The Low-Down

General: About my 2009 prediction

2011-01-10T09:27:00.011+11:00

In 2009 I predicted a change to 240 Volt power in the US to facilitate the large power demand for vehicle recharging.
At the 2011 CES in Las Vegas, General Electric had a stand showing their 'WattStation' charging a Chevrolet Volt.
The nice thing is that it is apparently a 240 Volt system :-)

AP writes "An attendee looks GE's new Residential WattStation plugged into a Chevrolet Volt electric car at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show January 8, 2011 in Las Vegas. The 240 volt Residential WattStation is intended to be installed at home and can charge a car in only 4-8 hours. The Residential WattStation will ship in the fall and is expected to retail for between UAD $1,000 to $1,500."

I have no idea what UAD are, but if they meant AUD then US is about the same.

Update: 20110119 -

The Register has an interesting story on the current (no pun intended) state of UK electric vehicle recharge infrastructure which has this interesting bit of information -

"... This is because e-car batteries can't be charged up at all quickly. Using a specialist 240V, 32-amp supply - representative of the sort of charging point that could be widespread very quickly, and the rating that its users' home charge points have - a Mini-E can recharge in 4½ hours. The maximum amperage it can take, according to the makers, is 48: thus the fastest it can possibly, theoretically be juiced up without damage is 3 hours. If the luckless Mini E driver is compelled to use a normal UK wall socket, it will take well in excess of 10 hours. ..."

The next paragraph dealing with the recharging of a Tesla Roadster is a bit of a horror story! It is well worth reading the whole article.

That's a lot of power to generate and distribute over a country to run a significant percentage of transport on electricity. I think that even the local distribution for that power will be at a lot more than 240V, probably with a small substation/transformer per cluster of recharge points.

mbed - Big Boys Arduino!

2010-11-13T13:19:00.019+11:00

Hack-a-day described mbed as "Arduino. On steroids. With claws and fangs.", what's not to like about that?

The mbed is a small module with 0.1" pins for mounting on a breadboard. It has an NXP (Philips) LPC1768 Cortex M3 ARM 100 MHz processor which has 512KB Flash, 64KB RAM and a stack of goodies including Ethernet, USB OTG, SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, PWM, ADC, DAC and GPIO (ordinary General Purpose I/O pins).

The development tools are unusual in that you don't install anything, when you register your shiny new mbed, you get an account with your own workspace and access to the web-based compiler and libraries.

To register, you just hook the mbed up to a USB port on your PC (cable provided) and click on the MBED.HTM file in the flash-drive that appears (being web-based it works for Windows, Linux and Mac of course). Less than a minute later (if you have a user name thought up) you can be set up and ready to go.

To run the demo 'Blinking LED' program just click on the download button and save it to the flash-drive your mbed appears to be. Press the reset button on the mbed and 'Presto!' the latest file to be downloaded is executed, it really is that easy.

The demonstration video to show the power and ease of development is well worth watching.

Anyway, the thing is that it looks like someone has made an mbed to Arduino Shield adaptor, so connecting to various ready-made peripherals should soon be even easier.

Considering the no-hassle compiler and libraries are free, the mbed is a quite reasonable proposition for dipping your toe in the ARM embedded development waters at about the same price as the far less powerful Arduino Nano.
I got mine from Element 14 (formerly Farnell) for about AUD $87.

Virtualisation for Beginners

2010-10-10T08:41:00.008+11:00

I recently learnt that Dr Dobbs Journal is no more, having just become a sub-section of Network World.

This prompted me to go pick up the article code ZIPs from the old web-site to trawl for any useful bits.

I pointed my Getright Browser Tool at - ftp://66.77.27.238/sourcecode/ddj/ and downloaded the lot (1.31GB of zip files) while it is still there.

Amongst the goodies I found that I had downloaded a zipped image for a Ubuntu Dot.Net Development virtual machine.

I put this Zip and the FREE VMPlayer from VMWare onto an old 786MB / 40GB / AGP video Pentium PC running fully up-to-date XP SP3.

Honestly, there are probably better machines hardware-wise put out for recycle at the side of the road.

I unpacked the 1GB ZIP which became about 11GB on account of a 10GB disk image in there.

I installed and ran the VMPlayer and was happy to see that it actually ran OK on such a low-spec machine and handled the wireless 11n NIC OK.

I tried to run the Ubuntu virtual machine but if failed as it was created to run as a 2-CPU machine though luckily only with 512MB RAM.

I changed the VM settings (so easy that the cat could do it) to 1 CPU and away it went.

Then VMPlayer announced that my Linux VMWare Toolkit was out of date and offered to fix it up while I was still using the Ubuntu VM.

I accepted and the tools were downloaded verified and mounted so that they suddenly appeared as a CD inside the Ubuntu VM, Impressive!

I opened the .tar.gz tools archive file on the CD and dragged the contents to my home/user directory and they were uneventfully extracted.

I then ran the enclosed .pl install script and voila, my Ubuntu virtual machine is all updated with the latest VMWare tools.

Now I can play with Ubuntu Dot.Net development any time I want without having another old PC hanging around.

Actually, I’m tempted to get VM Workstation and make a VM of the old XP machine so that I can run IT under Windows 7 in the future.

And NO I won’t even try and run Ubuntu in VMWare in the virtual XP machine, I’ll make a separate Ubuntu machine. :-)

So, two take-aways from this –

Getting a hands-on taste of Virtualisation is cheap and easy, and…
You don’t need a high-end machine to experiment on (and get some Virtualisation experience you can claim when job-hunting).

Have a go! :-)

General: My Obesity Solution

2010-03-25T06:58:00.007+11:00

Here is a passing thought I will share with you.
The media and doctors are all brow-beating us about how the population is becoming obese.
Well surely, if so many people are becoming obese, then it should be time to redraw the height/weight scales that are used to determine 'normal'.
If you think that would be cheating consider this - the scales currently in use were derived post-war after years of rationing where people barely saw sugar or butter or any sizable piece of meat, is that fair? Is it pure coincidence or artistic incompetence that paintings and books from previous centuries depict a great many portly people? (Think 'Pickwick Papers').
I think that losing weight might be a good plan, but I am not convinced that we are being judged fairly.

Others doubt the BMI too!

Update: A nice kicking for BMI on The Register -'Being fat is no worse for you than being a woman'

General: Embedded Development

2010-01-29T14:38:00.022+11:00

Unless you are manufacturing your own line of products, embedded development starts with a customer wanting to create or improve a new or existing product.
Then follows a lot of question and answer and,l usually, research to identify the possible range of solutions, from off-the-shelf to fully-custom, and consider their respective strengths and weaknesses.
If it seems to both parties that a custom solution is the best option, you may have work to do, if the business matters are agreeable to you both.

Then, in theory, begins the thinking and design of a possible solution, although in practice quite a few possibilities will usually have occurred to the designer during the discovery phase.
The next step is fleshing out the component parts of the overall solution, which may start as no more than a few quickly drawn ideas, like so -

These rough ideas are frequently tested by the designer, either as components, or as a part of a whole solution. Whilst the older method is to build test hardware, a lot of people opt for simulation nowadays.
In order to produce the prototype, the schematic designs must be entered into the design tool and parts created and added to the library if it does not contain the required part, or not one in the required physical package.

When the complete schematic is entered and verified for electrical consistency, the board layout can be performed. An important first step here is entering the manufacturing capabilities of the PCB company as a set of design rules that your board must conform to.

When the layout is complete, a set of files can be sent to the PCB manufacturer and a small batch of prototype boards ordered. It can typically take 5-10 days to receipt of the finished boards, although speedier options exist for higher prices.

This board is mostly Surface-Mount, apart from power devices all lined up to share a common heatsink and the much cheaper through-hole electrolytic capacitors. The hardest-to-solder ARM processor goes on first to give unimpeded access to it!
Once the prototype is fully debugged, actual assembly will be performed at the PCB manufacturers, but for the prototype it's a job for a good eye and a steady hand.

Once all parts are fitted, the board can be fitted into the prototype hardware and then the software programming and debugging can commence!

In this case, a JTAG port makes software development and testing much easier.

Larger size photo's can be viewed in this Flickr set.

General: Test your ISP!

2010-01-23T14:04:00.018+11:00

Here is a handy site to see what shenanigans your ISP might be up to - Netalyzr

Here are my results!

Summary of Noteworthy Events –

Major Abnormalities

Your DNS resolver returns results even when no such server exists

Minor Aberrations

Address-based Tests +

NAT detection (?): NAT Detected

DNS-based host information (?): OK

Reachability Tests +

TCP connectivity (?): OK

UDP connectivity (?): OK

Path MTU (?): OK

Network Access Link Properties –

Network latency measurements (?): Latency: 250ms Loss: 0.0%

The round-trip time (RTT) between your computer and our server is 250 msec, which is good.

We recorded no packet loss between your system and our server.

TCP connection setup latency (?): 250ms

The time it takes your computer to set up a TCP connection with our server is 250 msec, which is good.

Network background health measurement (?): no transient outages

During most of Netalyzr's execution, the applet continuously measures the state of the network in the background, looking for short outages. During testing, the applet observed no such outages.

Network bandwidth measurements (?): Upload 220 Kbit/sec, Download 1.3 Mbit/sec

Your Uplink: We measured your uplink's sending bandwidth at 220 Kbit/sec. This rate could be considered somewhat slow, and may affect your user experience if you perform large transfers.

Your Downlink: We measured your downlink's receiving bandwidth at 1.3 Mbit/sec. This level of bandwidth works well for many users.

Network buffer measurements (?): Uplink 4600 ms, Downlink 1400 ms

We estimate your uplink as having 4600 msec of buffering. This is quite high, and you may experience substantial disruption to your network performance when performing interactive tasks such as web-surfing while simultaneously conducting large uploads. With such a buffer, real-time applications such as games or audio chat can work quite poorly when conducting large uploads at the same time.

We estimate your downlink as having 1400 msec of buffering. This is quite high, and you may experience substantial disruption to your network performance when performing interactive tasks such as web-surfing while simultaneously conducting large downloads. With such a buffer, real-time applications such as games or audio chat can work quite poorly when conducting large downloads at the same time.

HTTP Tests +

Address-based HTTP proxy detection (?): OK

Header-based HTTP proxy detection (?): OK

HTTP proxy detection via malformed requests (?): OK

Filetype-based filtering (?): OK

HTTP caching behavior (?): OK

JavaScript-based tests (?): OK

DNS Tests –

Restricted domain DNS lookup (?): OK

We are able to successfully lookup a name which resolves to the same IP address as our webserver. This means we are able to conduct many of the tests on your DNS server.

Unrestricted domain DNS lookup (?): OK

We are able to successfully lookup arbitrary names from within the Java applet. This means we are able to conduct all test on your DNS server.

Direct EDNS support (?): OK

EDNS-enabled requests for small responses are answered successfully.

