Second Life

Second Life is virtual world where you sign up, get an Avatar (computer image) and wander around a user created 3-D world interacting with your surroundings and other Residents (participants). Unlike many online games, the world has been created almost entirely by the users. There is a rich scripting language called Linden Scripting Language which allows Residents to create everything from clothing and houses to motorcycles and wings.

There is no scoring system and you can't "win" so Second Life isn't a game but it's much more than a social interaction tool as well. It has its own economy based on Linden Dollars which can be used to buy things other people have created, invest in real estate, play the stock market or exchange for real U.S. dollars. There are people who make their real life living making items for Second Life. Universities have been offering online degrees through Second Life and some companies even do first round interviews in Second Life.

The Resident's Avatar navigates the 3-D world by walking, flying, riding in vehicles or teleporting. There is a complete physics to the word so things that should fall do and your can't just walk through walls or people. You can interact with other people by chatting with them, trading with them or even shooting them.

Really the world is to huge even to describe in a single blog entry, go check out Second Life. When you are finished being amazed and appalled, check out a spoof site called Get a First Life.

Facebook

If you haven't heard of Facebook or its primary competitor, MySpace then you've been living under a proverbial electronic rock. They are Social Networking websites where people can give advertisers everything an advertiser would want to know about them - name, address, phone number, email, age, sex, music preferences ... in exchange for telling the world about their new favorite breakfast cereal.

Facebook, created by 23 year old billionaire Mark Zuckerb, is ranked as the sixth most trafficked website in the USA with more than 30 billion page views per month. It boasts 42 million active members, and is expected to exceed 60 million by the end of this year and 200 million by the end of 2008.

Facebook has a rich develpers network with its own, custom Facebook Marked Language (FBML), Facebook Query Language (FQL), API (REST Web Service) and Facebook JavaScript (FBJS). Allowing developers to write full applications inside the Facebook environment. For you database geeks, click here for the Facebook database design.

I think it's a cool concept but before you ask, I do not have an account on either FaceBook or MySpace. I'm just not that excited to have complete strangers know what kind of juice I drink.

Wikipedia

I heard on NPR that there's a great site http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/ created by a CIT grad student, Virgil Griffith, which allows you to see who made changes to Wikipedia articles and what changes have been made.

For example (from the article)

A person from Wal-Mart made this change:

Original:
Wages at Wal-Mart are about 20% less than at other retail stores. Founder Sam Walton once argued that his company should be exempt from the minimum wage.

New:
The average wage at Wal-Mart is almost double the federal minimum wage (Wal-Mart). However, founder Sam Walton once argued that his company should be exempt from the minimum wage.

I'm going to go check out what Haliburton has changed ...

Read the NPR article here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12823729

Vault

Up until recently, I have been opposed to source-code management tools. A source-code management tool is used by groups of programmers working on a single project.

Without source control, the project is divided up into files and a single person is given the responsibility for that "file." That is not to say that a single person will do all of the work on a file but a single person is responsible for coordinating the work on that file so that someone making changes a) makes changes to the most up to date version of the file and b) doesn't over-write anyone else's changes. This system works great in small teams of responsible people but breaks down in larger or less disciplined groups.

Source control software allows the entire project to be "checked in" to a central repository. There are several versions of source control available. The simplest is the "check out" method where a single person signs out the file and works on it. While it is checked out, other people can read the original version but cannot edit it until it is checked back in. This solves both the newest version problem and the over-write problem. Unfortunately, it limits file edits to a single user at a time which can be problematic for large files or under tight deadlines.

Another common type is the edit-merge-commit model. When you want to edit a file, you get the latest version from the repository but it doesn't get locked. When you are done with the file, you check it back in. If someone else has also made changes to the file, the software shows you both versions side by side with the changes from each person highlighted. If there are no line level conflicts, you can just merge the two files together incorporating changes from both people. If there are line lever conflicts (both people edited the same section of code) you have to manually choose which changes to keep.

Recently, our group started working on the largest project we have ever attempted. All five programmers are working on the same project and, often, the same section of code. We chose to use Vault as our Version Control software and I have been slowly warming to it.

Axminster Palm Nailer

I spent the last three days working on my house extension. Mostly, I'm just grunt labor and my friend, Geoffrey, is the real brains. He's a toy freak and the newest toy he brought to play with is a pneumatic Palm Nailer. It works on air pressure like a pneumatic nail gun but instead of driving the nail in one blow, it hammers the nail in. "Why, then, " you ask, "don't you just use a nail gun?" I'm so glad you asked. A nail gun is only so accurate. We were nailing Joist Hangers and trying to get through those tiny little holes with a nail gun is well beyond my skill.

A Palm Nailer has a magnet in it so you just place the nail in it and push it into where-ever you want. A smidgen slower than a nail gun but loads more accurate and easier than hammering 32x4 nails by hand.

BART

BART is the Bay Area Rapid Transit system ... for you people terminally stuck on the East Cost, the Bay Area is San Francisco and surrounding areas. In California. Check out their bus map. It gives graphic, real-time updated information on where all of the buses on the selected lines are and an estimated time of arrival at any given bus-stop. Every couple of seconds, you can see the little bus icons advance on the map. So much better than sticking your head out into traffic in Burlington wondering when/if the next bus will arrive.

The website uses a Java Applet (Client side with database connection) to display the data without an incredible time lag (unless you, like me, try to select All Lines). I'll bet it would look better done with Flash/Flex ...

Terra-server

I am in the midst of loading my 500+ cd collection onto my hard-drive. This driven partially by the 14 year old I gave my iPod to and partially by rediscovering all the cool CDs I have that I haven't listened to in forever. I'm about half way through and running out of hard-drive space, a problem I have never had before on any computer I've ever owned. Not that my hard-drive is tiny, it's just that mp3 files take up space.

For just how much space and an easy to understand article on mp3 compression check out How Stuff Works.

So, I'm whining to a co-worker about my drive problems when our network admin comes up and says - "hey, we have an extra drive you can have for $150. The only problem with it is that it's too large to back up." My ears perk and swivel and I am reaching for my wallet before he finishes the word "up."

My new toy is a Buffalo TeraStation Home Server. The Tera standing for almost one terabyte of disk space. For you not-so-geeks, that's 1024 Gigabytes. To compare and contrast, my current hard-drive is a measly 80 Gigabytes. Using MP3 compression (which is about 10:1 for music files) and a little math, I should be able to store 20,000 music CDs on my new hard drive.

Cloud Computing

I just read a really cool article in August's issue of Scientific American. (Yes, I know, I'm a little behind. I've had other things on my mind :)

The general concept is that Sun Microsystems has packaged 250 servers into a standard shipping container. Add electricity, water (for cooling) and a high speed internet connection and you have an instant data center. "Project Blackbox" has seven terabytes of active memory and can support 10,000 users.

I found it particularly interesting because Sun is claiming that this is the next step towards fully distributed computing - one of the "future trends" Laura and I talked about at the end of our Flash/Flex presentation.

RE Leslie's Database problem

Hey Leslie -

I don't use Oracle but I have a possible suggestion about your problem ...
If it's the LONG/LONGRAW data type that's crashing your system, is it a field you really need to return in the code that's crashing? When I'm lazy, I just return the entire record when I only need a couple of fields.

dm