port7 – co – uk

So as a Metaverse blogger and someone who also has an interest in things Canadian, I thought I would take a look for Canadian related things in SL. It seems there is not much of a Canadian presence in SL, I may be wrong and might be looking in all the wrong places but that is certainally my impression so far.

One of the few Canadian presences I have recently discovered is the Telus build. For those that don’t know Telus are a Canadian telecommunication company, providing landlines, mobiles, internet access, tv access etc. They are quite a big company in the Canadian marketplace, probably equivalent of Virgin Media here in the UK.

Regards the build, well it’s not on its own island, but on a mainland called ‘Shinda’. The builder is the well known Scope Cleaver, who its seems is building up quite a corporate portfolio.

Not exactly sure the about purpose of the build, it seems like it is just a place to show of various offers and products the company has, an in-world shop window if you like. There doesn’t appear to be many place’s for meetings, nor are there any obvious events or attempts to build a community, although I thought the Halloween decorations were a nice touch. Still its a Canadian presence, which is a good thing, who is next?

First a disclaimer, I am not a Ugly Betty fan, all my knowledge of the show is from my wife who is a fan! Now we have got that straight we can continue.

So taking the lead from AK’s post about the recent entry of ‘The Office’ into Second Life, one of Dwight’s favorite places in Second Life was listed as The Griffin Business Center, which appears to be a place people can rent for meetings etc.

There appears to be some advertising in there for ‘MODE Modeling and Designing Agency’, in the form of a poster. If you click on the poster you get a notecard from someone called Wilamina Laville asking for SL models. Now for those that are fan’s of Ugly Betty will recognize MODE as the fictional agency that Betty works at, with Wilamina being a character in the show who is one of the ‘bosses’ of said agency.

This may be nothing more than a Ugly Betty fans’ SL shrine to the show, or it could be the start of another SL – TV Show tie in. Who knows!?! There deffo seems to be a few happening recently, all from various US networks, maybe it’s a case of lots of bandwagon jumping, which is a good thing for the population of SL, even if it does leave me scratching my head on what’s in it for the TV show concerned!

So today Niamh decided to surprise us all by taking her first steps! She knew she had done something important as she had a huge grin on her face as she did it. She repeated it a few times afterwards just to prove it wasn’t a fluke!

I am a very proud dad!

Even though this is probably being blogged about loads, I thought I would jump on the bandwagon. Good friend of mine and metaverse evangelist Aleister Kronos, has just blogged about the recent announcement by Linden Lab that they intend to collaborate with IBM and others on further developing 3d Internet technology, specifically Second Life.

Some of the issues that they have specifically said they intend to work on are things that many consider to itches that really need scratching if SL is to become more acceptable to the masses. One of the things on my list is the platform stability, the current situation where a sim can only take approx 40 users at one time is a real limiter IMHO.

This was hinted at last month in an interview with Zero Linden on Dizzy Banjo’s blog. Though I must admit I didn’t think there would be any movement on this for some time yet. I am glad to be proven wrong! Though realistically when the fruits of this collaboration will eventually filter down is anybody’a guess.

Add that to the another announcement from SL consultancy and builders Electric Sheep, that they are releasing the first non-Linden commercially backed SL viewer, calling it the OnRez viewer.

Things are really hotting up in the metaverse!

So the latest issue of Linux User and Developer (edition no 94) is running an article I wrote on how Linux and Free Software can help a company towards PCI: DSS compliance. Hopefully it’s informative and people will find it interesting, its certainally a hot topic in the IT profession nowadays.

It’s in the shops now, so go buy it!