Open Wonderland User Meeting 2010.03.20

Today there was an Open Wonderland Community meeting. It was announced on the Facebook group. If you're interested in Open Wonderland, join the Facebook group!

There is a Cafe Press store now that people can buy things from with some of the proceeds going to the foundation. As of today there is 1 item but there will be many more to come.

http://www.cafepress.com/OpenWonderland

There is an Immersive Education Summit coming up in April that the project team is looking at attending.

There was some discussion around an 0.5 Preview 4 release. What is needed as a foundation is a process for deciding when it is time to put out a release. There is also a forum thread on this topic which goes into more detail.

http://groups.google.com/group/openwonderland/browse_thread/thread/ff2986e3308e3d62

There will be a new "help wanted" link from the project page pointing out where the team could use help with things. I'm looking forward to that.

There is a regular developer meeting in the works which will be announced once it is organized. This will be a separate, more technical, meeting to complement the more general community meeting. It sounds like the first one will be tomorrow so I hope to attend.

The Genographic Project : The Human Family Tree

On 2010.03.18 myself, my daughter Jocelyn and her boyfriend Mikey, and my daughter Hayley, attended a screening and post-show discussion for the film The Human Family Tree. The film is a product of The Genographic Project, a long-term joint effort by many scientists and people at IBM. The project as stated on the website, "is seeking to chart new knowledge about the migratory history of the human species by using sophisticated laboratory and computer analysis of DNA contributed by hundreds of thousands of people from around the world." The film is a document about these efforts. Read more here:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/human-family-tree-3706-interactive

In the film, the researchers describe how they have taken DNA samples from people on one day on a Queens street, and correlated that with DNA from previous research to chart paths not only of how people of related, but how people have migrated around the world. For example, one black man from America finds he has roots that stretch back through Europe. Things like that don't necessarily make sense to people until one puts the evidence together with lots of other people and finds that we all have common roots starting somewhere in Africa. It's beyond the scope of my post to describe in more detail, but I'd encourage folks to read the background and watch the show.

For $99 you can get your own kit to participate by sending in a cheek swab sample and get your DNA charted in the same way as the people in the film. As soon as I think I can afford it I want to get myself and my kids to participate.

So, do I believe that every human on earth today can be traced back to a small group in Africa? It's believable. The film was designed as an hour and a half to tell a story, rather than an in-depth scientific analysis. There are finer details to how the research was done that were left out of the film that I think could have been included at the expense of some of the storytelling. As with any scientific proposal, I want to dig more into it to a finer level of detail before saying "count me in as a believer".

Assuming the science is solid, what does that mean for me? It doesn't change anything. I think I would feel a deeper connection to other people on the planet, but I've always sort of felt that way after having practiced Buddhism and really exploring what it means to be "not separate". I'm fascinated by the science used. I've been getting into genetics and biology lately and this is a way to take that science and knowledge and apply it. There's something that boggles the mind here that is a game-changer for some people in the way they see themselves fitting into the world, and for others a validation of what they have suspected anyway.

Smarter Technology 03/10: Ben Lindquist, MXP

BubbleCloud, MXP, et.al.

adopted by OpenSim, plans for VastPark,

MXP will replace CICP for Green Phosphor

says important for exposing data assets inworld such as database
gp working on protein folding concept 10 people collaborating on folding but dont want to replicate the folding ops inworld so that is done offline in the cluster and the vw goes through the mxp interface for the display.

talk to tommy

http://206.130.108.87/st/sldl2.php

Project Wonderland : Sample Shape Tutorial

Hi folks... Today I am working with a Project Wonderland tutorial on developing a basic module. http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javadesktop/ProjectWonderlandWorkingWithModules05 To get to this point I had to download the source and module system code, compile, and test and try them out. I was having problems for awhile with errors in the server output. Eventually today I figured out that in some cases when the server doesn't shut down properly, read and/or write perms on some log files may be hosed and prevent proper startup next run. Here's me trying out the PDF Viewer module, before I go off on the current tutorial material.

And here's me after completing the steps in the tutorial to download, build, install, and test the shape sample module.


Pretty simple! So my next steps are to:

1. Generate ideas for what I would like to create a module for.
2. Continue inspecting the server logs and code in order to keep getting more familiar with the inner workings of the infrastructure.
3. See what work has been done or is being planned on things like application performance and monitoring.

See ya next time!

Singularity U : Phillip Rosedale

Watching the Singularity U talk from Philip Rosedale, now formerly of Second Life, on YouTube. Singularity University... This talk was uploaded to singularityu's channel on youtube on 01/31/2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3LFqX6YNY0

Its an enjoyable talk and about every 5 minutes I hear something that perks my ears up.

~7:00
* Take control of the atoms in the real world as the real world becomes more malleable

~15:00
* As we take control of the atoms in the virtual world we can convert creativity into money

~16:00
* Yes! To hell with conference calls. Phillip describes ...

~20:00
* Memory Palace

~26:00
* Building vs. buying, 1 out of 1000 in music business is listened to, is that a social norm.

ThinkBalm

I found a neat new company to research and keep a 3-D eye on. It's called ThinkBalm:

http://www.thinkbalm.com/

As stated on the website, the mission is:

"ThinkBalm offers independent IT industry analysis and strategy consulting services."

And specifically this is in the area of "work-related use of the Immersive Internet." This means that they are doing research and analysis and consulting in 3-D web technologies like virtual worlds and other like technologies. There's also a LinkedIn group, which is where I found out about them in the first place whilst browsing the profile of someone else who works at IBM. The group is a community for discussion and brainstorming around the aforementioned ideas.

http://www.thinkbalm.com/community/

Tonite I visited their island in Second Life, the ThinkBalm Data Garden.



They display some nifty 3-D data visualization examples, specifically around data regarding virtual world adoption in business. There's a neat activity regarding barriers to adoption that I can agree with, specifically in getting users interested in the technology and the problem of inadequate hardware.

I think the data visualization is what draws me in here. I've seen a few different data-viz technologies in Second Life. Being a programmer and having written a few intermediately complex scripts myself, I'm extremely curious at what the technologies and programming aspects are of the mechanisms. It's also really really cool to see a set of data represented in 3-D. It's not a new idea, of course, but the technologies are new enough that there are lots of companies doing research and development in this area. But it's really cool to see a company say, here's data on the research we did, in a 3D representation, which is totally appropriate for a virtual world company.

I found a report that they just published:

http://www.thinkbalm.com/2009/05/26/thinkbalm-publishes-business-value-study/

Check it out if you have time. There is an event coming in October for people new to the LinkedIn group to get to know each other. If I'm not on a real-work meeting at the time, I will attend and blog about it then!

Smarter Technology : Green Phosphor

http://www.smartertechnology.com/c/s/Smarter-Technology-Virtual-World/

http://www.youtube.com/user/arkowitz

Many Eyes