Beyond Concalls

I have been looking at ways of making virtual meetings easier, more effective and fun. As part of that I have looked again at secondlife, and one of my new correspondents pointed me at “The future is virtually here”. This, despite being published last August, and while containing two fun stories about EVE Online, tries too hard in my mind to use language which proves the author’s Yoof credentials. Also quoting IBM and World of Warcraft as the exemplar’s of using virtual worlds is, to my mind lazy. Many (or was it several) companies use secondlife as a virtual store front, although I admit that IBM’s virtual data centre, (see also my blog report on the IBM virtual data center) is a quite a cute toy, but a number of people are on the trail of WoW, and its monthly subscription is high for school students. The killer app. for virtual worlds seems to be training.  …

Laptop Diaries XIII, Open Solaris

I went to Sun’s Lintlithgow Enterprise Business Centre launch last week, and I saw a demo’d copy of an opensolaris VM which looked really cool, and then a colleague, Jingesh Shah, published a blog about an open source ERP package, called “openbravo” running on Open Solaris. This has to be done. I got Open Solaris running in a VM. …

Multi-Player Diablo

Now its working. Make sure both systems are on fixed local tcp/ip addresses, enable port forwarding on the gateway for ports 4000, 6112-6119 to the games host. Make sure both games are patched up, although you only need one CD. Join the game using the gateway’s internet address. I need to write a program to report this to the screen, currently I login into the gateway to get this.

Further notes and hints on my Diablo page on my wiki. …

Laptop Diaries

Just building up a new laptop for the family, but this one’s MS Vista. I bought a copy of Norton, of course, but had a couple of problems installing MS Office and transferring data. Most of these seeem to be firewall problems, but it does seem that Vista/XP networking might not be as easy as it should. It would seem that Norton (and Microsoft) now have a new version of ‘Secure by Default’, which borrows from the good old security guru’s axiom, ‘if no-one can use it, no one can abuse it.’

On a more serious note, when adopting W95, Microsoft left the 3.11 program explorer interface in place, with XP you have ‘classic’ look and feel themes, I can’t find the retro interface on Vista and I found trying to get it to ‘see’ the exported devices on my home network exceptionally frustrating, and I still don’t know how we got it to work.

For more, see New Laptop, Studio 15 on my wiki. …

Mucking around

The rest of my August posts to the sun/oracle blog related to creating a personal spore, bluetooth on XP, using twitter, using get satisfaction, firefox 3.*, roller, 2nd brain, the demise of slynkr, the now defunct Grazr and FAT file systems with Virtual Box, together with the advice not too. …

Reading Danilo Poccia’s Italian language blog

My colleague Danilo Poccia has been experimenting with allowing his readers to use Google translate to read his blog. I, at least, will find this useful as Danilo writes in Italian. This could of course be an advantage as the ‘to english’ translators may be stronger, since it looks quite good to me. It also enhances his hit count; it’s only available via the HTML interface 🙂 . He categorises the blog, so finding his professional content is quite easy. Other colleagues experimented with this technique and use case  …