EDNS-enabled requests for medium-sized responses are answered successfully.

EDNS-enabled requests for large responses are answered successfully.

DNS resolver address (?): OK

The IP address of your ISP's DNS Resolver is 61.9.188.40, which resolves to dns.dav.bigpond.net.au. Additional nameservers observed for your host: 61.9.194.56

DNS resolver properties (?): Lookup latency: 200ms

Your ISP's DNS resolver requires 200 msec to conduct an external lookup.

Your resolver is using QTYPE=A for default queries.

Your resolver is not automatically performing IPv6 queries.

Your DNS resolver does not use EDNS.

Your DNS resolver can successfully accept large responses.

Your resolver does not use 0x20 randomization, but will pass names in a case-sensitive manner.

Your NAT has a built in DNS proxy. The DNS request was received from 61.9.188.40

DNS glue policy (?): OK

Your ISP's DNS resolver does not accept generic additional (glue) records — good.

Your ISP's DNS resolver does not accept additional (glue) records which correspond to nameservers.

Your ISP's DNS resolver does not follow CNAMEs.

DNS resolver port randomization (?): OK

Your ISP's DNS resolver properly randomizes its local port number.
The following graph shows DNS requests on the x-axis and the detected source ports on the y-axis.

DNS lookups of popular domains (?): OK

77 of 77 popular names were resolved successfully.

Name	IP Address	Reverse Name/SOA
www.abbey.co.uk	165.160.15.20	X (pdns1.cscdns.net)
ad.doubleclick.net	74.125.155.148	px-in-f148.1e100.net
www.alliance-leicester.co.uk	194.130.105.121	X (alice.ioko365.com)
www.amazon.com	72.21.210.250	210-250.amazon.com
www.ameritrade.com	204.58.27.113	beta-new.tdameritrade.com
www.bankofamerica.com	171.159.193.173	www.bankofamerica.com
www.bankofscotland.co.uk	195.171.171.21	X (ns0.bt.net)
www.barclays.co.uk	213.219.1.141	X (dns1.lon7.telecityredbus.net)
bit.ly	168.143.173.249	X (ns1.dn.net)
www.capitalone.com	208.80.50.112	X (chia.arin.net)
www.careerbuilder.com	208.88.80.22	X (smokey.careerbuilder.com)
www.chase.com	159.53.60.105	X (ns1.jpmorganchase.com)
chaseonline.chase.com	159.53.64.54	resources-cdc2.chase.com
www.citi.com	192.193.103.222	citibank.com
www.citibank.com	192.193.103.222	citibank.com
www.citimortgage.com	192.193.218.222	citimortgage.com
www.cnn.com	157.166.226.26	www.cnn.com
www.desjardins.com	142.195.132.100	www.desjardins.com
www.deutsche-bank.de	217.73.49.24	www.deutsche-bank.de
www.e-gold.com	209.200.169.10	unknown.prolexic.com
www.ebay.com	66.211.181.19	hp-core.ebay.com
www.etrade.com	198.93.34.21	www.etrade.com
www.f-secure.com	61.9.193.137	a-61-9-193-137.[...]echnologies.com
www.fdic.gov	192.147.69.84	www.fdic.gov
www.friendfinder.com	208.88.180.81	X (ii53-30.friendfinderinc.com)
www.google.com	74.125.155.99	px-in-f99.1e100.net
www.halifax.co.uk	212.140.245.97	www.halifax.co.uk
www.hsbc.co.uk	193.108.74.126	X (ns3.hsbc.com)
www.irs.gov	61.9.193.214	a-61-9-193-214.[...]echnologies.com
www.jpmorganchase.com	159.53.60.105	X (ns1.jpmorganchase.com)
mail.google.com	74.125.155.17	px-in-f17.1e100.net
mail.live.com	64.4.20.169	dp2.mail.live.com
mail.yahoo.com	124.108.97.193	l1.login.vip.aue.yahoo.com
www.mbna.com	209.135.59.10	X (ns1.usi.net)
www.mbna.net	209.135.59.10	X (ns1.usi.net)
www.meebo.com	208.81.191.110	X (ns1.meebo.com)
messenger.yahoo.com	68.142.194.14	myc1.msg.vip.mud.yahoo.com
www.microsoft.com	207.46.19.254	wwwbaytest2.microsoft.com
www.nationwide.co.uk	155.131.31.81	www.nationwide.co.uk
www.networksolutions.com	205.178.187.13	www.networksolutions.com
www.newegg.com	204.14.213.185	X (pdns1.ultradns.net)
online.citibank.com	199.67.181.11	myciti.com
online.wellsfargo.com	151.151.13.132	psaltery-on.wellsfargo.com
www.orange.fr	193.252.122.103	www.orange.fr.b2.fti.net
partner.googleadservices.com	74.125.155.167	px-in-f167.1e100.net
www.paypal.com	66.211.169.65	X (crocodile.ebay.com)
www.postbank.de	62.153.105.37	X (ns1.postbank.de)
www.rbs.co.uk	155.136.80.222	X (ns0-08.dns.pipex.net)
www.schwab.com	162.93.237.80	wwwschwab-vip.schwab.com
search.yahoo.com	74.6.146.119	m1.search.vip.sk1.yahoo.com
www.secureworks.com	67.107.53.168	67.107.53.168.ptr.us.xo.net
smartzone.comcast.net	76.96.58.12	webmail3.westch[...]ail.comcast.net
www.smithbarney.com	192.193.224.11	ssb.com
www.sterlingsavingsbank.com	12.19.55.215	sterlingsavingsbank.com
www.tdameritrade.com	204.58.27.97	beta-new.tdameritrade.com
tinyurl.com	195.66.135.131	a.tinyurl.com
www.torproject.org	86.59.21.36	byblos.torproject.org
us.etrade.com	198.93.34.50	us.etrade.com
www.usbank.com	170.135.216.181	usbank.biz
www.verisign.com	65.205.249.60	www.verisign.net
www.visa.com	61.9.193.184	a-61-9-193-184.[...]echnologies.com
www.wachovia.com	169.200.89.101	X (sls-ns1.wachovia.com)
www.wamu.com	159.53.62.63	X (ns1.jpmorganchase.com)
www.wellsfargo.com	151.151.13.133	psaltery-dd.wellsfargo.com
westernunion.com	206.201.228.250	www.wuagentlink.com
windowsupdate.microsoft.com	207.46.18.94	X (msnhst.microsoft.com)
wireless.att.com	135.209.168.22	origin-b2b-al[...]eless.att.com
www.yahoo.com	209.131.36.158	f1.www.vip.sp1.yahoo.com

7 popular names have a mild anomaly. The ownership suggested by the reverse name lookup does not match our understanding of the original name. The most likely cause is the site's use of a Content Delivery Network.

Name	IP Address	Reverse Name/SOA
www.bing.com	61.9.193.142	a-61-9-193-142.[...]echnologies.com
www.facebook.com	61.9.129.174	a-61-9-129-174.[...]echnologies.com
www.lloydstsb.com	141.92.130.226	X (ns0.bt.net)
www.nordea.fi	193.88.186.178	X (ns01.tdchosting.dk)
www.sears.com	118.215.209.99	X (ns1.apnic.net)
www.ticketmaster.com	125.56.180.199	X (ns1.apnic.net)
www.trendmicro.com	60.254.148.11	X (ns1.apnic.net)

2 popular names have a mild anomaly: we are unable to find a reverse name associated with the IP address provided by your ISP's DNS server. This is most likely due to a slow responding DNS server or misconfiguration on the part of the domain owner.

Name	IP Address	Reverse Name/SOA
www.bankofthewest.com	204.44.2.241	X
www.sparkasse.de	212.34.69.3	X

DNS external proxy (?): OK

Your host ignores external DNS requests.

DNS results wildcarding (?): Warning

Your ISP's DNS server returns IP addresses even for domain names which should not resolve. Instead of an error, the DNS server returns an address of 199.101.28.130, which resolves to www.bigpondsitehelp.com. You can inspect the resulting HTML content here.

There are several possible explanations for this behavior. The most likely cause is that the ISP is attempting to to profit from customer's typos by presenting advertisements in response to bad requests, but it could also be due to an error or misconfiguration in the DNS server.

The big problem with this behavior is that it can potentially break any network application which relies on DNS properly returning an error when a name does not exist.

The following lists your DNS server's behavior in more detail.

www.{random}.com is mapped to 199.101.28.130.
www.{random}.org is mapped to 199.101.28.130.
fubar.{random}.com is correctly reported as an error.
www.yahoo.cmo [sic] is mapped to 199.101.28.130.
nxdomain.{random}.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu is correctly reported as an error.

Host Properties –

System clock accuracy (?): Warning

Your computer's clock is 14 seconds slow.

Browser properties (?): OK

The following parameters are sent by your web browser to all web sites you visit:

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml; q=0.9,*/*; q=0.8
Accept Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

Java identifies your operating system as Windows Vista.

Uploaded Data (?): OK

The following additional data was uploaded by the applet:

General: The future of Second Life

2009-04-18T08:13:00.010+10:00

I have just read an interesting post by ArminasX Saiman on the latest departures of staff from Second Life.
While it is possible that these are due to the company transitioning from small start-up to large-scale operation, my skeptical mind has another opinion.

The thing about SL (Second Life) is that it is its own showcase, in other words 'what you see is what you get' a world where the user is free to create content to bend the virtual world to their own ends.
Given this, it makes sense that it is in their own best interest to make SL as high-performing a platform as possible. What we see however is a platform crippled whenever serious numbers of people are present in the whole system, and downright unusable if any significant number are gathered in one place for an event. This latter limitation is critical if SL is ever to become a virtual world to be used by business for large-scale events.
ArminasX makes note of the ability of the platform to now support 88,000+ concurrent users, but I see this advance as nothing more than the expected improvement due to the progression of hardware performance.
In short, the lack of real satisfactory performance on a platform which is its own major sales tool strongly implies to me that this implementation has hit a wall, that is there is some inescapable, insurmountable problem.
I, personally, suspect that the problem is the huge asset database rather than a network bandwidth problem and I was therefore less than surprised to see that the impending Blue Mars VR intends that 'many thousands of users will be able to simultaneously log into a single “city.”' (where a 'city' seems equivalent to an SL 'sim') but does not support user-created content, thus limiting the assets database whilst presumably requiring considerable bandwidth.
Blue Mars also does not have contiguous sims (cities) with seamless travel over boundaries, each one is discrete, which I assume means that a sims servers asset cache (I think that this exists from personal experience) will not need to import a users assets as they enter it.

Still, whatever the technical limit, back to the reasonable supposition that there must be one since the main sellling tool, the actual experience, is clearly limited.
The shareholders would obviously like a return on their investment and a big IPO would be their best bet. In order to do this they would need it to be seen by both businesses and Joe Public as a viable platform with room for growth in size, performance and stability.
If one knew that the platform as is wouldn't deliver and the shareholders want those who profess belief otherwise while they get an IPO together then, ethically, one might have to think about leaving.

