port7 – co – uk

So it seems that Intel are stepping up their SL activity, no doubt prompted by Lindens revelations (about 1/2 way down the page) that they made extensive use of AMD processors (though now they are moving to intel).

So I went looking last night for Intel’s Devzone, and that took some time, I eventually had to IM Gadget Mandelbrot and get him to teleport me there. When I got there it turned out that I was late for the European launch and too early for the North American one (blame 7 month old Niamh for that).

Still there were a few people there and I got chatting to them. Apparently the idea is to create an environment for people to collaborate on various development projects, both for SL and RL. A bit like Google’s Summer of Code and Sourceforge (but more Fun ). So I will continue to keep an eye open and monitor progress. Apparently a MP3 of the launch will become available at some point, so I will grab that when its released.

I quite liked the architecture of the place, very 70′s and Tracey Island!

So wandering around in-world on Bank Holiday Monday, I pop over to Lindens place in SL where I find a list of educational establishments in SL. One of them caught my eye, it was the SL Ecosystem a collaborative experiment creating Artificial Life (AL), presumably using scripting.

As you can see from the picture the AL’s are quite primitive, but as things get more sophisticated were could it lead? Is SL a natural environment for AL lifeforms, it certainally seems so, but I think the language may be too primitive yet to create anything decent at the moment.

Still it’s a start.

I learnt a new buzzword today, Enterprise 2.0, seemingly its a play on the Web 2.0 thing that everyone keeps talking about.

What is it? It’s basically the new managment style that is being using in places like Google and Sun, where there is a relativly flat managment structure, and all employees are encouraged to express and share in a manner much like the internet, with company blogs, mailing lists etc.

There also seems to be some controversy around the fact that Wikipedia deleted the entry.

Thats the friday useless fact for you! And anyway is nearly bank holiday, so I am watching the clock till 5!

Interesting that Sony BMG are doing a big launch of an artist of theirs in Second Life, its Paula DeAnda. Dunno if she is any good or not though…

So this is a post about blender, no not that blender!!, I meant this blender!.

We were in Costco in Saturday, intending to get a new tyre to replace the flat one I got on Thursday, and there was a couple of enthusiastic demonstrators flogging these devices. So after some badgering from Julie, we got one, I won’t say how much it cost but lets just say it was a pretty penny. Though I am impressed by the thing, its makes a cracking smoothie, and can do soups etc.

So if you want a nice smoothie, come round to mine!

So I have a Windows PC that had a previous installation of Windows XP with a FAT32 filesystem. I re-installed XP and did a quick format using the NTFS filesystem.

I now realise that I want to get back some of the data that was on the previous installation. Now I know that that data might still be there on the platters just not indexed by any filesystem, and there are tools out there that will allow me to have a look and maybe get them back.

Does anyone know what those tools are? Google is not being very helpfull tonight….

Well I thought I would get Niamh of to a good start in life by introducing her to Free Software. So here are some pictures of Niamh, the first time she is sitting in front of a laptop, and its running Ubuntu!

She is obviously going to be a lady of great taste and intelligence!

So Dell is set to announce that it will start offering Ubuntu Linux as an option for pre-load on it’s PC’s! This is good news, I have long thought that people will just use whatever is plonked in front of them if it is at least ‘Good Enough’.

I think Ubuntu has produced a Linux distribution that is ‘Good Enough’ for most users needs and now that Dell are shipping it then, hopefully that will mean more market penetration for Linux. Good job for Ubuntu and Dell!