A busy month of travel was capped off by a round trip to Boston earlier this week. Amazon had a big presence at the MIT Emerging Technologies Conference.

I straightened out some isses with the Web Page on a Prim, and it is now up and running again. I have some big plans for this and for the Text on a Prim and hope to have something saleable in another week or so.

I hope to have a lot more time at home next month, but the action never stops. There’s even more cool stuff cooking behind the scenes.

• 117 Run Commands In Windows Xp – “Run command is very usefull, but sometimes it is forgotten. Use it sometimes and you will find how powerful is run command.“
• List of the Keyboard Shortcuts that are Available in Windows XP – “SUMMARY: This article describes the keyboard shortcuts that are available in Windows XP.“
• Amazon Web Services Blog: We Build Muck, So You Don’t Have To – “After being in business for nearly 11 years, we know how to make great muck at Amazon!“

• Techcrunch UK: RSS: It’s dead Jim or can we ping it back to life? – “All the speakers unanimously agreed that RSS is great, as did most of the audience. Some people even spoke about how RSS had changed their lives. So surprisingly during the Q&A session some idiot had the audacity to proclaim that RSS is dead! Oh yes now I remember (strong stuff that beer) that idiot was me.“
• Kirkland Weblog: Happy Hour Guide to Kirkland Bars and Restaurants – “As we start moving back indoors we thought it would be a good idea to get a list of top Kirkland happy hour spots and provide any details we could get from the bars and restaurants of in and around the downtown area. These are all worthwhile spots to hit after work, down some beer and snack on some apps. ” Perhaps I am driving my manager to drink — he knows the location and times of every happy hour in the entire city of Kirkland.
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Transforming Business through Virtual Worlds Capabilities – it’s Déjà Vu All Over Again – “To learn what is required in a practical way, we have been using the Second Life platform to conduct a series of experiments, such as holding virtual meetings on a variety of subjects with groups of various sizes. The meeting participants are represented visually by their individual avatars or personalized icons in the virtual world. We are very interested in understanding how best to conduct such virtual meetings. We have learned that many of the visual clues from the physical world should be embraced in the virtual world. For example, meeting participants should be seated facing each other, as they would normally do in a meeting, and whoever is currently speaking should gesture with his or her arms. “

Needless to say, my life is always pretty busy — 5 kids, a demanding job, and all of the side stuff that I do on Syndic8 and Second Life. My wife and I spend a lot of time driving the kids here, there, and everywhere — school, music, friends’ houses, lessons, church activities, and so forth. Each Sunday night, as we look forward to the week to come, it feels as if we are at the top of the first hill of a roller coaster track. You know, that point where you’ve slowly clacked up the hill, slowly and steadily gaining altitude, and suddenly you are there at the top. You suddenly realize that the situation is no longer under your control, and that for the next 2 minutes or so you simply need to hang on, enjoy the ride, and perhaps even scream a bit.

We start the week, propelled through it by inertia and the innumerable demands on our time, and before we know it it is Saturday again!

This afternoon I got the distinct feeling that my wife and I are at the top of a roller coast 10 times higher and longer than ever before. Her open house went well, and in the afternoon I logged in to Second Life to find an avatar in my build looking at my Web on a Prim demo. After we talked for a bit he invited another person and another into the meeting, and before I knew it there were four of us chatting:

One more person showed up after I took this picture, and while I was talking to them I was also IM’ing with Hugo of Life2Life.

I received a lot of good feedback on my Web on a Prim work, and I’m going to have to buckle down and get it ready for sale ASAP. I’ve now got some beta testers lined up!

I’m not sure where this roller coaster ride will go, but I’ll just hang on and hope for the best.

I am trying to build lots of cool stuff in Second Life and I found that my inability to create bitmapped graphics was getting in my way. I installed a copy of Photoshop CS a couple of months ago but couldn’t make heads or tails of the interface. Needing to solve this problem in a hurry, I signed up for the Introduction to Photoshop CS class at Bellevue Community College. This is an online class. The instructor posts new lessons on Wednesdays and Fridays, along with assignments and a quiz. Each assignment consists of a set of edits and a directive to upload the finished picture to a photo album site.

Last night I managed to complete the first two assignments and I am already much closer to being able to do what I want.