Of course, they could easily prove me wrong, just fix the performance issues to prove it can be done.

General: The passing of a friend

2009-02-28T08:16:00.021+11:00

Peter Hemsley was a good friend of mine who lived in the UK.
I had known him for about thirty-eight years when we both became 'Telecoms Technician Apprentices' in British Telecom (then known as the Post Office as the same company was the national mail carrier)

During this time we both enrolled in an early computing night-class at South-East Derbyshire College of Further Education and rapidly gained skills in BASIC and PDP-8 assembler, both memory-constrained so we learnt to code lean and mean!

Later we both worked at S.E Labs in Sandiacre, Nottingham (which became a branch of Thorn EMI Datatech) in the field of instrument repair specialising in microprocessor-based instruments and analogue and digital multi-channel tape decks.

During this time and subsequently, we formed a business partnership, 'Amber Microsystems' specialising in the development of custom hardware and software. Much of our development work was carried out on Apple ][ machines which were our first (and much loved!) personal computers. I left my half of the company to Pete' when I emigrated to Australia in late 1987.

I didn't normally get a lot of email from this friend although I included him on all the techo' newsletters and occasionally sent him an update on happenings in my life.
For a couple of weeks I had email delivery failure notices from his mailbox provider and on further investigation, his domain seemed to be gone from the internet.
On last Monday (the 23rd Feb') my unease and foreboding prompted me to seek more information on his curent status.

Knowing that he was keen on Amateur Radio, I 'Googled' his name with 'RSGB', that being the body (Radio Society of Great Britain) that 'Ham' clubs are affiliated with in the UK.
Sadly, I found an obituary notice on the site of SNADARC, a club in South Normanton, a village close by his home and one of our old haunts. -

Peter Hemsley
It is with sadness we report that Peter Hemsley has passed away recently after his brave five month battle with cancer.
A floral tribute was sent on behalf of the club and members were also in attendance at the funeral service at Mansfield Crematorium.

Searching the site for confirmation that this was the same person I found some pictures that indeed seemed to be of my friend and I sent off an email with a picture I took of Peter in April for them to confirm my conclusion.

Sadly, it was indeed my friend Peter that had passed away just before Christmas after a five month battle with cancer.
When I saw him in April he was pretty ill and said that he had Emphysema (bad enough in itself) but perhaps he got re-diagnosed afterwards.
I suppose that his preference for hand-rolled filterless cigarettes may well have caught up with him finally.

He was an elegant coder with a preference for assembly language and had a particular skill with numerical methods and an intuitive grasp of manipulating numbers in binary representation.
There are still several places on the internet archiving his fast and compact PIC microcontroller routines for Square roots and Decimal Input/Output that he originally presented in Everyday and Practical Electronics magazine.
A bit of competitive fun that we both enjoyed was each taking turns trying to improve the speed or reduce the size of a piece of code until no further improvements could be made. I think the score was about even (well, that's my story and I'm sticking with it!).
He was similarly economical when it came to hardware design and contrived some very nifty microprocessor-based designs and single-sided PCB layouts with minimal interconnects.

I will miss him a lot for his sense of humour and steady friendship.

This is the last photograph I took of him as we wandered around Anchor Surplus in Nottingham in April 2008 chatting about how we used to actually work on half the old stuff there in our younger days!

General: It's Prediction-Time!

2009-02-07T09:59:00.003+11:00

It occurred to me today that now I don't do an email newsletter, I haven't made my New Year prediction this year.

Since we are already in February, I think it is appropriate to make a somewhat further-looking prediction than usual.

As you may know Copper is in seriously short supply world-wide. This has led to a lot of thefts of copper cable recently, sometimes attempted thefts of live cables worthy of Darwin Awards.

Simultaneously, our oil reserves are now on the downward side of 'peak-oil' and in any case we can't afford to burn carbon compounds and exacerbate Global Warming.

This inevitably means an ever more serious attempt to replace Internal Combustion Engines in vehicles with Electric Motors and some kind of electrical power storage.

Since putting new batteries in your vehicle every day is right out, a rechargeable power storage system is necessary and recharge-time is clearly a limiting factor if it can't be recharged in a reasonable time.

Eight hours is, in my opinion, the longest duration acceptable for recharging where a vehicle is used to it's maximum range/performance.
A vehicle that can be recharged in eight hours, adopted throughout a country clearly represents a massive load that cannot be easily distributed throughout the working day barring differences in time-zones.
The best that might be achieved is partial recharging whilst at work, but this is during the part of the day that industry makes it's heaviest demands of the power generating and distribution grid already.

With the current generation of electric vehicles, eight hours does indeed seem to be the best achievable recharge time BUT, this is on 110 Volt distribution outlets due to the limitations on maximum current. On 240 Volt outlets, this can be reduced strikingly to two and a half hours!

Once you can achieve a recharge in two and a half hours, you can also have a managed, phased recharge period in three or more 'shifts' to lighten the load on the power grid which saves building extra generating capacity just to recharge Electric Vehicles.

Given that copper house wiring may soon be impractical due to scarcity of copper, we can expect to see other materials used in this role. To achieve the same deliverable currents will require a moderate increase in wire size but to achieve a high enough current delivery for an electric vehicle revolution at 110 Volts would require a much larger diameter of wire and also present additional difficulties over those already present in working with conductors such as Aluminium.

An alternative would be to make ALL domestic 110 Volt mains three-phase, but this would have it's own complications of expensive re-work and materials as well as overcoming perceived safety issues with the higher phase to phase voltages.

For these reasons (Here comes the actual prediction!), I think it is extremely likely that within five years we will be hearing about the necessity of the USA adopting the 240 Volt standard to enable the Electric Vehicle solution to Oil shortages and Greenhouse Gases.

It is possible that in order to handle the recharging loads an even higher voltage could be chosen to reduce the cost of thicker conductors or to try and carry on with Copper conductors but of a lighter gauge. This would cost more in higher performance insulation and there would undoubtedly be a big panic about the safety aspects of voltages that are higher than any currently used. For these reasons I don't think a voltage greater than 240 Volts would be adopted.

Given the irresolute prevarication about switching to Digital TV (as if they will be any more ready in 4 months time), I can only guess what a mess the changeover to 240 Volts will be.

A sample Electric Vehicle (and a rather tasty one at that) with the recharging times documented.

General: My Australia Day

2009-01-27T12:01:00.005+11:00

First a bit of sillyness and a dance at Eloquence - http://www.flickr.com/photos/27843830@N07/3226591313/

Then off to the local club to listen to the band and watch others dance - http://www.flickr.com/photos/27843830@N07/sets/72157612983770139/

General: My 2009 so far...

2009-01-12T11:02:00.003+11:00

So far, 2009 has been a very busy year from day 1 for my wife and I.

We have been busy (but unpaid) getting to grips with multiple roles and functions at a local venue in order to re-allocate them in a more flexible distributed manner to facilitate easier management by the elected officials in the future.

I have also spent my weekends thus far assisting in the replacement of a commercial kitchen floor, which entailed dismantling and removing a lot of built-in steelwork and heavy-duty appliances, floor preparation for professionals to lay a sealed vinyl floor on a new level base, re-tiling walls, electrical and plumbing work and restoring/rebuilding all appliances and shelving.

In my 'free' time I have been seeking full-time employment as my wife is now unemployed after 33 years and I must put a steady income at the top of my priority list. Hopefully a decent income for me will allow my wife to find local low-stress employment, I know she has more than earned that lately.

I hope that your 2009 has been less hectic so far and that you prosper, despite the state of the world-wide economy.

Here's to us, Cheers!

Second Life: Thoughts on Gender in Second Life

2008-12-14T12:31:00.008+11:00

I have recently been considering the issue of gender as it affects a residents experience of Second Life. It could well be that the thoughts and conclusions I have arrived at have been thought of before or even superceded, but as far as i know they are original to me.

My consideration has led me to the belief that in terms of the depiction of gender in SL there are two functions performed by anatomical parts of the avatar. These are the sexuality component maleness and femaleness and the more identity-related femininity / womanliness and masculinity / manliness. While thinking up my theory, I mentally referred to this latter component as the 'Emblem'.

Both male and female initial avatars are devoid of any features in the crotch region other than a little pubic hair on the skin texture. This elimination of detail obviously greatly simplifies the addition of clothing layers for pants for both genders.

This presents no big problem for female residents in my theory since the vulva represents only the sexuality component of gender and the much more important identity component of gender is catered for by the female avatars breasts which are quite easily handled with clothing layers. Anyone who doubts the basis of this conjecture may care to reflect on women that they know / have known who have had health problems such as cervical cancer and those who have had breast cancer that might require mastectomy and recall which women were the more devastated and felt their identity more threatened.

Unfortunately for male residents the penis serves double-duty (yet again!) and represents both the sexuality and identity gender components and there is no alternative external physiology that can really substitute the masculine identity function so the intentional omission of a penis (etc) is at a probably sub-conscious level a source of distress for male residents. It’s not that we want to have it there all the time, but it never being there is just a constant ‘not quite right’ feeling.

I believe that this emasculation is probably the root cause for observed compensatory male avatar characteristics, unrealistic height, geeks with builds like Olympic athletes, strong "5 o'clock shadow" (since the avatar obviously shaves every morning). I am not in the least criticising any male avatars who evince any or all of these features, on the contrary, I understand completely. I think that this might even be behind some new male avatars eagerness to acquire the infamous ‘freenis’ with the justification of using it for sex, maybe it is really just an attempt to put something that they know is wrong to rights.

It's not even that any kind of 'funtionality' is necessary, but I can't help but wonder how many male residents have been lost due to the the choice of living a SL life with a neutered male identity or be thought of as a sex-fiend and get a penis

In closing, I would ask female residents who have female avatars to ask themselves: If the default female avatar was as flat as an ironing board, how long would it be (in minutes) before you went looking for boobs? ‘Frewbs’ anyone?

I welcome all comments and alternative viewpoints.

General: Songbird is now at version 1.0.0

2008-12-03T06:36:00.004+11:00

Songbird is an open-source, customisable music player.
An excerpt from today's announcement -

...
We set out to build an open, customizable music player. Today, we're launching with dozens of integrated services, hundreds of add-ons, and a growing developer community. We'll be the first to admit that there's plenty left to do. And, while we're not ready for everyone, 160k users a month are expressing their vote for an alternative music player.

We now use GStreamer as our main media playback system, across all platforms - giving us higher performance, better reliability, and a platform for much more media-related functionality in the future.
...

More...

General: My Four Cardinal Virtues Test...

2008-11-14T10:03:00.002+11:00

I think that's a good result...

(but there are no bad virtues, so try it for yourself)

Your result for The Four Cardinal Virtues Test...

