Baba Sucks

• Remembering Jesse. http://tinyurl.com/2crh3f #

The Second Life 4th Birthday event is coming up soon. The event is schedualed for June 23rd-June 30th. Check out the SL4B Portal on the Second Life wiki for more information on the planning of this event.

I’ve volunteered to take up the open source display at the event. The open source display will show how open source has influenced Second Life and how Second Life has influenced and inspired open source projects. So far the display will include libsecondlife, OpenSL [2], OpenSim, and other information about Linden Lab’s use of open source software(eg. Mono, Mozilla Gecko, Squid, Linux, MySQL)

Anyone interested in helping out with the open source display is encouraged to contact me at baba@libsecondlife.org or IM Baba Yamamoto in Second Life.

If you want to help out with other aspects of the SL4B Event contact SignpostMarv Martin in Second Life.

Trying out Trac for the first time this week on some new projects.

The trac website says,

Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission is to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team’s established development process and policies.

All that is very true. I commend the Trac team on their accomplishment. If only it were not coded in Python. EUGH whitespace syntax.

It’s all right. As long as I pretend it’s not there and it always works as expected it will never matter.

If all goes well with Trac maybe libsecondlife and Open Metaverse can start using it soon too. It looks to be more put together than our current mash.

Not much activity here recently.  I’ve been posting quite a bit to my new tumblelog at meta.babasucks.com

No heavy thoughts, just web spew and shinies.

John Edward squares off against John Edwards in the 2008 presidential race which is gathering steam in the virtual world of Second Life.

Edward is running a compelling campaign. Voters are asked the question, “Who would you rather vote for? Some political expert or a man who can read minds?!”

Vote John Edward in ‘08 — HE CAN READ MINDS!

read more | digg story

This will have to tide you over until I am once again bathed with the light of inspiration.

Gwyneth Llewellyn once again stands on top of the Internet to claim WIN.

You may have heard the latest wag from the valley, purporting that Second Life is some sort of Pyramid scheme. This all came from a blog post by Capitalism 2.0 author Randolph Harrison entitled, “SecondLife: Revolutionary Virtual Market or Ponzi Scheme?”

Excerpt from Gwyn’s winning comment,

It would be rather obvious for me (and I do well know that sometimes common sense does not apply to economics, but…) that if you’re willing to enter a small exchange which only has, oh, perhaps, 5 million L$ to offer, an offer of a “few million L$” (you mention US$10k, or about 3 million L$) would certainly make the market collapse… and give you an awful rate of exchange in return.

I fail to understand the point. This is the expected behaviour on an open exchange — or at least it was, when I had my economics classes. Where exactly am I missing the point?

To recap:

Linden Lab is operating a “rigged” exchange, since it’s “an open auction”, and “doesn’t work well for big trades”. To make “big trades”, you tend to suggest to go to the tiny private exchanges instead, but then complain that the market collapses due to your flooding of L$ there… and, as a conclusion:

it suddenly dawned upon me.

This game was just a pyramid scheme.

I’m baffled on how you start adding apples to oranges and suddenly the result comes out in onions. However, I blame my own ignorance. Probably, this makes sense to an economist. For the layperson, however, your experiences in trading on the LindeX and on the small, private exchanges, do only reflect how a market behaves, and the conclusion that “Second Life is a pyramid scheme” doesn’t follow. At all.

It’s finally happened folks.  Second Life’s client is open source under the terms of the GPL v2.

Some people have questioned whether or not libsecondlife will continue now that Linden Lab has open sourced the client. The answer is an emphatic –YES!

While the client is now open source, libsecondlife has a few advantages over the more complete client from Linden Lab.

libsecondlife is…

1. BSD licensed as compared to the GPL.
2. libsecondlife is has less baggage(we only do networking).
3. libsecondlife is easily cross platform in C# or java.