A plague on Vista’s house!
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
WARNING: rant ahead. If you love Microsoft and think Windows is the best OS ever, then aside from that fact that you probably don’t even know what “OS” stands for, just don’t bother reading this post.
I am steadily growing ever more hateful of Microsoft’s latest OS… Windows Vista. I got a Dell XPS 420 (which only runs Vista) in work last October, and I’ve never done anything overly nasty with it. I do some web-development, so I run a WAMP server, and I run the Second Life clients (main release, and the beta versions). By and large, those things shouldn’t cause any major problems… maybe a few one or two, but nothing serious.
Therefore, my Vista experience should be a joyous one, surely? Aye right…
StumbleUpon
Posted by Peter | Filed under Websites
I’ve never been too fond of link sharing systems. I did sign up for Delicious and DiggIt and so forth, just to try them out, but I never really found that they hit the spot for me. But I’ve also noticed my surfing habits have become remarkably stale these days too… I was never really exploring the web the way it’s meant to be.
Thankfully, I found a solution! Hurrah! 
StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/) is a great link-sharing system, provided you don’t mind installing a web-toolbar. (I’m not usually a fan of them, but I like this one). You tell it your approximate interests when you sign-up, then when you’ve got the toolbar, just hit the “Stumble!” button to be taken to a random site which matches your profile.
When you’re at a site, you can click “I Like It!” or “I don’t like it!”, and it will use that information to better filter your stumble results over time. (As far as I know, it ignores your surfing habits unless you deliberately click the “I Like It!” or “I don’t like it!” buttons).
I’ve found some pretty cool stuff already through it, and suspect that I’ll use it a lot in the future. It’s awesome! Just click and stumble across something random.
I like surfing this way! :>>
Massively Multi Learner Workshop 2008
Posted by Peter | Filed under Education, Virtual Worlds
I attended the Massively Multi Learner Workshop with my boss this year. It was hosted by Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridge (England), and was certainly an interesting insight into some of the research that’s happening just now in education with MUVEs (Multi User Virtual Environments).
My boss (Daniel Livingstone) made appropriate mention of Sloodle in his session, as well as running a couple of practical sessions on using Sloodle. Seemed to have a fair few folks interested, which is great.
The session of particular interest for me was “Learning on the MUVE: Islands in the Sun?”, by Maggi Savin-Baden. It was the only majorly pedagogical presentation, and I think I wouldn’t have followed it nearly so well if I hadn’t read a paper all about Problem Based Learning (PBL) in Second Life (SL/PBL) on the plane on the way there. Those combined were my first taste of real pedagogical theory, and although some of it went a tad over my head, I felt I could definitely maintain a research interest in this field.
Reasoning AI in SL
Posted by Peter | Filed under Virtual Worlds
Interesting article on Physorg.com talking about researchers who have created an AI, with the reasoning capability of a 4 year old child, and made it control a Second Life avatar:
http://www.physorg.com/news124368610.html
I reckon that this kind of idea is really great. In part, it’s good just to see people extending SL beyond the bounds of the virtual world offered directly by Linden Labs. But more than that, the investigation into an AI which can control an avatar in such an open-ended situation is very brave.
A number of people have dismissed it as a ‘bot’. However, bots for games are very narrow-focused, and most of their behaviour can be faked and/or pre-planned in various ways. Second Life doesn’t have goals, tactics or strategies, so you’re really looking at core behaviour… rationale based on beliefs and supposition. Very interesting stuff.
KitCom
Posted by Peter | Filed under SLOODLE
A new tool in Second Life is KitCom, which claims to be the “first and only tool to chat between Second Life and WWW”:
Technically it’s not the first and only, since Sloodle has had the “WebIntercom” tool for quite some time to link SL text-chat to a Moodle chatroom. However, I’m glad to see that somebody else has done it outside Moodle. Not sure how it works, but I’m glad to hear of it!
Sleeds.org Chatlog
Posted by Peter | Filed under Virtual Worlds
Here’s a tool for automatically formatting your raw SL chatlog in a pretty way:
Great idea because it highlights chat clearly from different users, and even shows avatar pictures if the user is registered. Click here for an example. It doesn’t lift your chatlog directly from SL… you have to paste it in manually… but great anyway for browsing a chatlog anyway.
Second Life: DHTML on a Prim!
Posted by Peter | Filed under SLOODLE, Virtual Worlds
Yep, you read that title right… DHTML on a prim…. yeeeeeaaaaaaah baby! :>>
Checkout this page here, which shows a pretty radio button bouncing about a box, powered by JavaScript (albeit rather poorly hackishly programmed JavaScript):
http://www.avid-insight.co.uk/sl/bouncing-ball3.html
Now, download and run SL client version 1.19.1 (it may need to be Release Candidate), and on your own parcel of land, set your media URL to the above address. Setup an appropriate media prim, and hit “play”. 
(For those of you without your own land, we’ll be setting up demos of this stuff soon in the ‘Sloodleville’ area of the “virtuALBA” sim. Do come along!)
It’s fairly slow, and as yet SL doesn’t allow interaction… but it works! It manages to update itself about 4 times per second by the looks of it, which is more than enough for most (sensible) purposes.
Rock on Linden!
Meetings, meetings, meetings
Posted by Peter | Filed under SLOODLE
My Tuesdays and Wednesdays are getting somewhat busy now:
Tuesday 10pm: Sloodle Development meeting
Wednesday 10am: Sloodle 101 class
Wednesday 10pm: Sloodle 101 class
With that and my church’s regular outreach starting on Wednesday evenings, I’m not getting much time for boredom! Good fun though. Lots of interesting folks coming to my 101 classes (some sessions more than others), and plenty more along the way in between times!
The project is definitely starting to feel more community-based, which is great. Lots more people getting involved gradually and having basic introductions to the tools through the 101 classes. The Sloodle Pilot will hopefully see more folks getting more seriously involved too as time goes on.
Onward, upward, outward!
Age of Empires 3
Posted by Peter | Filed under Games
It had been a while since I bought a new game… in fact my gaming mouse had all but been lost under a layer of dust! However, I decided to pop by my local games shop recently, and in the preowned PC games section, I found two interesting things… one of them being Age of Empires 3.
I played AoE2, and thoroughly enjoyed it (as I have done with many such titles, including the C&C series and Stronghold).
The new thing these days with isometric games is, of course, true 3d graphics. And my goodness, AoE3 does the 3d graphics well! The animations and interactions between items are incredible. Particularly amazing is the physics acting on debris. I had guys launching cannon-balls at a wall on a cliff over a river. Chunks of debris flying off the wall bounced off the cliff and landed in the water with a “splash” sound. That’s impressively satisfying!
Besides that, the gameplay is pretty good. Lots of ’stuff’ to get your head round, but it’s worth the effort. Some good and interesting units, and a reasonable storyline. Also some interesting quirky features that make it just different enough from the norm, while still being familiar enough to be playable.
Not finished the game yet (too busy with work!), but enjoying it so far. I’m lousy at strategy games above “easy” difficulty level, but this one is fun anyway. Definitely worth a shot.