The Lion

64% Temperance, 75% Prudence, 89% Fortitude and 84% Justice!

You scored 64% on Temperance, higher than 64% of your peers.
You scored 75% on Prudence, higher than 90% of your peers.
You scored 89% on Fortitude, higher than 83% of your peers.
You scored 84% on Justice, higher than 95% of your peers.

Hear you ROAR! Your virtue is FORTITUDE--that which makes you confront fear, pain, uncertainty, and violence. Yours is a virtue much desired by numerous who cringe in the face of a threat when you can very well answer it with equal violence. Your virtue is the most exciting and some might say the most empowering--who wouldn't love to be as daring as you?

Still, being brave doesn't mean you're being brainy. Just because you roar at an elephant or a stampede doesn't mean you won't get smushed. Ask Mufasa.

Take The Four Cardinal Virtues Test at HelloQuizzy

General: Boring stuff

2008-11-09T16:24:00.005+11:00

Well, not to me - New Speedbor Wood Drill Bit

...
It has been designed specifically for high speed precision drilling. In addition, it has consistently outperformed rival products in independent speed tests. Speedbor Max is a drilling phenomenon achieving a drilling speed which is six times faster than basic flat bits.
...
More Here.

SL: Second Life Magazines

2008-11-06T07:31:00.011+11:00

If you haven't had a look at Second Life yet, you may not realise how absolutely vast this virtual world is.
You would have no chance of discovering for yourself even 1% of all that is happening at any time, so obviously you need sources of information on such things.

Fortunately there is a multitude of newspapers and magazines covering events and different aspects of Second life and these are available both in-world at kiosks (usually for free) and outside Second Life on the general Internet.

Publications range from the light blog-like such as Rez Magazine, to professionally laid out full-colour pdf newspapers such as The Metaverse Messenger, a bang up-to-date sample of which you can see here announcing an in-world celebration for Obama's victory.

Perhaps the most prolific subjects for publication are the Fashion and Lifestyle magazines such as Scarborough Flair, Second Style Fashionista, Second Homes and many more.
There are even Annual publications to provide information on annual events such as the Hair Fair.

And don't forget, in Second Life you aren't limited to just changing your clothing and hairstyle but your entire body shape and skin, so you have specialist magazines such as this, to say nothing of the non-human avatar publications and articles, Fairies (well winged people anyway) and Vampires included.

For the business-minded, there are blogs by people who run both real-world and virtual-world businesses and frequently post their experiences and advice, such as ArminasX Saiman.

One thing is for sure, there is never any need to be bored when you have a Second Life, there's always something happening that will interest you and always something you can read to find out about it.

General: Bayer - Rat Of The Week

2008-11-05T08:57:00.004+11:00

Something to get you infuriated and disgusted
It happened 20 years ago, I wonder how many people died from it?

General: Wassup 2008 edition

2008-10-27T06:34:00.003+11:00

A classic internet meme revisited.

Very True, True

The original Budweiser Wassup Ad'

General: Who Knew?

2008-10-26T16:39:00.003+11:00

The Stink in Farts Controls Blood Pressure

...
The new research found that cells lining mice’s blood vessels naturally make the gas and this action can help keep the rodents’ blood pressure low by relaxing the blood vessels to prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). This gas is “no doubt” produced in cells lining human blood vessels too, the researchers said.

“Now that we know hydrogen sulfide’s role in regulating blood pressure, it may be possible to design drug therapies that enhance its formation as an alternative to the current methods of treatment for hypertension,” said Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon H. Snyder, M.D., a co-author of the study detailed in the Oct. 24th issue of the journal Science.

...

Techo: Not Quite 3D

2008-10-24T08:50:00.002+11:00

Here's a fascinating article about a new form of electron movement.
It's not something that you can try out on your kitchen table though!

...
"Working with one of the purest semiconductor materials ever made, they discovered the quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal in a device cooled at ultra-low temperatures roughly 100 times colder than intergalactic space. The material was then exposed to the most powerful continuous magnetic fields generated on Earth."
...

General: Have you ever used Google Answers?

2008-10-20T07:13:00.006+11:00

Here is an example that I found fascinating!
(And you can see the search that I used to get this at the bottom)

Question

Earth is getting a lot of space dust and meteors from space.
On the other hand our atmosphere is losing some gases.
Which one is greater? Is Earth gaining or losing?

Answer

Hello, and thanks for the question.

According to Jeff Brown at Washington State University,
several hundred tons of meteorites enter the Earth's
atmosphere every day. The total amount per year can range
from 10 million to 1 billion kilograms.
A lot of this is just dust or micrometeorites, but it adds up.

For example, let's say an average of 500 million kilograms
a year has landed on Earth over the past 10,000 years.
That's 5 trillion kilograms. Or 5 billion metric tons.
That might seem like a lot, but the total mass of the Earth
is over 5 x 1021 metric tons! (That's a 5 with 21 zeroes.)

The Earth also loses mass in several ways.
All the time, we're losing light elements, mostly hydrogen,
from the atmosphere.
In a study
"PLANETARY SCIENCE:ON THE SOLAR WIND AND ATMOSPHERE EROSION"
(http://scienceweek.com/st16.htm )
The author points out that
"....at present the Earth loses matter at a rate of 1 to 3
kilograms per second, the rate and composition varying with
solar cycle (sunspot cycle).
Recent measurements (K. Seki et al, Science 291:1939 2001)
suggest the rate is lower than this, but even with a net
loss of 3 kilograms per second, it would take 50 billion
years to deplete the Earth's atmosphere and at least another
15 trillion years to evacuate the oceans.
For comparison, the total lifetime of the Sun is only
approximately 10 billion years."

Assuming the worst case from this study, say we lose
3kg/second.
That works out at: 3*60secs*60mins*24hours*365.25days or
94,672,800 Kg/year

So to answer your question, over long periods of time we gain
more from "space dust" and asteroids than we lose from the
escape of gases, but in some years it may be a net loss.

But gas escape is not the only way we lose mass.
Another way the Earth loses mass is through radioactive decay.
The Earth's interior is peppered with radioactive elements
such as uranium, thorium and potassium 40.
These radioactive elements are mixed in with other rock.
Granite, for example, can contain as much as four grams per
ton of uranium and 13 grams per ton of thorium.
As these radioactive elements decay, they give off heat and
in the process of releasing this energy, the elements also
lose mass.

Gary Collins, who is a physicist  at WSU, says …
"it should be possible to figure out approximately how much
mass is lost, but it would be a difficult calculation"

Taken from: "Ask Dr Universe: The Big Questions" at
(http://www.wsu.edu/DrUniverse/earth4.html )

And "space dust" and meteorites are not the only ways we
gain mass. For one, Earth gains a tiny amount of mass from
the "solar wind," the stream of charged particles from the
Sun's corona. This varies wildly, as you’ll find from the
NASA site on the solar wind here:
"The Solar Wind"
(http://science.msfc.nasa.gov/ssl/pad/solar/sun_wind.htm )

Hope that answers your question,
but if you need clarification, just ask.

willie-ga

Google search used
earth mass gain loss

General: Virtual Worlds becoming mainstream

2008-10-20T06:54:00.002+11:00

There's a VERY big seminar on in London Monday and Tuesday.

"Virtual Worlds London, 20-21 October 2008, is the leading European event for businesses seeking to understand and maximize business strategies within virtual worlds. VW London is presented by Virtual Worlds News, the VW business news authority. Virtual Worlds London takes place at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre two blocks from Parliament."

The list of companies sending speakers is impressive all by itself!
Some big name companies you might not think are interested in virtual worlds, but they certainly are.

Featured Speakers

Christian Ahlert, Owner, OpenBusiness.cc, MiniBar
Dave Anderson, Head of Interactive, BBC Worldwide
Tony Bicknell, Director, Futuresource
Justin Bovington, CEO, Rivers Run Red
Corey Bridges, Executive Producer, Multiverse
Nic Brisbourne, Partner, DFJ Esprit LLP
David Burden, Managing Director, Daden Limited
Pierre-Oliver Carles, Stonfield Inworld
Mirko Caspar, Chief Marketing Officer, Metaversum GmbH
Bruno Cerboni, Virtual Italian Parks, Chief Executive Officer
Jesse Cleverly, Head of Co-Production and Acquisitions, Drama and Animation Dept, BBC Children's
Harvey Cohen, Founder and President, Strategy Analytics
Victoria Coleman, Vice President, Samsung Electronics
Chris Collins, Director, Enterprise Systems Business
Guy de Beer, CEO, Playcast Media Systems Ltd.
Bruce Damer, Executive Director, Contact Consortium - Virtual Worlds Roadmap SIG
Dick Davies, Executive Producer, Ambient Performance
Francesco D'Orazio, Founder and CEO, Myrl LTD
Rob Edmonds, senior consultant, eLearning and virtual worlds, SRI Consulting Business Intelligence
Ron Edwards, CEO, Ambient Performance
Celia Francis, CEO, WeeWorld
Rohan Freeman, CEO, Sine Wave Company
Matt Furman, Software Engineer, Northrop Grumman
Jim Gatto, Section Leader for Intellectual Property, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP
Phil Guest, UK Managing Director, Sulake
Adrienne Haik, Chief Operations Officer, Metaversatility
Tracy Harper, Interactive Brand Manager, Orange
Mimi Harris, Communications Director, Rivers Run Red
John Hengeveld, Senior Business Strategist, Intel
Martin Herdina, CEO, Fatfoogoo AG
Adam Hildreth, Founder and President, Crisp
Jonathan Himoff, Founder and CEO, Rezzable Productions
Dan Hon, Co-founder and CEO, Six to Start
Bernard Horan, Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Labs
Chris Howard, Manager, Emerging 3D Internet & Virtual Business, IBM Research
Ian Hughes/epredator, Metaverse Evangelist, IBM
Bruce Joy, Founder and CEO, VastPark
Rupert Key, Director of Engineering, Malden Labs
Mark Kingdon, Chief Executive Officer, Linden Lab
Divinia Knowles, Head Of Operations & Financial Controller, Mind Candy
Roland Legrand, Chief Internet & New Media at Mediafin, Author at mixedrealities.com
Jeroen Matser, Strategy Director, Tribal DDB London
Karl Mehta, Co-Founder & CEO, PlaySpan
Jean Miller, German Market Development Manager, Linden Lab
Peter Mills, Chief Health Officer, Cigna
Nic Mitham, CEO, K Zero
Philippe Moitroux, CEO, TAATU
Claus Nehmzow, VP, Virtual Worlds/Immersive Experiences Practice Group, Method
Greg Nuyens, CEO, Qwaq
Kim Plowright, Production Manager, Oil Productions Ltd.
Jeffrey Pope, Executive Vice President, ngi Group Ventures / 3Di
Steve Prentice, VP & Gartner Fellow, Gartner
Jim Purbrick, Senior Developer, Linden Lab
Andrew (Roo) Reynolds, Portfolio Executive for Social Media, BBC Vision
Fiona 'Foe' Romeo, Head of Digital Media, National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory
Dave Rolston, PhD, Chairman and CEO, Forterra, Inc.
Cindy H. Rose, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Walt Disney Internet Group EMEA
Nikolai Roth, VP Sales, Weblin / zweitgeist GmbH
Andrew Schneider, Founder & President, Live Gamer
Joey Seiler, Editor, VirtualWorldsNews.com & Virtual Worlds Weekly
Dr. Yesha Y. Sivan, Shenkar College Software Department, Metaverse Labs. Ltd.
Christopher V. Sherman, Founder, Virtual Worlds Management
Rob Smart, Emerging Technology Specialist, IBM Hursley
Carlos Domingo Soriano, Director for Internet and Multimedia, Telefónica R&D
Hanno Tietgens, TUEV NORD 3D Consultant, Buero X Media Lab
Henrik Torstensson is VP Business Development of Stardoll
Sibley Verbeck, CEO, The Electric Sheep Company
Niniane Wang, Engineering Manager, Lively Engineering Lead, Google, Inc.
Keith Weiner, CEO and co-founder, Nortel DiamondWare
Dolf Wittkamper, Senior Director, Philips Design
David Wortley, Director , Serious Games Institute, Coventry University
Alex Wrottesley, Co-Founder, Near

Techo: Buckypaper!

