Chaos Magnet

Second Life and Amazon S3

I've been hearing a lot about Second Life lately, and I think this time I'm actually going to check it out. Second Life is and immersive environment a lot like World of Warcraft, or Star Wars Galaxies, except that nobody's trying to kill you. The really cool thing about Second Life is that everything in the world, for the most part, is built by residents, and you can buy and sell these objects using "Linden dollars". What's cool about that? Well, how about the fact that you can buy and sell those Linden dollars using real dollars. Yes, that means that if you make money in second life, you can turn that into cold hard cash. How much cold hard cash? Well, apparently the exchange rate fluctuates, but as far as I can tell, it's about one American dollar to 250 Linden dollars. A lot of businesses are jumping on this bandwagon, but it's hard to tell how much of this is-will go anywhere. Still, it's interesting, and I wonder if there's a living to be made here. I've tried to check it out before, but I've never had the hardware for it. Finally, my laptop has a display it likes, although the environment supposedly is not compatible with a satellite connection. (So far, in the very limited exploring I've done, it's not too much of a problem.)

There is also a lot of talk about the educational component here; today's youth are so focused on videogames, there is a fear he that they would learn better and an immersive and are such as this one. In other words, take for example the Sarbonians, a video game meant to teach economics. Students come from an environment in which there's no scarcity, and in a crash land on an alien world with limited supplies, and they have to make a go of it. Unlike other games with an economic basis (such as Civilization), in this one characters explain why the economic principles are the way they are. Pretty cool idea, if you ask me.

What I also thought was interesting is that Linden Labs, which runs Second Life, is making use of Amazon's new distributed storage solution, Amazon S3. This is an interesting concept in which you upload your content, and they pretty much handling. You only pay for the capacity that you use. They have a compute cloud as well.

Interesting.

Featured on IBM's developerWorks

I'm very fortunate that a lot of the pieces I write for IBM developerWorks get featured, either on the home page or in the particular "zone" in which they belong. Today I see that The ultimate mashup -- Web services and the semantic Web, Part 5: Change out Web services is on the home page. I'm particularly proud of this series, which introduces people to all kinds of concepts, from the Semantic Web to RDF and ontologies, which I find absolutely fascinating. Maybe it's the puzzle-solver in me, but the idea of trying to reconstruct the structure of information and how different pieces relate to each other fascinates me.

It's just an area that I don't feel people are taking seriously enough; this is where we're going, people! You may not like it, and it may be extra work, but somebody's going to figure out a way around that, just you wait.

I guess it's not actually funny ...

I do a lot of joking about Bushisms, because the mangling of the English language is one of my pet peeves. (For heaven's sake, you're the President of the most powerful nation in the free world. LEARN TO SAY NU-CLE-AR!!!!!) But maybe it's not that funny; I wondered how somebody who was so ... well ... stupid had gotten as far as he had. Maybe he's not as stupid as he looks. Maybe there's something entirely different going on.

Check out this video:

Bush Video from 10 years ago!

Fun writer tools

My installation of Microsoft Word decided to take a dive, and i didn't have time to deal with it. Fortunately, there are really only two tools I use in Word that I can't get from WordPad: styles and the word count. For a lark, I tried out Writely, and online word processor. it's pretty slick, actually. At least at broadband speeds, it feels like an actual desktop application, but since it doesn't have styles (or word count for that matter) probably the most useful aspect of using it is that it backs up your file to an offsite servier every so often. (I'm not sure how frequently, but for some reason I want to say every 10 seconds.) also, because it's online, you can then access your files from anywhere, as well as charing editing duties with someone else. But it still doesn't have a word count, so i was able to find a Word Count tool at Writertopia. Writertopia isn't out of beta yet, but the did release two cool tools. One is the simple Word Count page, and the other is a progress meter, complete with silly graphics.

Now if only I could get Writely to automatically do a word count and update the reference to a progress meter on my site, that would be interesting.