing the physics engine.
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Schneier on Security: Homeland Security Cost-Benefit Analysis
queued for weekend reading
Opensim Users
OpenSim Users social network started on Ning. Very cool.
Popularity: 3% [?]
IBM Moves Into the Virtual World
OpenSim gets a mention in a Motley Fool article. Nice.
‘At home Manekshaw was far away from an Army chief’ - ExpressIndia.Com
My friend Jehan features promiently in this article about the passing of his grandfather, India’s first 5 star general.
Uncertain Principles: Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy, by Randy Olson
Going to need to check this out
Larry Lessig says the law is strangling creativity | Video on TED.com
Really great talk
Slashdot | Second Life Faces Open Source Challenges
Nifty, OpenSim made slashdot
Popularity: 4% [?]
If you are in the San Francisco area in early August, I’ll be giving a presentation on OpenSim at the Linux World Conference. Our local linux users group got a preview of that talk this past week. For the talk I started up an OpenSim instance on my laptop and let everyone with wireless and a capable video card connect to it, with much hilarity ensuing. It worked so well, that I’m definitely going to include that portion in my talk at Linux World.
If you are going to be around there, let me know. I’d also love to meet up with OpenSim folks in the SF area during my trip out.
Popularity: 21% [?]
I’ve been thinking a lot about the way the implementation of SecondLife has created a very specific culture in that environment. One of the issues SecondLife is currently having in expanding scope, is that culture makes some things easy, some things hard, and other things impossible. The technology is never impossible, but meeting the needs of the residents of can be. I’m going to start posting some of these “what if” bits on the technology here under the opensim and secondlife tags, please feel free to jump in and discuss.
The Permissions System
The SecondLife permissions system is a curious thing:
The model provides the ability to let people create modifiable, but un resellable goods, or prevents a good from propagating. What it doesn’t really do though is encourage Creative Commons content. Most creators that create “full perms” objects, find that someone takes a copy removes some of the permissions, then sells it elsewhere.
There has been a lot of arguments that a CC model for content creation can’t work on grid scale, but I don’t think it’s been given a fair shake. If you really wanted to try this experiment, you’d need another bit (at least one more) which was:
Doing so would let you put content into the environment that has the Modify / Copy / Transfer bits enabled, and no down stream person could turn them off. “I gave away this thing, and want it to be part of the commons. Anyone can have it, but also has to keep it in the commons.” To support this kind of model building content on the main grid, Linden could even remove the upload cost for NDP content, making it a richer world for all.
The recent trend to do public works projects in SecondLife, paid for by the Lindens, means there is definitely some need for a commons space. Perhaps expanding the permissions model to keep free content free would do some of this on it’s own.
Popularity: 24% [?]
Mo Hax and I have started a weekly effort to gather up some of the IBM internally created OpenSim / Second Life content and contribute it to OpenSim as stock content. As OpenSim approaches the 0.6 release, it would be good to have some more reasonable stock content included for those people that aren’t Second Life Heads, and have huge inventories of their own stuff sitting on their disks. The results of week one was a single handshake animation, and a lot of understanding on how our stock content system works, and how it should be changed to make it easier to contribute to it.
Yesterday, in between builds and meetings, I decided to refactor a few LSL scripts I had that used unique OSL functions that let you dynamically create textures on objects, both from text drawing commands, and from images of the internet. Those are all now in the OpenSim Library, and accessible for anyone in world. They are under the same license as OpenSim, so do what you will with them. 
(Note: I’ve found the client caches the inventory trees, so you’ll need to clear cache before they show up.)
The scripts contributed yesterday are as follows:
Consider all of these as launch points to more complex things. But, they’ll at least give people a flavor of what is possible. And you’ll get it with every opensim build.
Popularity: 17% [?]
A new open source project has shown up on the horizon that makes it easy to add USGS data to OpenSim. For those that have been longing this, check out this email to get you started.
Below is Ithica New York, in OpenSim:
Popularity: 12% [?]
In secondlife sculpties only collide on bounding boxes, which make them really only suitable for visuals, not for part of complex builds. Due to some early work done by Teravus this week, that’s no longer true for OpenSim. We’re now creating a tri-mesh collision surface for sculpties and passing that into our physics engine. This code is young (only a week old), but you can see a demo of results below.
Sculptie Physics on OpenSim from Dahlia Trimble on Vimeo.
Popularity: 16% [?]
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