“According to previous figures from Linden Lab staff, fewer than 700 of 18.1 million registered Second Life accounts ever participated in the official forums provided by the Lab. The partial closure of many of the most heavily trafficked areas of those forums when Lab announcements were migrated back out to the blog in 2006 did little to boost participation in the official forums.”
“For those using older versions of Microsoft Word, or other non-Microsoft word processing software, the new .docx format can be a real pain. It has caused dissension in some workplaces. How to cope with conflicting Microsoft Office formats.”
“The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.”
“Have you ever watched a BBQ cook-off on television, or gone to one of these live events and thought that judges at these events had the best job in the world? Well they do. However, to get one of these coveted non-paying positions you have to become a Certified BBQ Judge, and this article will show you just how easy it is to meet this requirement.”
“BuddyPress is a bundled collection of plugins and themes for creating a social network service around an installation of the popular open source blog engine WordPress MU.”
“The OpenLuna Foundation seeks to return mankind to the lunar surface, first through robotic missions, followed by manned exploration, culminating in an eight person permanent outpost, and to do all of this in a way that it is accessible to everyone. Our research and technology will be open-source, we are privately funded, and one of our specific goals is to reach out to the community and educational systems to spread interest, enthusiasm, and involvement.”
“Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to even publish it because of how easy it is to misinterpret. The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones. Nor does it in any way measure the ways in which companies or individuals contribute to WebKit in other meaningful ways. That said, it does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project.”
“The Linux and open source community does not want to find itself back where it was in the mid-to-late 90’s, where it was relegated to servers and the desktops of fan-boys and uber-geeks. This is not where Linux wants to be. The last five years has blessed Linux with so much growth. But if Linux can not gain a foothold in the tablet PC market, that growth could wither away.”
“It’s been a long time in the coming but this year Linux will get a makeover, thanks to the Gnome project. In September the Gnome team, makers of one of the most popular desktop interfaces for Linux, will release version 3.0 of their desktop environment and they are promising “big user-visible changes”.”
This entry is one in a series that tackles issues of proper word use and grammar in English.
When speaking of three dimensions, we often use words like “width,” “breadth,” and “depth.” The fourth word commonly used in “height,” which is odd because it is missing the final “h.” Nevertheless, that is correct.
I recently had a chance to try out the beta for a new virtual world called Twinity. Like Second Life, Twinity aims to be a virtual world where you can wander around, meet and talk with people, shop, and augment your avatar and your living space, if you have one. This is a beta, and so there are some issues, but I think it’s a pretty cool approach.
Here’s what I liked about it:
They are planning to reproduce huge swaths of London, Berlin, and Singapore, thereby proving alternative “real life” locations for you to visit and spend time in. I believe that the building is only done by the Twinity core team.
They have a number of ways of customizing your avatar, but the coolest in my opinion is what they call “PhotoFit.” The idea is that you upload a photo of a real person, e.g., yourself, and by moving around a few points that give the geometry of the face, your avatar will then look like that. My first attempt was with my own photo and I thought the result wasn’t bad. My later attempts with photos of Matt Bomer (from White Collar) and George Clooney looked more generic. In any case, you can further tune the look. They use the FaceGen technology from Singular Inversions for PhotoFit.
I was wandering around a shop (I bought some cool red Converse sneakers) and discovered that they’ve implemented mirrors. That is, you can have a surface that reflects your image back at you. Evidently it is possible to do this in Second Life, but I don’t think it is widely used.
On the negative side, but with the caveat again that this is a beta:
Every time you change location, it can take up to several minutes to pull down the objects that populate it. I understand that the world is dynamic but I really hope that the final version does better caching for objects that haven’t changed since the last visit. I can tell some caching is going on, but performance needs to be improved.
A few more initial choices of avatar clothing and hair would be good.
Like many virtual worlds, the basic walking movement is too slow. While you can run, the basic walking speed should be increased 50%.
They have an interesting way of getting around in buildings. Essentially, as you approach the front door there is a green object that when clicked will give you all the visitable locations in the building. You can then click and jump to them, with the download delays noted above. I think they should have a better concept of doors that open and close, especially for moving into and out of locations on the ground level. That is, if I’m on street level I want to be able to open a door and walk out, I don’t want to do a little teleport. I might be missing something here, I admit.
Twinity is only available for Windows.
Twinity uses the BigWorld virtual world and MMO technology.
