Sean’s Mental Walkabout

Virtual Worlds News: Video: IBM Takes Lotus Sametime into 3D with OpenSim
Now public, even with a you tube video

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Technology Review: A Bridge between Virtual Worlds
OpenSim in MIT Technology Review

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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.

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5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G - Free Software Foundation
Good things to highlight. I’ve never been an apple fan because of their really strong DRM push.

An introduction to git-svn for Subversion/SVK users and deserters
Really extensive write up on git-svn usage patterns

Git - SVN Crash Course
git for svn users

David Silverman - About Typo
Sent to me by a friend of a friend. I need to check out some of the excerpts this weekend.

Scramblings
doing C# bindings on Linux

KODAK Theatre HD Player Features and Benefits
This could be cool, except if they fully did away with an IR remote. I don’t care out innovative your remote is, if I can’t use my logitech harmony your device is useless to me.

BBC hires IBM guru for its foray into virtual worlds | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Roo has been a great pleasure to work with, the BBC is very luck to have snagged him from us.

Slashdot | RHN Bind Update Brings Down RHEL Named
Ah, it’s going to be a funny day on the internet

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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

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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:

• No modify
• No copy
• No transfer

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:

• No drop permissions

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.

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Will your next meeting pass the “blizzard goggles” test? - (37signals)
I need to start doing this a lot more. Meetings suck off way to much actual productive time.

Obama/Clinton support visualizer that rocks - (37signals)
Ok, I’ll stop linking in 37 signals blog posts soon, but it’s impressive how much good stuff is in this backlog. This is a brilliant visualization tool.

Workplace Experiments - (37signals)
It’s reasons like this that while everyone wants to become google, google wants to become 37signals (and I really wish I still had that graphic around somewhere).

Cooking For Engineers - Step by Step Recipes and Food for the Analytically Minded
The cook charts are just amazing. I’m going to have to check out a few more things on here.

“You have to treat your employees like customers” - (37signals)
In an era where most of a companies actual resource is it’s people, this hits the nail on the head

Dunning-Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge (or skill) tend to think that they know more (or have more skill) than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less.”

Public Speaker - ActiveWiki
Seriously? Active worlds users only get to hear the 50 closest people to them?

Phusion Passenger™ 2.0 RC 1 and Ruby Enterprise Edition released « Phusion Corporate Blog
Interesting, they also support django now. Passenger is definitely a great piece of software.

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