Clash of the Titans
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
(Warning: a slight moan ahead… you’ve been warned…!)
Call me a doomsayer, but I think we could be about to see a trademark war. Thus far, Linden Lab’s legal team have reared their ugly (I mean lovely and in no way defamatory) heads at anybody and everybody who even hints at the name or logo of Second Life, even if the usage falls under “fair use” and does nothing but promote the platform. They have seemingly destroyed communities which support the virtual world, all in the name of defending their oh-so-precious trademark, which was never in any real jeopardy anyway.
It will be interesting to see how these bullies stand up to the biggest legal bully of all, now that Microsoft has (either foolishly or heroically) announced their SecondLight technology. Admittedly, it’s not a virtual world… rather, it provides a degree of depth for an otherwise flat display technology. Still, I reckon its close enough to give Linden Lab the shivers.
You can bet that if I alone started a website or service called “SecondLight”, even if it had nothing to do with Second Life, then Linden Lab would be on my case in a flash. So come on Linden legal dudes… bare your teeth at the monster. If you don’t, we’ll all know you’re cowards after all… you squish the little guys, but hide in the corner when somebody bigger comes along.
Long Distance Communication
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
You can tell I had a slightly bored lunchtime, as I spent it doing some trace routes and looking up their geo-location information (such as was available). The reason? I wanted to figure how insanely long-distance communications between me and my boss technically are.
From my office, if I want to visit my boss in person, then I go up a set of stairs, and take a very short walk along a corridor. However, we tend to use email a lot more often… so I was wondering just how much further that actually is. The internal email system is rubbish, so we use our own external email systems… his is based on a server in New York (as far as I can tell), and mine is based on a server somewhere in Germany. Here’s the approximate route traced by my system:
- Paisley (University)
- Glasgow
- London
- San Francisco
- New York (mail server #1)
- San Francisco
- Germany (mail server #2)
- London
- Glasgow
- Paisley (University)
My geography has never been terribly good, but looking at a map, I make that at least 9000 miles! (Probably much longer, given that cables are never in a straight line over those kinds of distances.)
Ironically, of course, an email between our offices is likely to arrive faster than we could on-foot. The Internet is amazing when you think about it!
SL Word Processor
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
I am very pleased to see that the new “http-in” functions for LSL (in Second Life) are available for beta testing now. Basically, these functions let you setup any prim as an HTTP server, which can be accessed from outside via URL, for sending data into SL, and/or requesting it back out.
In a word: awesome! It will be great to avoid so many HTTP polls or whatever.
But here is my cunning new idea… create an object which sets itself up as an HTTP server, and puts its own URL as the parcel’s media URL. It then listens for text coming in via chat, and outputs that text in response to incoming HTTP requests. Voila! Mini-word processor for Second Life!
I have no idea if this will work… I guess I’ll need to wait until the functions go officially ‘live’ before I find out. It’ll be really cool if it does though!
Ubiquitous computing and keeping a personal touch
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
According to MarketWatch.com, a new hospital in Missouri was designed with a computer in every patient room. (With 258 beds, that’s a lot of computers!)
The results in terms of improving efficiency (less running about finding charts and supplies and so on) are certainly great, but more than that, I am impressed by the deliberate decision to avoid losing the personal patient contact. Specifically, it would be easy for a nurse in the patient’s room to spend all their time looking at a computer screen, and if it is fixed to a wall, that would inevitably mean turning his/her back on the patient.
To avoid this, a mechanism made by Proximity Systems was used, whereby the computer screen and keyboard are on a retractable arm. It can be moved and swivelled into place, allowing the nurse/doctor to continue facing and talking to the patient, and making it a secondary tool in the interaction (as it should be). It can even be swivelled around to let the patient see the screen too. When not in use, the whole thing folds up into the wall, taking up almost no space at all.
I am a self-confessed computer geek, so I like my computers… but I also greatly appreciate this importance for personal contact above artificial. The futuristic visions of computers and robots tending to all our needs (a la various movies) seem fairly bleak to me. We should never lose sight of the personal aspect of life, because we are inherently social creatures (some of us admittedly less so than others!).
Computing for Everyone!
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
Budgetting for computing facilities is an odd area sometimes. As many will point out, the cost of the outlay can be quite high (although it is reducing), and the ongoing cost of maintenance can be very difficult to meet (schools in Australia are seeing the negative consequence of bad planning in this area). However, it is also noted that computers can help to save money too, whether by reducing the need for printed material, or allowing colleagues to meet ‘virtually’ instead of having to travel great distances.
Some people have the budgetting fairly well sussed (or just have a big budget!), to the extent that computers practically seem to be a dime-a-dozen for many of us, which is a wonderful privilege. The perceived value of computing facilities is evident in the very fact that initiatives such as OLPC and Classmate PC exist.
Unsurprisingly, education is a major proponent of computing facilities, given the ease with which so much reference material can be stored and searched using a computer (I often wish books had a ’search’ button!), as well as the effectiveness of word-processing assignments over hand-writing, and so on. I have no idea how many computers my university has, for example, but given the number of students across the campuses, I wouldn’t be surprised if the number is into the thousands; there are numerous labs for all students, and it is expected that everybody (no matter what they study, from art to nursing) has some IT literacy.
However, it is worth remembering that not all people are so fortunate in their budget for such things. Computer prices in Pakistan have seen a 20% increase lately, which is adversely affecting educational institutions, which need to increase their tution fees in response, which in turn puts more strain on the students. Worrying too is the situation at the Eastern Ilinois University, where the campus computer labs are too expensive to keep open, so some students are required to buy their own laptop for use on campus instead. Meanwhile, some teachers in Ireland are struggling simply due to apparent strange spending priorities.