“Microsoft will no longer offer Linux or Unix versions of its enterprise search products after a wave of releases set to ship in the first half of this year, the company announced in an official blog post Thursday.”
“The solution was Second Life Enterprise, which the company unveiled publicly in November. The nascent software incorporates all the interface and peer-to-peer interaction of Second Life without the security threats and lurking lewdness.
In other words, Tech purchased its own mini Second Life server that can be accessed only by authorized students, teachers and researchers. Its employees have the authority to regulate, to keep things G-rated and educationally relevant.”
“The folks at the OpenLuna project take that line to heart. OpenLuna is an open source, wiki-based attempt to design a leaner, meaner, public driven moon mission. As with any open source project, they encourage everyone to participate. When they run into questions, problems and challenges, they pose them to the crowd and invite people from every field to weigh in.”
“Apple represents the “auteur model of innovation,” observes John Kao, a consultant to corporations and governments on innovation. In the auteur model, he said, there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created. Movies created by powerful directors, he says, are clear examples, from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” to James Cameron’s “Avatar.””
“The term “enterprise” in the category name indicates that solutions are suitable for use in the workplace, as opposed to recreational use (e.g., consumer video games and recreational virtual worlds), and are scalable, secure, and stable enough for at least some work-related use cases. Because the enterprise immersive software market grew out of four distinct ancestral origins (virtual worlds, serious games, business applications, and learning simulations), the software products in the category vary widely in features and functionality.”
“One recent improvement in the Wonderland platform is of particular interest to enterprise users who may have previously been hesitant about using the software because of licensing issues.
Under Wonderland’s GPL license, any improvements to the core code have to be donated back to the community if they are distributed to the public — and having users log into the world remotely counts as “distribution.””
“alien is a program that converts between Redhat rpm, Debian deb, Stampede slp, Slackware tgz, and Solaris pkg file formats. If you want to use a package from another linux distribution than the one you have installed on your system, you can use alien to convert it to your preferred package format and install it. It also supports LSB packages.”
“Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today that open source industry veteran Matt Asay has joined the company as chief operating officer (COO) — responsible for aligning strategic goals and operational activities, the optimization of day-to-day operations, and leadership of Canonical marketing and back-office functions.”
“Right after WordPress launched their Android app, the WP crew finished the final touches on their Blackberry app that rivals the one they built upon Google’s mobile OS.”
“Most of this information is based on my experience working on Second Life at Linden Lab from 2001 to 2009. SL is a highly complex virtual world, incorporating the features of Web services, online games, 3D modeling and programming tools, IM and VOIP, and so on. Between 2006 and 2007, the userbase grew dramatically, and while it has become more manageable, it continues to grow today. We ran into all manner of scaling challenges, and had mixed success meeting them; ultimately SL did grow to meet the new levels of demand, but we certainly made some mistakes, and there were periods where the reliability of the system really suffered.”
“(GIMP) is undergoing a significant transformation. The next major release, version 2.8, will introduce an improved user interface with an optional single-window mode. Although this update is still under heavy development, users can get an early look by compiling the latest source code of the development version from the GIMP’s version control repository.”
“The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VW-BPE) is a community-based conference that provides opportunities for participants of virtual worlds to share current teaching, learning and research practices in 3D virtual environments. Conference presentations focus on teaching/learning, scholarly work, projects, events, activities and new and innovative tools for virtual education. Conference presenters’ focus on the identification of ‘best practices in education’ designed for 3D virtual world technology.”
SAN FRANCISCO, February 5, 2010 – The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the 2010 “We’re Linux” video contest. The contest seeks to find the best user-generated videos that demonstrate what Linux means to those who use it and inspire others to try it.
The contest is calling all community members and amateur filmmakers to share with the public what a 30-60 second Linux-focused spot for the Super Bowl might look like. This theme is not a requirement for entry; however, videos that can demonstrate the benefits of Linux to the general public are likely to receive more community votes. The submissions should aim to inspire people to use Linux, create conversations among the public, and convey the power and ideals of Linux.
Bob Sutor, VP, Open Source and Linux, IBM Software Group; and
Steven Vaughan-Nichols, journalist, ComputerWorld.
It’s my understanding that the judges will be sequestered in some tropical paradise to thoughtfully decide this year’s winner, though I may be horribly mistaken.