2008-10-19T12:58:00.002+11:00

An amazing material!

Here's an excerpt -

Future planes, cars may be made of `buckypaper'

...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - It's called "buckypaper" and looks a lot like ordinary carbon paper, but don't be fooled by the cute name or flimsy appearance. It could revolutionize the way everything from airplanes to TVs are made.

Buckypaper is 10 times lighter but potentially 500 times stronger than steel when sheets of it are stacked and pressed together to form a composite. Unlike conventional composite materials, though, it conducts electricity like copper or silicon and disperses heat like steel or brass.

"All those things are what a lot of people in nanotechnology have been working toward as sort of Holy Grails," said Wade Adams, a scientist at Rice University.

...

General: Squashed Philosophers

2008-10-19T07:50:00.002+11:00

Now this is a very nifty site,
A Readers Digest version of the thoughts of the great philosophers.

As the site says -

Glyn Hughes'
SQUASHED PHILOSOPHERS

THE BOOKS WHICH DEFINED THE WAY WE THINK NOW.
Their own ideas, in their own words, neatly honed into little half-hour or so reads.
"Like reading the bible without all the begats" - Jim Curtis

General: You'll be glad you read this...

2008-10-16T06:59:00.006+11:00

Well what do you know, it turns out that -

web-browsing is good for the brain!

All the goodness of reading and more!

General: Daylight Saving

2008-10-04T19:33:00.004+10:00

Most Aussies will need to put their clocks forward at 2AM tomorrow morning.
(I'm sure most of us do it before we go to bed, Shhhh!)

Here is a possible downside to the practice (typo's and all) -

"When I was a kid we never had drought after drought.
Then we started with daylight saving.
We started with a little bit, but now we have six months of the year daylight saving.
it has just become tpp for the environment to cope with.
It is so logical, for six months of the year we hqve an extra hour each day of that hot afternoon sun.
I read somewhere that scientiic studies had shown there is a lot less moisture in the atmosphere which means we get less rain.
I believe this extra one hour is slowly evaporating all the moisture out of everything.
Whycan't the Governmentget the CSIRO to do studieson this, or better still get rid of daylight savings.
They gave to do something before itis too late."

This comment was sent to a newspaper.

Techo: 4 Teraflop in a 1U rack-space!

2008-10-01T13:08:00.004+10:00

Now that's Impressive!

...
With the world’s first teraflop many-core processor, the NVIDIA^® Tesla™ S1070 computing system speeds the transition to energy-efficient parallel computing.
With 960 processor cores and a standard C compiler that simplifies application development, Tesla S1070 scales to solve the world’s most important computing challenges—more quickly and accurately.

Feeding HPC Industry’s Relentless Demand for Performance.
Keeps pace with the increasing demands of the toughest computing challenges including drug research, oil and gas exploration and computational finance.

Many-core Architecture Delivers Optimum Scaling across HPC Applications.
Parallel performance from 960 cores capable of concurrent execution of thousands of computing threads and scalable architecture meets computational demands of applications whose complexity has outstripped the CPU’s ability to solve them.
...

Which leads to things like This -

Evolved Machines is reverse-engineering brain circuits to develop a new paradigm for device technology. Their research work requires the large-scale simulation of neuro biologically realistic neural circuits which require enormous parallel computing capacity. Simulation of a single neuron involves 200,000,000 differential equation evaluations per second, requiring approximately 4 gigaflops. A neural array engaged in sensory processing requires thousands of neurons, thus, the detailed simulation of neural systems in real time requires more than 10 teraflops of computing power.
...

General: I Used To Believe....

2008-09-26T06:51:00.004+10:00

A great little web site - http://www.iusedtobelieve.com/

About the site, in it's own words -

I Used To Believe is a funny and bizarre collection of ideas that adults thought were true when they were children. It will remind you what it was like to be a child, fascinated and horrified by the world in equal parts. The following pages will reassure you that the things you used to believe weren't so strange after all...

You can add your own to the site. If you think your beliefs were strange, check out our most common beliefs and discover that you're not alone! We also provide RSS feeds if you like that sort of thing. There are currently 63841 beliefs on the site.

Some areas of this site contain content which is not suitable for children.

Techo: Running Leopard on your PC

2008-09-20T10:47:00.004+10:00

It seems I have the right hardware and it sure looks easy.

Review: EFiX Dongle Perfectly Transforms PC to Mac

When we first heard about EFiX—a simple USB dongle that'll let you magically install Leopard on your PC—it sounded too fantastic to be true. Well, I used it to turn my gaming PC into a Mac Pro over the weekend, and I'm somewhat amazed to say this, but it works perfectly.

I grabbed all the updates straight from Apple—including 10.5.5 last night, so you don't have to wait for a hacked patch like you would running a typical Hackintosh—installed a whole bunch of software and have been using it for several days. It runs beautifully, just like a real Mac Pro.

The Process

...

General: An Explanation about Second Life

2008-09-17T14:15:00.003+10:00

An interesting article by Kate Amdahl to explain Second Life to those who think it is not something they would be interested in, but don't know much about it.

The Web Was Young Once, Too: Why Even Non-Residents Should Take Second Life Seriously

An extract -

For many of us Second Life residents, Second Life is an enormous and important part of our lives. But plenty of people who don't use Second Life don't understand what the attraction could possibly be, and maybe think of it as more like soap operas or Dungeons & Dragons, just a trivial hobby or entertainment or toy. Here's a piece to help someone like that understand why they might want to take Second Life at least a little seriously.

The first thing to realize is that Second Life isn't a toy: it's an environment. As David Kirkpatrick puts it (I'll mention him again in a minute), "It's not a game, it's just a place you go to do whatever you want to do."

Second Life can be much more than entertainment or a way to relax, but entertainment and relaxation are a big part of it. The thing to realize is that unlike television or video games (for instance), Second Life is an active, social way to relax. We Second Life residents spend a lot of our time talking to other resis, sometimes just shooting the breeze but sometimes having serious conversations. We explore, learn, question, create, design, teach, and grow as people.

Here are some examples of the many, many, many things in Second Life that make it meaningful and important.

...

(David Kirkpatrick is the senior editor of Fortune magazine)

General: Charles gets an Apology!

2008-09-15T21:03:00.010+10:00

Who would have guessed this was ever going to happen?

Charles Darwin to receive apology from the Church of England for rejecting evolution

"Sections of Church likely to be dismayed by Darwin move" - You Think?

SL: A party for Plurkers (not plonkers)

2008-09-15T12:12:00.006+10:00

Today (actually Sunday 1PM SLT) there was a gathering for Second Lifers on Plurk to meet one another avatarically.

Here is a sample shot (totally bananas!)

Techo: MS will make Hyper-V a free download!

2008-09-09T08:36:00.005+10:00

It seems they definitely want control of the virtualisation market from VMware.
I suspect that is so that there are no backdoors owned by anyone else that can be used to subvert their security/DRM so they can forge ahead with their content provider plans.

Anyway, more on this story Here.

General: A bit of crowing

2008-09-05T11:32:00.005+10:00

Now we just want more reasonably-priced BD recorders for faster and easier archival backups.

General: The Demo Scene is alive and well!

2008-09-03T09:54:00.007+10:00

It's Demo's like this that remind how much I love coding and inspire me to update my skills.

That demo is one of many entries in the Nvidia 8800 based NVScene 2008.

Whatever hardware you have, PC, Amiga, Atari-ST, Commodore 64 etc' (what? no Mac?), there will be something here to blow your socks off!

More Demo sites here, here and here, Enjoy!

General: The Google Browser arrives!

2008-09-02T16:37:00.004+10:00

Here is the BBCs short piece on the new browser.
Here is the Comic Book Presentation from Google, and here's the explanation of it.

Things are going to get tougher for MS, just when they were planning to catch up with Firefox.

Techo: The new Homebrew!

2008-08-29T16:16:00.008+10:00

A successor to the GP2x series of open-source handheld gaming devices.
Best thing of all is that GP2X is far from dead, all that has to be done is recompiling of GP2X Homebrew.

Not a bad specification either.
The Linux-powered device (running its own GP2X distribution) has an Arm9 533mHZ processor, 3D Accelerator and 64 MB of ram, 1GB of built-in NAND flash memory, an external SD card slot, and a single USB 2.0 connection.
It has a LiIon battery built-in, a place for the stylus, and a nice 2.8" OLED touch screen panel with a resolution of 320 by 240 (QVGA).
The most interesting thing is the Flash Player (Flash 7.0 compatible) and the planned release of commercial games.
If everything works out as planned, it will be shipped in mid October.

More info' here and on the linked pages.

General: More Mozilla!

2008-08-28T09:13:00.004+10:00

A Second-Life and Plurk friend Twinkles has just pointed out a new Mozilla program, Songbird to me.

Some Info' on it -

The Open Music Player

Songbird is an open-source customizable music player that's under active development.

We're working on creating a non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music. There are lots of ways to contribute your time to the project. We'd love your help!

There are several features we're proud of, but we'll be the first to admit that others need ironing out, are experimental, or are just plain missing. There's still a lot to do.

It is a 16.2 MB download for Windows (XP and Vista), and is also available for Linux (i686 and x86_64) and Mac (OS X Intel).

General: Winners of the 'Extend Firefox' contest

2008-08-25T12:41:00.003+10:00

Some nifty add-ons here.
I like the look of Pencil and Fire.fm.

General: Free Fonts

2008-08-19T08:28:00.008+10:00

I was just looking for a decent Script Calligraphy font
I eventually picked seven free ones from dozens here.

