Posts

Over at Sleeds.org is an interesting movie how they made a building, the process started with PDF, exporting it with Adobe Illustrator into SVG, this was processed by a script to get LSL snippets posted into a notecard and then got finally rezzed in SL.

This looks much like e.g. blender to prim, but it’s impressive, none the less, though I guess if you really want to build good things you need so stuck up with the client. Period.

Torley Linden has a nice entry about a series of photographs of the Lindens! Go ahead and take a look at it, it’s nice to see them, especially since some are complaining they’re more or less invisible nowadays on the main grid.

A few days ago I visited Mercedes-Benz Island to take another look at their in world presence. Well, there was not much happening, anyway and there was also no employee of the company present at this time. They are around there, normally, at some time.

They’ve got not very tight settings on security there, either. This means - just pushing is forbidden, all else works - user scripts, flying around and placing objects is available for every visitor. This means: very bad settings in concerns of security and an open invitation to griefers. I guess, autoreturn is in action, though, but placing objects allows the use of weapons.

And guess what? There were some bored griefers, who came into the island and wrecked havoc upon it. They were somewhat harmless, though, since they did not cage or orbit people. This would have been possible for them, too, without big effort at all.

Only in America: Evolution has never happened. The proof? It’s in every jar of peanut butter! Don’t believe it? Just watch this video!

If you ever want to live somewhere in SL or make business, better choose a region with a tight covenant on it. While standard “anything goes”-attitude on most parts of the mainland first sounds like real fun, it can for sure fast enough turn otherwise.

And now I’ve got a very good example for the necessity on a good, tight covenant. A friend of mine lives on the new continent in the east of the old mainland in the mature rated region Carrion that’s without covenant at all. They’re having a business there, but she lives there, too. It’s been mostly a nice, quiet sim. Until some days ago a new neighbor showed up in the region. This new neighbor’s business was making signs, he had a big enough parcel to upset the whole sim.

First he made his building very high compared to the other building, second he put some animated signs on his building and third he put some naked penises at display, too. This caused him an abuse report, the building is not there anymore, so this time it went good for the other parcel owners in the sim. But if he would have been a little bit more clever, his building would still be there.

This has only to do a little with Second Life, but since Microsoft also celebrated the launch of Windows Vista back then in Second Life, too, at different locations, so why not.

It’s got to be said: Windows Vista is shit! So, now blame me, burn me, do whatever you want with this statement, but what needs to be said is now said.

While the exceptionally good PR department from Microsoft is now celebrating the sale of 20 million licenses of Vista already, the question remains: is Vista ready yet for the primetime? No, it isn’t! Of course Microsoft wants to make you believe it, but there are good reasons to stick with Windows XP or Windows 2000 - yet. In my own opinion the best Windows Microsoft ever made is still Windows 2000. Also the number of 20 millions is in the discussion, some commenter over at eWeek suggested a good method how to validate this. BTW, in February Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer was still disgruntled about the bad sales of Vista and blaming piracy as the main reason for it, read this and that, too. Bwahaha! So, go figure! 20 million copies? In your dreams, pal!

Today is the 1st of April and that means: time for April jokes! I’ve found the first SL related today already in the Second Life Herald. To quote it:

In a cross-border caper organized in the wee hours of Saturday morning by otakup0pe Neumann of libsecondlife, notorious griefer Plastic Duck and infamous blogger antagost Prokofy Neva were married at a brief ceremony on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.

[…]

Asked why Plastic Duck, whose RL name is Patrick Sapinski, suddenly switched from griefing and stalking and poking a stick at Prokofy, who has furiously exposed his antics in lenghty blog blasts, to wooing the 50-year-old single mother of two, Duck said, “I’ve never had a mother’s love.”

BWAHAHAHA!

While stilll doing business with IBM (haha!) I’ve stumbled upon this somewhat older article about the formation of IBM’s Second Life business group. What the goals of IBM are, what they’re planning to do and have already done. Quite interesting read!

The well known sim Amsterdam has been sold for about 50.000 US$!

Well, the price for sure is real enough when you take in account the work needed to build such a big sim and calculate the prize you would need to pay if you order it at some agency.

But what’s to say about it… while the sim itself is nice and well done, I don’t like the crowd that’s normally populating it so much, I wouldn’t have paid so much for it nor felt the need to buy it myself. I wonder in which kind of direction it is going to develop, now, since it’s been sold. This has been for sure a good deal for its previous owner.

Now that’s something out of the IBM article, but worth an own entry: the open available JPEG-2000 library OpenJPEG got faster! This means you don’t need the proprietary libraries from Kakadu anymore to get a good open source client, if you’re living on the bleeding edge and this is making its way in the main tree of OpenJPEG after some time, I guess. Yeah!