“How is LinuxCon different than other events? In a number of ways. This is an event specific to the Linux community, but within that, it encompasses all matters Linux. Other events specifically target certain groups in the ecosystem, but LinuxCon is the only event that really brings together a diverse group of all types of industry leaders and contributors – from business executives and end users, to developers (both in the kernel and out), to the systems administrators and senior technology operations leaders. “
“The Linux Foundation has announced that the Call for Papers deadline for LinuxCon 2010 will be the 31st of March. Registration for the non-profit organisation’s second annual conference, which will take place from the 10th to the 12th of August, 2010 in Boston Massachusetts, is now open.”
“To help users discover the Linux distribution that’s best for them, this resource will definitively list the best candidates for the various types of Linux users to try.”
“The site’s engineers have announced HipHop, which turns the popular and dynamic PHP code into highly optimized but static C++ and then compiles it using the GNU C++ compiler, g++. The change has been released to the community under the PHP license, and you can read more here.”
“The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VW-BPE) is a community-based conference that provides opportunities for participants of virtual worlds to share current teaching, learning and research practices in 3D virtual environments. Conference presentations focus on teaching/learning, scholarly work, projects, events, activities and new and innovative tools for virtual education. Conference presenters’ focus on the identification of ‘best practices in education’ designed for 3D virtual world technology.”
“Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) (NYSE: SAI) today announced it has purchased Forterra Systems Inc.’s On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment (OLIVE(TM)) product line, including all names, trademarks and licenses.”
Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 2 represents a major new advancement for our Lotus Symphony users. Based on current OpenOffice.org 3 code stream. Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 2 offers loads of new features and capabilities and improved file fidelity. The Lotus Symphony team is excited to get it out to you and get your feedback.
This is a very big upgrade as is indicated by the jump from version 1.3 to version 3. The beta is available for Linux desktops, Mac OS X, and even Windows.
I was having a conversation today with a friend and somehow we got onto the topic of support for ODF, the Open Document Format, in WordPress. Drupal has some import support for ODF word processing files and that effort appears to be quite active (in the sense that there was an update to the module yesterday).
Thinking of WordPress as a content management system, importing an ODF file means taking a word processing, presentation, or spreadsheet document and putting into a form that can be saved and displayed by WordPress, either in a blog post or a standalone page. For simple text, this would mean translating to HTML. Doing a bit more work, it could mean using HTML and CSS for formatting. Getting even fancier, it could incorporate extra JavaScript or PHP code to handle spreadsheets in a live manner.
Import is hard because you need to be able to do something with anything that’s in any document. If you can’t handle something, you had better tell the user what you decided to discard. A minimal import for word processing files, as I mentioned above, might respect all words in the text, paragraph structure, bold, italic, colors, headings, and a few other simple things. In this case I would think of the import as “take this file and do something sensible, if not perfect, with it.”
Export is easier to imagine. Given the range of things that can be done in WordPress posts and pages, I would think that only a relatively small subset of ODF would be needed beyond the packaging and some straightforward text markup. Here I would take as my model “what would this WordPress page look like if I printed it, and what ODF file would I have to create to generate equivalent output?”
Given this, I would tackle the export to ODF feature first, but there is a core question that needs to be answered. Why? That is, given a web page generated by WordPress, why do you need to generate ODF form? I must admit I’m somewhat strapped to come up with good reasons, though I could probably make up a couple.
It is more interesting to consider how to take documents created in ODF by something like Lotus Symphony and then import them into WordPress for publishing. That’s the key word: publishing. So though the problem is harder, having various ways of importing documents into WordPress from ODF would likely be much more useful.
Assuming this as the preferred direction of work and looking at how WordPress can be extended, it’s worthwhile to ask what you might do with plugins or themes to make the import even better. While I like the idea of the result being theme independent, having one or two plugins that added some cool support for imported spreadsheets or presentations could potentially be quite nice.
“Open Source Bridge is a new conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way. “
“Without doubt, one of the most extraordinary developments in recent years has been the rise of Facebook – not just as the most popular social network, but increasingly as a force to reckoned with in the world of computing, perhaps soon on the scale of Microsoft and Google. This makes its relationship to free software something of more than passing interest. “
“HipHop for PHP isn’t technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it.”
This year’s FutureWeb conference will take place in Raleigh, NC, from April 28 to 30. I’m scheduled to be on a panel called “The Future of Open Source and the Web” organized by Tom Rabon and Michael Tiemann of Red Hat at 2:30 pm on the 30th.