I chose:

Chopin,
Jane_Austen,
Freebooter,
Gabrielle,
Exmouth,
Henry_Morgan
Scriptina.

Your needs and/or tastes may be different but I'm sure they'll have whatever you want.

Start Here if you want to see all the choices in all font styles.

Techo: Free Hex Editor/Inspector

2008-08-18T13:57:00.009+10:00

Rather nice and available for free Here.
It features support for all basic data types, Endian-ness, File, Memory and Disk sector editing and Explorer integration.

Click the picture for a larger image of the tool as I'm using it in Vista.

There are Standard, Professional and Ultimate version too (for increasing prices).

General: Recipe Time again

2008-08-12T07:21:00.007+10:00

I thought I’d share a bunch of interesting recipes and food-related stuff that unexpectedly came my way this morning whilst Plurking and catching up on emails.

For the bread-makers, this Irish Soda Bread looks like something different and suitable for soups in cold weather (although Tarissa - likes Stilton and Strawberry jam on hers).

Of course, you’ll probably prefer some soup to go with your Soda Bread.
Here is a wonderful mouth-watering collection of soups.
I found those when Century 21 sent me a link to a recipe for Spicy Moroccan Vegetable Soup.

A popular topic on Plurk lately has been BaconSalt, Their motto is “Everything should taste like Bacon”.

Some folk might be taking that idea a little too far though!

Techo: A goody for the Embedded Dev's

2008-08-09T11:52:00.006+10:00

Here's a nice thing - LinuxStamp!

An open-source design, but you can buy one ready-built for only US $120 anyway.

Features:
* Atmel AT91RM9200 processor (Arm9 processor with MMU, 180Mhz operation)
* 32MB SDRAM (Only limited by 1x 54-TSOP SDRAM chip)
* 8MB SPI Dataflash
* 1x 10/100 Ethernet
* 1x USB host port (allows wifi adapters, flash drives and other USB devices to be used)
* 1x SD card slot
* Serial debug port access through FTDI USB/Serial converter
* JTAG port
* 2-Layer PCB design
* POE capable (48v -> 5v Power supply can be implemented on a motherboard)

I'll definitely be considering this for my future projects.

Mind you, Hammer and Nails is good too.

General: Global Warming stopped a decade ago

2008-08-09T10:53:00.002+10:00

Really, but there's money and power in it for some people, so you don't hear about it much!

More info' Here and Here.

And if it's a slow day for you, plenty more controversial stuff Here!

General: The Fastest System on Planet Earth!

2008-08-08T21:03:00.002+10:00

Brace yourselves...

It's running Vista!

A part of the exciting Assembly 2008, see the system Here.

General: Bob Geldof and Bono aren't happy

2008-08-08T09:47:00.003+10:00

Me neither (but a lot fewer people care about that).

The G8 are halfway through the period of their promises, but only 14% of the way to meeting their declared goals.

Maybe if I sign up here, I can make at least a small difference.

Here is the full report.

General: Tron 2, A sneak peek

2008-08-07T07:35:00.001+10:00

It even has (an older) Jeff Bridges in it!

Here you go!

General: Did you see "The 6th Day"?

2008-08-06T19:21:00.003+10:00

That's the movie about cloning, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
How far off did you think 'Re-Pet', recreating loved pets, was?

Wrong, it's NOW!

Bring back Lassie and Rin-Tin-Tin

General: Oh great, more shoddy services

2008-08-06T12:41:00.002+10:00

Just what we need, US programming at sub-Standard-Definition (below free to air TV resolution) so the low bandwidth requirements won't make Telstra et al get off their arse any time soon to provide REAL broadband at sane prices.

Read about this crap here

Techo: A Larrabee primer

2008-08-06T08:51:00.004+10:00

A handy set of links from Blues News -

Intel details future 'Larrabee' graphics chip.
Intel's Larrabee Architecture Disclosure: A Calculated First Move.
Intel's Larrabee Architecture previews on HEXUS.net, PC Perspective, and Tech ARP.
Intel’s Line of Graphics Chips Could Have Broader Uses.

I'b be surprised if this super-CPU (not a GPU) didn't kick ass with Michael Abrash on the design team!
As Anand says in the article linked above:-

For those who haven't idolized Abrash, his Wikipedia entry helps explain his luminary status in the game industry:

"Michael Abrash is a highly regarded technical writer, and one of the top optimization and 80x86 assembly language programmers, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. Before getting into technical writing, Abrash was a game programmer, having written his first commercial game in 1982. After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. Some of the technology behind Quake is documented in Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book. After Quake was released, Abrash returned to Microsoft to work on natural language research, then moved to the Xbox team, until 2001. In 2002, Abrash went to work for RAD Game Tools, where he co-wrote the advanced Pixomatic software renderer, which emulates the functionality of a DirectX 7-level graphics card and is used as the software renderer in such games as Unreal Tournament 2004."

General: for those who miss the newsletter

2008-08-05T13:51:00.004+10:00

Just for a change, I'll not send you chasing links for this story I received by email today.
(Thanks Rufus)

Starting in 1941, increasing numbers of British airmen found themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape Now obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful, accurate map, one showing not only where-stuff-was, but also showing the locations of 'safe houses' a POW on-the-lam could go to for food and shelter.

Paper maps had real drawbacks: they make a lot of noise when you open and fold them, they wear-out rapidly, and if they get wet, they turn into mush.
Someone in the MI-5 branch (one hopes it was the youthful incarnation of 'Q'!), got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It's durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads and unfolded as man times as needed, and makes no noise whatever.

At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd. When approached by HM Government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort.

By pure coincidence, Waddington's was also the U.K. licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, 'games and pastimes' was a category of item qualified for insertion into 'CAR packages' dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war of all belligerents.

Under strictest secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were located (Red Cross packages were delivered to prisoners in accordance with that same regional system). When processed, these maps could be folded into such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece.

As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also managed to add: A playing token containing a small magnetic compass A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian and French currency hidden within the piles of Monopoly money! British and American air crews were advised, before taking off on their first missions, on how to identify a 'rigged' Monopoly set - by means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking square!

Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, perhaps one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets. Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely - HM Government might want to use this highly successful ruse in another, future war.

The story wasn't declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony.

At any rate, it's always nice when you can play that 'Get Out of Jail Free' card.

General: And they sell Corona

2008-08-05T11:34:00.003+10:00

Pretty progressive!

I guess you can't say you weren't warned if you come out loaded.

More great signage here.

General: More free music

2008-08-03T10:46:00.003+10:00

An interesting find this morning, The Hamster Alliance.

The free music downloads page is here.

I'm quite enjoying giving the speakers a workout with "Chell's Revenge".

General: My Saturday Morning

2008-08-02T15:59:00.007+10:00

This Saturday was a working-Bee at the Hazelbrook Bowling and Sporting Club, likely to soon be renamed Club Hazelbrook.
(I suggested "Club Hazo'", that being the local idiom for our village, but they weren't convinced ;-)

This effort was mainly to replace the protective surround on one of the bowling greens to prevent damage to bowls travelling at speed off of the edge of the green.
This typically occurs when a bowler 'Drives' the bowl to try and clear opponents bowls away from the Jack (small white ball).
Seemingly an increasingly common gambit with the younger men now entering the game!

Astroturf Adhesive is some of the stickiest stuff around, and even trickier to work with in large quantities.

A float full of Astroturf adhesive, once you start you can't stop, because you can't put the float down with it stuck to your glove!

Anyway, Here are some pictures to give you an impression of the day.

Techo: Now That's Cool!

2008-08-01T07:22:00.002+10:00

First they immerse it in liquid helium to cool it to 3 degrees Kelvin (Absolute).
Then they run the refrigeration unit to take it down to 10 milli-Kelvin!

Your encryption keys won't be safe for much longer - read about it here.

General: Oops! ... Well it'll probably be O.K. ...

2008-07-31T09:30:00.004+10:00

Five tiny mistakes that became Huge Catastrophes - Click Me

There are many interesting little gems scattered throughout the story, so it's well worth a read.

General: The taming of the Shrew

2008-07-30T11:58:00.002+10:00

Easy, buy it a drink (that always works ;-)

Here's the little imbiber and friend 'Slow Loris'.

General: Who likes a good 'B' picture?

2008-07-28T15:23:00.002+10:00

Here are quite a few of them, from the SL wedding of Baldric and Emmanuel!

Techo: CPU Usage 1%

2008-07-28T14:01:00.002+10:00

Yes, well you'll get that with 64-bit Windows Server 2008 Datacenter...
IF you have 64 processors and 2 TiB (2,048 GiB) of RAM!

Much more on Pushing the Limits of Windows Physical Memory, for the many varieties of Windows, by the cluey Mark Russinovich here.

General: Celebration Central

2008-07-27T06:03:00.008+10:00

Well, 'Saturday night and Sunday morning' indeed!
Saturday night Carol and I went to another Christmas in July at the local lawn bowls club.
There were about 80 guests and a great time was had by all.

I had to go at 10PM though to get a bit of a rest, ready for Sunday morning.
Sunday morning 1:30 AM that is, to attend a wedding in Second Life, 9AM Saturday their time.

This was a first for me but I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
Unless you were there you couldn't imagine how serious and significant an event it was with no detail overlooked, thanks to great work by a lot of people.
The minister was an actual real-life minister and it is a real relationship in both worlds, SL and RL.
The ceremony was in both text and Audio, so those of us so equipped got to hear them both making their vows and the minister declaring them married, definitely a Kleenex moment!

I got a heap of pictures of the wedding and reception, so have a look here.

Congratulations and best wishes for a long and happy future to Mr and Mrs Garfunkel!
(Well, I'm not sure if you actually can change your surname in SL, but you get the idea)

Update: The offocial photo's are here, That's me in piccy number three.

General: Christmas In July, #1

2008-07-20T10:34:00.004+10:00

We were invited to a friend's Christmas In July party (a Blue Mountains tradition) last night.
I got a little virtual dancing practice in first, but there was no actual dancing as it turned out.
Still, I did get to sit on Santa's knee and got a prezzy from the Secret-Santa pile.

Piccies Here for those who're interested.

Techo: Opening up TWO cans of Wupass!

2008-07-18T13:32:00.003+10:00

On Intel, AMD/ATI and Nvidia.
Maybe PC prices will drop further with a bit of luck!

Email evidence unveiled in NVIDIA/ATI price fixing civil action

EU Files New Charges Against Intel

General: Now I'M feeling very depressed!

2008-07-18T09:58:00.002+10:00

Blue - http://www.bluesnews.com/ - puts down my 1.5Mbps broadband in no uncertain terms!