I was reading an Infoworld article (from June, I am a bit behind) about the new AMD K8L architecture and decided to go to the AMD site to see if I could find anything meaty and interesting to read about it. I enjoy reading architecture documents, typically 10-20 page PDFs that I can print, read, and recycle. After searching the web site I found nothing at all about the K8L, and left them a strongly negative comment:

Bummer, a definite lack of a decent information architecture.

Somewhat coincidentally I was listening to an IT Conversations podcast by Peter Morville about Ambient Findability earlier today. Peter meet AMD, AMD meet Peter…

Update 25 Sep 2006: I managed to max out my month’s allocation of snapshots in less than 24 hours. I have sent the site developer some funds and service should be restored shortly.

If you could look inside of my brain (perish the thought) you’d see all sorts of random parts tumbling around, bouncing and bumping into each other from time to time (but not that often — I am pretty sure there’s plenty of empty space inside). When those parts bump into each other, some sparks fly, an idea is generated, and sometimes I end up with something interesting.

A bunch of people in the Second Life community have been interested in having what they call “HTML on a Prim.” The ubrowser has apparently been used to create a prototype of this feature but to date it has not emerged in a production release of the Second Life client.

Earlier today a couple of those random parts in my brain intersected and I realized that I could do a simple and crude version of HTML on a Prim, building on the work that I had already done to create Text on a Prim. As noted in a previous blog entry, there are lots of ways to create a graphical snapshot or thumbnail of a web page without too much trouble.

So, here’s what I’ve got:

Appropriately enough, I am showing the Second Life home page in the screen shot. I am also wearing a cool new shirt that I found at Designs by Adri (Don’t worry, this won’t turn into a fashion blog anytime soon).

If you want to try this out, go here and then send the URL on channel 3 using a command like “/3 http://www.amazon.com”. Right now it takes 5 to 10 seconds to fetch the remote web page, generate the image, and get it uploaded to the client. Not instant, but not too bad either.

If you are standing in front of the Developer Relations Outpost and are wondering where these things are, they are on the roof!

So what’s next? I am planning to get some decent land and to start selling Text and Web prims sometime soon. I still need to figure out how to embed self-updating scripts in the objects, design real APIs, and all sorts of fun things. Maybe I’ll take a couple of vacation days next month and whip this into shape. This is one of those fun topics where each thing I do begets 10 more ideas, and the biggest challenge is simply focusing on doing a couple of things really well instead of trying to do everything all at once.

Your ideas, comments, feedback, and questions are all welcome, preferably as comments to this post. You can also go in-world and join the group that’s called “Text On a Prim / Web Page On a Prim.” I’ll send regular updates to that group, including solicitations for beta testers.

Dang I’m tired, but this was worth doing.

• WebThumb – “Creates a PPM-format image of the first screenful of a web page and writes this image to standard output. This is done using the Xvfb virtual framebuffer X server, which provides an environment for the mozilla web browser.” Also listed on Freshmeat.
• Joshuan Eichorn: WebThumb API – “To submit a thumbnail request, send an XML message…”
• Joshua Eichorn: WebThumb Contest – “The webthumb API seems to be running pretty stable these days. But it doesn’t have a lot of users yet, so nows your chance to change that. I’m running a short contest giving out webthumb accounts with higher API limits as prizes. “
• Creating Thumbnail of WebPages using WebThumb API – “In this Article we are going to discuss how we can incorporate WebThumb API in PHP to create thumbnail of web pages from our PHP applications.“
• Hasin Hayder: Generate Thumbnail of Any Web Page Using PHP – “Today I made a PHP Wrapper of his WebThumb API using Curl. Now you can create Thumbnails using this wrapper class from PHP. “

This coming Sunday (the 24th of September) my wife (Carmen) will be conducting an open house in Redmond, Washington.

The house is cool enough all by itself — a spacious 4300 square feet on two levels, sitting on 5 wooded acres, but it is currently owned by the estate of James Doohan, Star Trek’s Scotty. There’s a modicum of discreet memorabilia inside, and no transporter or engine room, but I’m sure that the fact that this house was owned by a celebrity would certainly make it a conversation piece if you are so inclined.

Feel free to come by on Sunday between 1 and 4 PM:

22132 NE 114th Street Redmond, WA 98053

Or click here for a map (the arrow points to the street address; the house is to the north of the street, set back a considerable distance). You can also contact Carmen for a private showing.

Looks like I will be coming along for the ride this Sunday, so feel free to stop by if you want to talk about RSS, Web Services, or Second Life.