“The New Zealand Post is one of three government agencies looking to rip out their Windows desktops and replace them with Linux and open source applications.”
“In this article I am going to show you how I go about putting together a machine that will use the Linux operating system. I understand that this type of topic is very subjective, so there will be plenty of disagreements. But that is part of the fun and the reason why we have comments available on this site. So, without further adieu, let’s get to building.”
“I know everyone likes to get the bad news over with first, so I’ll start with that. We found out on Friday that development resources are no longer being applied to Project Wonderland. “
“What I do want to discuss, with as little fanboyishness as possible, is how I see the iPad being a real landmark in the ongoing growth of virtual words:”
“The program, in a limited beta since last month, provides a virtual home to all premium members along with a free plot of virtual land and monthly stipend of Linden dollars. “
“Engage!® Conference and Expo is the definitive event on youth entertainment technology. Taking place February 16-17, 2010 at the Javits Convention Center in New York City, this year’s Engage covers the critical information you need to deeply connect with and generate revenue from youth and parents online and on mobile devices. Coverage includes social games, virtual goods, virtual worlds, branded apps and online-offline toys.”
“A Frank Lloyd Wright Museum has been in operation in Second Life for six months [SLURL]. Now, though, it’s officially working in partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation under the new name of the Frank Lloyd Wright Virtual Museum, incorporating in the U.S., and seeking official non-profit status. “
“As a Second Life enthusiast, I really want the iPad to run Second Life. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t. As my friend Wagner James Au points out on the blog New World Notes, the iPhone already has a couple of rich, text-only Second Life clients, and the iPad now has the horsepower and screen size to support Second Life graphics.”
The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, house painting, and musical tastes.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 7 high quality Linux calculator tools. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone who wants more functionality offered by simple calculators such as gcalctool (the default calculator provided with GNOME).
In looking through the available books, I was struck by the number that have been published in the last six months. That said, those addressing education and virtual worlds tend to be quite expensive. I understand the issues around lower volume and smaller audiences, but I’m not sure those high prices will attract many readers. It’s a general problem in the book world, especially the academic book world, but it’s still striking in comparison to the more major market books.
I’m about to start another series of blog entries on what I see are some of the most important issues to consider for the next generation of virtual worlds. Since I’ve written a fair amount before on these networked 3D immersive environments, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a list of my older blog entries to provide some history of my thinking, make it easy to see where I agree or disagree with what I thought a few years ago, and to ensure that I’m at least considering everything I once thought important.
So here are the previous blog entries in chronological order:
Cisco Systems, Equifax and three smaller companies have partnered to create United Nations Citizens, a virtual world that has a real economy and is geared toward enabling a virtual shopping mall.
Title: Asking the Hard Questions about Open Source Software
Abstract: Businesses have had decades of experience in acquiring software directly, on hardware, in services engagements, and through system integrators. As more and more organizations consider using open source, it’s important to uniformly hold all acquired software to high standards regarding quality, security, performance, and value for money spent in acquisition, support, and maintenance. Additionally, open source software adds questions about inclusiveness, governance, and longevity of communities. In this talk, I’ll discuss the questions you need to ask to ensure that you get more than what you pay for in the software you acquire.
No matter what you’re pleasure, chances are there is an online community serving it. The open source community has many such places – Linux.com, for example – that cater to specific elements of the community. Red Hat believes there is room for a larger community for the larger community, however, and have seen to the task themselves with Monday’s launch of opensource.com.
This theme had almost all the features I was looking for:
Variable number of columns, so I could use two for full pages and three for those with blog entries.
Customizable logo and header images.
Built-in CSS support for printing.
A professional looking design.
It doesn’t have automatic page navigation, but I can live with that for now. The theme has many ways to tweak it and allows you to “tiger stripe” tables (that is, alternate the color of rows). I turned this off, but it clearly represents a tremendous amount of work and refinement.
As many of you know, I’m still quite interested in virtual worlds and 3D immersive environments though I certainly don’t spend as much time in Second Life as I did several years ago. So from time to time I poke around and see what people are working on, and tonight I came across the Sirikata project from the Stanford Virtual Worlds Group in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.