"Just in time for all these E3 movies, my cable bandwidth was quietly upped, and I am now getting staggering 31 Mb/s downloads, close to 4 MB a second.
This makes it more apparent than ever that in this brave new internet world, my old 1.5 Mb/s connection probably doesn't even qualify as broadband, as it was not really capable of downloading a lot of these clips, much less streaming them.
Back in the day we had a joke about "Low Ping Bastards," but I think that's much too kind a description of the connection I'm currently enjoying."

General: I'm not getting you down am I?

2008-07-18T09:18:00.003+10:00

That would be 'Marvin, the Paranoid Android' of course.
If you want to own a bit of Douglas Adams memorabilia, this will certainly fit the bill, a very big bill though, $25,000 !
http://gizmodo.com/5025757/douglas-adams-hitchhikers-guide-typewriter-up-for-sale

Not that there's really much funny about mental health issues, they can happen to anyone, we're just lucky they only cause suicide in under 1% of us!
J.K. Rowlings experience, for instance -
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Depression/story?id=4542880&page=1

Still, it's not surprising individuals in trouble get overlooked by society when 3,600 mental patients can vanish in a single mental institution! (and then be discovered) -
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=5379962

Scary stories, all of them. Now do you feel lucky?

Techo: SSDs not quite so bad as first thought

2008-07-16T09:32:00.008+10:00

Toms Hardware has taken note of criticism of their SSD/HDD battery-life evaluation, such as this one by George Ou that I read some days ago -
http://www.formortals.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/81/Default.aspx

Here is Toms Hardware's apology and revised evaluation -
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/15/toms-hardware-rescinds-ssd-power-test-finds-them-more-efficien/

This time, George gives then an 'A-' instead of an 'F' -
http://www.formortals.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/83/Default.aspx

The more important thing, imo, is the differences between Single-Level Cells and Multi-Level Cells (SLC and MLC) used in Flash memories.
MLC is inferior in performance, but cheaper to make, so guess which one the manufacturers want to foist on us?

I vented (just a little bit) here -
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=89349
I'll tell you right now,
MLC is the HD/DVD of SSDs, SLC is the Blu-Ray of SSDs.
People just won't settle for cheaper but inferior, no matter how many profit dollar signs are in the vendors eyes.
They might as well get used to it and concentrate on SLC and bring the price down by total market dominance, that works!

Techo: Nvidia price-cuts, no surprise there...

2008-07-16T08:59:00.006+10:00

Except for Nvidia who are probably sobbing their socks off that that they aren't making the profit they expected due to unexcpectedly stiff competition from AMD/ATI.

Here's the news -
http://gizmodo.com/5024873/top+end-nvidia-geforce-gtx-280-260-graphics-cards-get-huge-price-cut
Nvidia's top end GeForce GTX 260 and 280 graphics cards ... launched for $399 and $650, respectively, less than a month ago.
But pressure from ATI has driven Nvidia to already cut the price, hard.
The GTX 280 is now only $399, while the GTX 260 is $299, the same price as ATI's HD 4870.
Good to see ATI back in the fight.
Anyone already buy this and feel hosed though? Competition is a lovely thing.

And here's a pre-pricecut story, by a fellow Blue Mountains resident, on why ATI cards caned Nvidia so hard -
http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00034.htm

General: Worlds Oldest Blogger Signs-Off

2008-07-16T08:42:00.002+10:00

The worlds oldest blogger, an Australian woman has passed away.
Here is the story and a short extract -

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080714/wr_nm/blogger_oldest_dc

CANBERRA (Reuters) - An Australian woman renowned as the world's oldest blogger has died at the age of 108, with her last posting talking about her ailing health but also how she still sings a happy song every day.
Olive Riley, of Woy Woy about 50 miles north of Sydney, began blogging in February last year, sharing stories from her life during the two world wars, raising three children on her own, and working as a station cook in the outback.
...

Read her Blog 'The Life of Riley' here -
http://www.allaboutolive.com.au/

SL: Ruthed!

2008-07-15T14:48:00.017+10:00

I finally found the missing piece of the OpenSim on Vista puzzle, you have to run the Opensim server as Administrator, even when you already ARE an Administrator. Gee, thanks for such priveleges, Microsoft.

Sadly, the XP build I have worked on is looking like it has low-level stability issues as it is a machine that I resurrected from a major crash in order to get somebody's data back from it.
I think I'll have to re-install from scratch, which kind of tempts me to use Linux instead.
Darn, it's one learning curve after another.

So, now I have 65,536 square metres of ocean that I can terraform to my hearts desire. I will have a 15,000 Prim budget and no network lag or unexpected Sim outages (I hope).
If I get confident and the traffic cost isn't too insane, I might even try connecting to the OSGrid to share the place.

This is a 'tiny' 63x62 metre block I raised from the seabed to learn the land tools (after I built an atoll first). 3,900 square metres and no land tax to pay, lovely!

Until I manage to port my Second Life inventory across, I will probably remain 'Ruth', the default Second Life avatar.

Porting stuff across will, of course, be restricted to stuff I have permissions to, but hopefully won't be too hard once I part with 14 Euros (about AUD $22) to these guys -

http://www.secondinventory.com/

Thanks to mentor and all-round nice person Moggs for that heads-up -

http://moggsoceanlane.blogspot.com/

Incidentally, it turns out that you don't have to do Second Life scripting exclusively in LSL (Linden Scripting Language) as it is based on .Net/Mono.

You can also use C#, Java, VBScript (On Windows) and more, so long as you put a comment on the first line to identify the language.

http://lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=Mono

Some caveats however -

http://www.theseventhsun.com/7thSun_Vol2No2_gigsCorner-registered.pdf

But that won't stop the .Net fans from networking in Second Life -

http://www.sldnug.net/

SL: Noddy's Guide to Opensim Setup

2008-07-14T12:07:00.002+10:00

I had the passing thought to Google 'Opensim Vista' to see if others had problems with the installation.
I'm happy to say I found a nice hand-holding guide -
http://www.virtualwhite.com/?p=9

It starts off -

"If you’ve have ever wanted your own Second Life Island/Estate but didn’t want to pay the $1700 bucks plus $300/month fees for it, then this tutorial series is for you. I will take you through downloading, installing, and configuring an Opensim standalone server on Windows Vista using the community edition of MySQL. It is all free of charge thanks to many others who are forging a freely available virtual world platform."

It shouldn't be hard now.

Also, I don't see why these instructions won't work on XP too, so I intend setting up the OpenSim server on an older PC on my home network. Then I might be able to connect to the OpenGrid.

General: Petrol $8/Litre - Bring it on!

2008-07-12T13:59:00.007+10:00

I have made no secret for my disgust at the Dickensian attitude of employers to teleworking.
They aren't happy if they can't see people at desks like some 21st century counting-house.
It's not like they don't have a million metrics to measure employee productivity that have nothing at all to do with where the employee is located.

NO clerical work not actually requiring personal contact with other people should require the worker to leave home in this day and age.

Get rid of that stupid fixation and see how much fuel consumption, traffic congestion, car-parking and time wasted on pointless travel is eliminated.

And it's not just workers, get a load of this video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Do you really need to send a kid to school for them to do P.E.? of course not.
Since they can get all the information and explanation in detail on any subject in the world these days, how many hours could we cut off the school day and leave them plenty of hours of daylight for play and social interaction and forming friendships.
Schools aren't so much there for the kids as for the parents to have a place to send them while they both go out to work.
Maybe the fuel crisis (real or a marketing ploy) will help drive initiatives like this one -
http://www.schome.ac.uk/wiki/Main_Page

General: Starry Starry Night

2008-07-12T10:40:00.003+10:00

Here is a rather nice video of a recreation of Vincents work with the soundtrack accompanying it.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=LxVDVggLqsA
A lot of skilled work packed into 4 minutes.

SL: Linden aren't the only Virtual World makers

2008-07-08T09:10:00.009+10:00

Introducing a new category "SL:" to make finding relevant articles easier for my Second Life friends.

I have been looking at an alternative to Second Life where I can host my own virtual world just for practicing building etc with no lag or outages.
The project I found was OpenSim -
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

Wikipedia has more on Open Simulator -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSimulator

Here is some info' on setting it up -
http://opensimuser.wordpress.com/2008/06/15/opensim-install-and-configuration-tutorial/

I'm still in the throes of getting it set up right, but meanwhile, I disovered that there is another project which ties all these private virtual world servers together in a grid -
http://osgrid.org/index.php?page=home&btn=1

A handy place for getting a quick overview of all this is - http://planet.opensim.us/
(not often you see a '.us' suffix)

Lest you think all this Second Life stuff is just a game and not a genuine virtual reality, I will mention that I got offered a full-time Real Life/Second Life job last week as a scripter (programmer) on a major project with a real company, I think I'm going for it.

General: That's not a big mug of coffee...

2008-07-07T11:09:00.004+10:00

That's ballast in the making! ;-)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080705/ap_on_re_us/lawn_chair_balloonist
Man flying lawn chair lifted by Helium balloons
...
Too bad Mythbusters found it so hard to do!

General: I'll drink to that!

2008-07-05T17:22:00.002+10:00

I'm glad I downloaded Firefox 3 as soon as it was available, it is much faster then IE7 on Vista 32.
Just a few other people like it too apparently -

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-9983245-92.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Guinness bestows download record on Firefox

(Over 8 million downloads in 24 hours)

Techo: Don't rush to buy an SSD for your notebook

2008-07-05T09:31:00.002+10:00

Toms Hardware dishes the dirt on SSD power consumption -

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html
The SSD Power Consumption Hoax :
Flash SSDs Don’t Improve Your Notebook Battery Runtime – they Reduce It
...

General: For the lazy people ;-)

2008-07-04T07:38:00.003+10:00

A couple of people have mentioned that they preferred the email newsletters I used to send out, citing the inconvenience of having to remember to check the blog.
For this very reason I enabled RSS on the blog when I created it, subscribe and you will be informed of each new post as it happens.

Plus, as I alluded to in the opening entry of this blog and preceding email regarding it, with increasingly harsh penalties for misappropriating copyrighted material, it is necessary to replace the former wholesale cut-and-paste approach with a precis and link to the material, whether in the blog OR an email, so you would still need to visit the web-sites for the whole story.

Have a go at using the RSS feed, I think you'll like it.

General: Beware - Brain Pain!

2008-07-04T07:30:00.003+10:00

A nice little free game with simple controls that is infuriatingly tricky.

http://armorgames.com/play/1846/shift-3

Oh yes, this will soak up some productivity!

General: IOS makes PDF ISO32000-1

2008-07-03T12:46:00.007+10:00

Not 'Techo:' because this potentially affects everyone.
The PDF format is no longer Adobe's, it belongs to all of us.

PDF_is_now_ISO_320001
PDF is now ISO 32000-1, an international standard

It mentions -
"The next version of Microsoft Office, still called "Office 14," will support by user-chosen defaults at least two published international standard document formats. But at least for now, neither of them was Microsoft's to begin with."

And ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden clarifies -
"The standard will benefit both software developers and users by encouraging the propagation and dissemination of a common technology that cuts across systems and is designed for long term survival,"

Here's hoping we can soon wave goodbye to proprietary formats holding hostage historic documents of all forms.

Techo: Brace Yourself...

2008-07-02T19:48:00.007+10:00

Because...
Intel says to prepare for 'thousands of cores'
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-9981760-64.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
But as Blue (http://www.bluesnews.com)says/) says-
"Based on the quad-core timetable, expect software support in 3008"

General: When one lifetime isn't enough...

2008-07-02T10:09:00.007+10:00

Get a Second Life like I, 'Haizo Baum', did -
Haizo Baum Photoset on Flickr

The Second Life 5th Birthday (SL5B) expo' is on until the 7th of July.
So much wonderful stuff and lots of freebies too, now is a good time to think about joining in if ever you're going to.
http://secondlife.com/
You can go everywhere and see what it's about for free, even having a go at building.
It only costs for membership if you want to own land and build permanent things.
If you're with Bigpond in Aus' your Second Life bandwidth is unmetered and free too, I presume other countries and ISPs might do similar bargains.

General: The Bluebird Project

2008-07-02T06:35:00.004+10:00

This was pointed out to me by my friend Graham.
Unsurprisingly - http://www.bluebirdproject.com/

Basically, they are restoring the Bluebird which was raised from lake Coniston.
The diary is a very good read so I think I'll keep this page open and return for a bit more every now and then.

Obit: One of my favourite actors :-(

2008-07-01T17:45:00.006+10:00

Sad to report, Don S. Davis who played General Hammond on Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis has passed away.
http://community.stargateworlds.com/news/6/1068/

Or the full story here -
http://gateworld.net/news/2008/06/don_s._davis_1942-2008.shtml

General: Just like on the crime tele-movies

2008-06-30T20:28:00.003+10:00

For a measly US$40, you can have voice-changer software on your PC!
http://www.screamingbee.com/product/MorphVOX.aspx?adid=349

It's worth a listen to the demos of male-Female changes (both ways) plus added background.noise

It works with stacks of games and communications programs -
...
MorphVOX Pro voice changing software can be used with all online games including World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Second Life, Lord of the Rings Online, Everquest, Counter-Strike, Battlefield 2 and many more.

It also integrates with VoIP and Instant Messaging programs such as Skype, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM, XFire, GoogleTalk, Roger Wilco and more.

In the studio, MorphVOX Pro integrates with multimedia applications such as Sound Forge, Vegas, ACID, Audacity, IClone and much more.
...

And if you should happen to have a need for it -
http://www.screamingbee.com/product/FurryVoicesforSecondLife.aspx
I'm just sayin'...

Techo: A free seamless texture creation tool

2008-06-30T09:01:00.008+10:00

This free tool is handy for creating textures that tile without visible joins, both for 3D modelling work and as backgrounds for web pages etc'.
And don't think it can only do plain wood textures.

http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/ww_overview.htm

Here's one I made in a couple of minutes -

The tool itself is only a 4.5 MB download, if you would like a downloadable friendly tutorial video of it in use, this one is 130 MB -

http://vidtuts.s3.amazonaws.com/Make-seamless-textures-with-Wood-Workshop.mp4

This link shows a lower-resolution version of the tutorial, but also has links to hundreds of ready-made seamless textures -
http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/06/28/make-seamless-textures-with-wood-workshop-video-tip-of-the-week-40/

General: Finally! (well, hopefully soon anyway)

2008-06-30T07:51:00.004+10:00

A lot of people have been waiting a long time for this to happen.

http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/

It looks like it will be a lot of fun but with no mention of a release date, there's no telling when it will be fun.

Techo: Was Dr Who right all those years ago?

2008-06-29T15:51:00.004+10:00

This article -
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-self-organizing-quantum-universe
mentions -
"A theory of quantum gravity aims to describe the nature of spacetime on the very smallest scales—the voids in between the smallest known elementary particles—by quantum laws and possibly explain it in terms of some fundamental constituents."

That sounds a lot like "Interstitial Space" as mentioned in Dr Who decades ago, this is a comparatively recent mention of it -
http://www.drwhoguide.com/who_ma33.htm

Anyway, if you have a heap of time spare, it's a very interesting article (imo as always).

General: Free Game time again

2008-06-28T14:39:00.005+10:00

This time an odd-ball MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) based around competing factions led by Bo Peep and Little Red Riding Hood!

The web-site has a rather nice scrollable text with a static graphical front overlay, worth a look just by itself (imo).

http://www.secondhandlands.com/

A snippet -
"Secondhand Lands ...
is the massively multiplayer online game set in a parody fairytale world. There will be none of those pansy elves or cantankerous dwarves in this land. Our heroes are comprised of the Wolves and the Sheep who have pledged their undying allegiance to Bo Peep or Little Red Riding Hood. Well, perhaps not undying... "

General: No ice at the North Pole

2008-06-28T13:26:00.005+10:00

This Year!
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-no-ice-at-the-north-pole-855406.html
Worth a read, I'll bet they'll be prospecting for oil quick smart!

Techo: Aussie Telco's screw us so bad

2008-06-27T08:19:00.008+10:00

I pay $80 for 25GB a month at 1.5 Mbps up and 256Kbps down, so this story about a new Japanese broadband cap makes me really depressed.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080625-japanese-isp-institutes-upload-caps-of-30gb-daily.html

That's a cap of 30 Gigabytes UPLOAD per day over 100 Mbps fibre (100 Mbps both ways!) with UNLIMITED downloads!
Telstra still apparently doubts that the market will use all the bandwidth that they can supply, so we're still in the dark ages of wire to the home.
It's cold comfort that the US telco' infrastructure is (according to the article) similarly retarded and their carriers are now adopting download caps too.

UPDATE
I wondered how much the japanese paid for that, so I Googled "Japan broadband cost" (without the quotes). Now I'm really sad!
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Telecoms/656.html
$0.22 per Mbit per Second per month, That's $22 a month for 100 Mbit!

How did it get to be like that? Here are some clues -
http://www.itif.org/files/Ebihara_Japanese_Broadband.pdf

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Sigh, However, since I get a new 25GB allocation starting tomorrow and have 6GB to use up today (I'm always careful to leave plenty for my wife to VPN into work from home), I have decided to get this 5-part documentary on the history of the computer -
http://waxy.org/2008/06/the_machine_that_changed_the_world_the_world_at_your_fingertips/

If you don't have a torrent download program, may I recommend Vuze (formerly Azureus) as an easy to use tool with a good catalogue of continually updated media recommendations built right in -
http://www.vuze.com/app

Obit: How old is Big-Bird? 6 or 74?

2008-06-27T06:40:00.007+10:00

Introducing a new category 'Obit:', for those who like to avoid them as well as those who want to see who they've out-lived!

Sadly, we kick off the new category with the demise of Kermit Love, the creator of Sesame Street's Big-Bird.
In this article you will find the answer to the question and other fun trivia.
The sign-up to the New York Times is free and no spam ensues, so why wouldn't you?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/arts/24love.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

He sounds to have been a real nice chap, I'm always a bit happier when such folk leave something they created or achieved in the world to remember them by.

General: Thinking straight can be tricky

2008-06-26T08:39:00.006+10:00

I was looking for a different 'Ruth effect' this morning, but this little (430KB) PDF was certainly worth the download and read.
http://www.turtletrader.com/pdfs/babe-ruth.pdf
It seems to be endless, the way our gut instincts are at odds with reality when it comes to thinking about risk and probability.

(Here's what I was looking for btw - https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5668)

General: Whatever became of Levelord?

2008-06-25T20:22:00.013+10:00

Or, "Richard Bailey Gray III" the great 3D Level designer.
It's only THIS hard to find out -
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Levellord

Here are some good relatively recent pages, up to yesterday even:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gray

http://www.levelord.com/

http://cdb2.deviantart.com/

Enjoy!

I really must make a rendition of this in Second Life -

General: XP Users Safe Until 2014

2008-06-25T13:49:00.002+10:00

Microsoft has pushed XP support out to 13 years instead of the usual 10, that takes it up to April 2014.

Windows XP sales to the public stop on June 30th, but the article has a solution to that.
Microsoft Extends Support for Windows XP To 13 Years

Windows 7 is looking like arriving in 2010.

Techo: Way overdue RAM capacity advance

2008-06-25T08:31:00.009+10:00

The 64-bit CPU and OS guys and the RAM guys seem to have been waiting for each other to make the first mass marketing moves. Now WinChip has made the first move with a 4-slot 16GB DDR2 kit.

I rather think this will actually get the ball rolling for 64-bit Operating Systems sales, up to now it hasn't been worth losing backwards compatibility with 16-bit applications for the small RAM and performance improvements of 64-bit.
(At the non-professional/enthusiast price point on readily available mainboards that support 4GB DRAM DIMMS, that is)

Winchip DDR2 667 MHz 16 GB Quad Kit

Techo: Ray-Tracing and 2 free games

2008-06-25T08:20:00.008+10:00

Well, a free Ray-Tracing 3D engine, one free game and another game in Beta that will be available for free when completed in early July.

First, the fascinating article with plenty of sample pictures -
Ray Tracing in Games: A Story from The Other Side

And where to pick up the games - Arauna Realtime Ray Tracing

General: Have your Avatar call my Avatar

2008-06-24T18:46:00.005+10:00

Here's a nice little article to please all of us Second-Lifers -
Have your avatar call my avatar: Doing business virtually

Here's a clue from it -
"...Don't worry if you don't have an avatar yet. It's still early. But be warned: Many think it's just a matter of time before being "in-world" becomes as important for business as having a Web site and standard teleconferencing equipment is...."

General: Lucky she wasn't killed in the rush

2008-06-24T16:40:00.004+10:00

A good plan by a smart girl. It raised 5 helicopters and 80 Emergency Workers!
Sports bra saves US hiker in German Alps

General: What Bill actually said

2008-06-24T08:15:00.007+10:00

He never said anything like '640K is enough for anybody'.
But what he HAS said makes interesting reading (imo).
The Quotable Bill Gates

General: The Microsoft gang reunited

2008-06-23T11:01:00.007+10:00

The original Microsoft team from the famous 70's photo reunite for Bills departure photo'.

Read all about it, as they say -http://www.newsweek.com/id/142636

Techo: Via debuts Mini-ITX 2.0

2008-06-22T13:27:00.004+10:00

This will be of interest to several folk formerly on my mailing list!

"Via Technologies has launched gen 2 of its signature mini-motherboard standard. Mini-ITX 2.0, an evolutionary update to the seven-year-old 170×170mm form-factor, introduces new and emerging buses and interfaces such as PCI Express, SATA, Gig-E, and HD A/V, while preserving backwards-compatibility with the original standard."

Now read on...

Via debuts Mini-ITX 2.0

Not that Intel isn't interested in this market too...
http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/DG45FC/index.htm