Clearly, it is an important area. There are drives to press forward the goal of “computing for everyone”, especially where education is concerned. I am certainly in favour of more people having the knowledge and access required to use things like the Internet, although I wholeheartedly agree that too many people are not educated properly about computing (even those who are regarded as ‘computer literate’ seem to lack fundamental knowledge sometimes).
Having said all that, I doubt there is much that can really be done to rectify the present problem situations, except to learn from the mistakes that are already being made! Maybe make plans more realistic, and remember to help people make effective use of computing opportunities.
Culture for the New Generation
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
Here’s an initiative that I like the look of in England: free theatre tickets for people under 26 (on the quieter nights of the week). I think if I were a more gregarious sort of chap, living nearer a decent theatre or two, then I would certainly take in some productions more often than I do… and being imminently back on a student budget (as many under 26’s are), free tickets would make the prospect that good bit more appealing!
I am often dismayed by the relative lack of culture in society, and by how starkly my comparitively rich and varied background contrasts with the fairly narrow and uninspiring upbringings of many of those around me today (no offence intended!). Looking back at a photo album of my childhood (which my family put together for me as a 21st birthday present a few years ago), I see lots of wonderful activities, including clubs, sports, theatre, outings, and much more. I got a great chance to do many things, and I believe I am a better person for it.
I knew somebody who did youth work in a YMCA for many years. I seem to remember they once worked hard to put together an adventurous trip for the kids, involving things like rock climbing and canoeing and so on, but instead of excitement, the kids couldn’t care less. They couldn’t see the point.
I believe the richness of a person’s upbringing has a great impact on their future attitude towards life. I have often shocked and surprised people by even the most trivial knowledge of areas outside my usual sphere of involvement and interest, and yet to me, such breadth and diversity of knowledge and experience is a wonderful privilege which should be pursued. Instead, many people seem to push away everything which they don’t need to know; it’s creating societal ruts which entire families and generations are falling into.
My conclusion? Promoting diversity and stimulating broader interests in the lives of young people is crucially important. This theatre initiative is a great step, and is naturally in keeping with the idea of making museums and libraries freely accessible. What we need now is more encouragement to use these facilities, and positive demonstrations of why they are useful. Many of the problems of violence and drugs and such like in some communities are attributed to there being “nothing else to do”, when perhaps there is actually plenty to do, but there’s just nobody telling them how or why.
A New Beginning
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
You might notice a big gap between the last post and this… that’s because I managed to dredge up the archives from my old (rather neglected) blog and import them here. (It was a nasty process… I had been using b2evolution v1.1, and for some reason, the b2evo team thinks nobody would EVER want to export… ended up having to hack a MovableType exporter to fit… got there in the end though!).
Hoping to make a bit of a fresh start. Still not too sure about this theme, but we’ll see what happens!
Thanks for visiting.
OS Upgrade
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve just been having a fun day… backing up my entire VPS into 3 separate places: my official backup allocation (separate server provided by my hosting company), onto another separate server to which I have access, and also down onto my own machine. Backed-up in a different way for each one too, just to be sure.
After that was done, I upgraded the server OS from Fedora Core 4 (old, dusty, and a slightly broken OS image to boot!), up to Fedora Core 6 (w00t!).
When I first went with FC4, it was the best my host could offer. (The alternative was an almost unusably broken OpenSUSE 9.something). It had PHP 5.0.23 installed, which sucked beyond belief (seriously PHP guys, not a cool release), so I had to temporarily downgrade to PHP4. I then had to spend ages figuring my way MANUALLY round various RPM repositories, until I could find YUM (YellowDog Update Manager) which, for whatever reason, was not on the FC4 OS image! Gah.
After that bundle of joy, I had to then find appropriate repositories which were still actively hosting FC4 material for the x86_64 architecture. After days of hunting, I eventually found the life-saving (and excellently named) “Atomic Rocket Turtle”, which had what I needed, so I got my crusty FC4 updated to the latest and greatest in AMP technology. Woohoo!
Now that I’ve upgraded to FC6, I was worried that I’d have to do the whole thing ALLLLL over again. Thankfully, YUM is already installed, and Apache and MySQL are pretty-much up to date. PHP is only version 5.1, which ain’t great (although it’s workable)… but thankfully, people are still making RPM’s for FC6 x86_64.
The restoration process of all my data seeeeems OK so far… had to nip into the restoration ‘map’ file (thingy created by Plesk - my control panel software) to correct something it didn’t like (it was insistent on a shared IP instead of exclusive… not that it makes much different, since I’ve only got 1 address and I’m the only client!).
Now I’ve got to update Plesk and make sure the firewall is OK in Virtuozzo (server virtualization software). Last few times I tried on FC4, it complained of a misconfiguration… probably some buried setting gone wrong… and I had no idea how to fix. Hopefully it’s all good now.
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…
MoodleMoot 07 — The Moodle Quiz
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
This was the 4th session on day 1 of MoodleMoot 07 in Milton Keyenes. The subtitle for the session was “Where we are, where we’re going, and how you can help”, and it was largely aimed at developers, and covered exactly what it said on the tin… it gave an overview of where development of the Moodle quiz currently is (i.e. changes from Moodle 1.8 to 1.9, and a little of 2.0). The presenter, Tim Hunt, is the maintainer of the quiz module, which (in my experience) has been quite rightly labelled “the most complex part of Moodle”.
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