Documentation is a bit sparse, but the code has been released under the BSD license and is written in C++. Here’s the teaser video they’ve produced:
The big player in open source virtual world platforms is OpenSim, an “extended subset” of Second Life. Croquet is another open source entry in this space.
For some of the research work by the Sirikata team, see
Daniel Horn, Ewen Cheslack-Postava, Tahir Azim, Michael J. Freedman, Philip Levis, “Scaling Virtual Worlds with a Physical Metaphor,” IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 50-54, July-Sept. 2009, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2009.54
Last night my Firefox browser started to crash. Not occasionally, but every single time I started to to type something in the search bar in the upper right hand corner. What the heck happened?
There are several possibilities when an application suddenly starts getting buggy:
Gamma rays from outer space changed some of the bits on your hard drive, thereby messing up your software.
You are having hardware problems, such as memory glitches or hard drive problems, that are causing instability.
Your machine has been infected with a virus or a worm.
Some other application messed up a file that the application in question uses.
You deleted or otherwise mangled a configuration file or (for Windows) a registry entry.
You installed an operating system update that changed something, and that eventually caused your application to break.
You installed an update to the application itself.
For applications that support extensions, addons, or plugins, you added or updated one of those, and it broke your application.
When this bad behavior started, I popped over to another machine running the same operating system and checked to see if Firefox there was broken. It wasn’t.
Next I tried doing the same thing that demonstrated the problem 5 or 6 more times to see if it went away as magically as it appeared. It did not.
Ah, I thought, I bet I have Firefox 3.5! Will upgrading to Firefox 3.6 fix the problem? It didn’t, though it did tell me that several of my extensions were not yet available for Firefox 3.6.
Next I considered whether now was a perfect time to switch to Google Chrome. Perhaps, but that was avoiding the problem rather than fixing it.
I then completely, or so I thought, wiped Firefox from my machine and reinstalled it from scratch. That did not fix the problem.
I wondered … are my old extensions still installed? They were, so evidently my cleanup had been incomplete. I uninstalled them all and restarted Firefox. The problem was gone.
At that point I vaguely remembered that Firefox had asked to install some extension updates and I was so busy with something else that I just accepted it and got on with my work. That was before the problem started. Hmmm.
I started reinstalling my primary extensions and checked after each one to see if I had the problem. I didn’t, but I stopped after five. I suspect the problem was either in Firebug or YSlow, but I didn’t verify. I know that Adblock Plus, COLT, ColorfulTabs, Diigo Toolbar, and XMarks are not causing issues, and those other two extensions are the only ones I did not reinstall.
The moral of this, as with most debugging, is: if you change something and then your system is broken, what you changed caused the problem. It’s not always direct cause and effect, and you may not notice the problem for a while, but it’s good to strip back to basics and then add things in one by one until you can find the culprit.
Update: Consensus seems to be that the update to YSlow is problematic.
DansGuardian is an award winning Open Source web content filter which currently runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, HP-UX, and Solaris. It filters the actual content of pages based on many methods including phrase matching, PICS filtering and URL filtering. It does not purely filter based on a banned list of sites like lesser totally commercial filters.
OpenDNS makes networks in homes, schools and businesses safer, faster, smarter and more reliable through Web content filtering and navigation services.
Novell today announced the availability of a suite of new tools that significantly reduces the time and cost for independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprises to develop, deploy and manage software appliances. With the availability of the SUSE Appliance Toolkit, Novell now delivers the industry’s most complete and integrated solution for building, testing, updating and configuring software appliances across physical, virtual and cloud environments. The Toolkit features an onsite version of Novell’s innovative appliance-building solution SUSE Studio and new management tools that enable ISVs and enterprises to reduce software development time, installation cycles and maintenance costs.
Now, this week, the LF is expanding another program: their online and on-site training for Linux professionals. This expansion is primarily in the form of a new free webinar series that will kick off on March 1 with Jon Corbet’s “How to Contribute to the Linux Community” seminar. This is not a new presentation, as many attendees of Corbet’s programs at various Linux events can attest. What is new is the fact that anyone who signs up for the webinar will be able to watch it free of charge.
But this slate is plagued by the same fundamental flaw as the vast majority of the current tablets: Windows. Phil states that the device will run plain-jane Windows 7. That’s a problem because even Windows 7 with its added touchscreen capabilities is not suited for extended tablet use without a stylus and Apple/Palm/RIM/HTC has proven to the world that we don’t need styluses.
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