• Torley Linden: How to convert YouTube videos for playing in Second Life – “Ever seen a worthwhile YouTube clip you wanted to share on your land parcel in Second Life, but were frustrated because QuickTime doesn’t play Flash video (which YouTube uses)? Until a time when we can easily play Flash inworld, here’s a way to convert YouTube videos for playing in Second Life.“
• Jaden’s Steamy Kitchen: How to Turn Cheap “Choice” Steaks into Gucci “Prime” Steaks – “For the past 4 months, we have been experimenting with how to get full, juicy, beefy flavor of a ribeye with butter-knife tenderness of a filet mignon without paying up-the-butt for Prime cuts.“
• Zen Habits: 27 Great Tips to Keep Your Life Organized – “The single, simplest thing I do to stay personally organized is to put whatever tool, item, clothing, bag, hairbrush etc., away immediately after using it. I always know where everything and anything is so I never waste time looking for something.“
• David Seah: The Printable CEO Series – “The Printable CEO was born from a desire to focus my time more productively. For me, that means things that make my freelance practice sustainable and fun. The Printable CEO name comes from the idea that a good CEO should focus primarily on those things that move the company forward; since I can’t afford to hire my own CEO, being able to print one out seemed like the next best thing!“
• David Seah: The Making of the Printable CEO – “The Printable CEO was born out of a very specific strategic need: I needed to create more tangible assets–that is, stuff that you could actually see with your eyes. And that was driven by a single horrible truth: I am a terrible networker.“
• DeepGrid: Public OpenGrid Services Network – “DeepGrid is a public network for connection region simulators compatible with the OGS/0.1-draft protocol. Please note that this is highly experimental software and does not yet support many features.“
• Design My Room – “Give your room a makeover.“
• Jotlet – “Simply spectacular time management.“
• Second Life Insider: Practical Marketing – Physical Business in Nonphysical Worlds – “Image enhancement isn’t about waving your products at people. It’s about reminding people that you’re a cool, interesting company that cares (insofar as corporate policies generally permit), and reminding them that you are there when the time comes for the person to seek out a commercial product or service, or make a choice between you and your competitors.“
• Bre Pettis: Make a pocket LED cube – Weekend Projects Podcast – “This week, Bre Pettis teams up with Mitch Altman and George Shammas to make a little 3×3×3 cube made of little LED lights that you can program with any kind of animation you like!“

• Synergy: a Mutually Advantageous Conjunction of Distinct Elements – “Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).” – Via Mike.
• Script Me – “This site will help you create scripts for your Second Life objects. These scripts allow you to add interactive elements to your builds without knowing how to code. All of the script are released under a creative commons license, which means that you can use them freely!“
• TechCrunch: MetaCard: The World’s First Virtual World Credit Card – “Singapore based FirstMeta has launched MetaCard, a credit card for Second Life that is claimed to be the world’s first virtual world credit card.“
• The Agency Blog: A Realtor’s SMO Strategy – “If you are a realtor in need of an SMO strategy for your site, you’re in the right place. Using these tips will help you get started on developing a growing lucrative internet client base that will be easy to maintain and cost effective.“
• johnplaceonline.com: Increasing Your Time Affluence – “If we devoted half as much energy to our happiness as we devote to the measurable, quantifiable factors in our lives (such as income and possessions), many of us would feel a whole lot better. With that in mind, if you’d like to invest in your happiness, reflect on these 10 time-management tips and consider how each might be applied.” – - Via Jeremy.
• Renee Blodgett: What’s Your Comfort Level with Space? – “When you meet someone new — for business or pleasure — begin to test their boundaries with space by moving closer at surprising times or retreating by a foot or so just as you are beginning to build rapport. Watch what happens.“

• Magrathean Technologies: OpenSim named D-GiG – “D-GiG stands for Distributed Global Information Grid and that is because mostly I don’t like hippos and secondly it’s a fork of the OpenSIM project that is hosted by the Electric Sheep company that runs off a CD that will automatically detect your hardware, display a interesting logo, and then prompt you to login into your freshly booted 1 simulator.“
• Jeff Heaton: Writing Commerce Scripts in Second Life – “Millions of dollars change hands in Second Life. Find out how to create scripts to sell items in your own Second Life store.“
• Cruxy Music Map for Second Life – “This is a dynamic rendering of where music from artists on Cruxy.com is being enjoyed and shared in the virtual world of Second Life. The music is played and distributed using the Cruxy Player for Second Life. “
• CC Chapman: I’m Done Coloring – “If you or your company are looking for someone to come in and help out let me know. Need a new media strategy developed for you? Need a facilitated brainstorm full of creative ideas? Just want someone to advise on how to engage the social media community? All of those and more I can handle.“

My next Amazon Web Services speaking tour will take me to Vienna, Berlin, London, Slough, and Edinburgh. I am always happy to meet with software developers and web entrepreneurs when I travel, and I do have some open time in Berlin and in London.

If you would like to meet, simply pay a visit to my trip scheduling page, choose a time, and send a confirming email to the address noted therein.

• Pick the Brain: How to Write Faster, Better, and Easier – “This system is about being organized and prepared. This will allow your ideas to flow at their fastest rate. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they will flow at lightning speed, but I think you”ll find this allows them to flow at their maximum speed.“
• Office Snapshots: I Know Where You Work – “Office Snapshots shows you the inside of the offices you care about. This will generally be from Web/Tech companies, and perhaps larger companies that people will be familiar with.” – Via Krish.
• Win2VNC: A Dual-Screen Hack for Windows – “If you have two or more computers on your desk and you are tired of having several keyboards and mice around to control them, this is the program for you. While running this program, you can move the mouse pointer beyond the right or left edge of your primary display and the pointer will appear on the other computer screen. If you have ever used x2x or a computer with two graphics cards, you know what I am talking about.“
• Greg Verdino: Lost Luggage Blues (Four Months Later) – “It amazes me that there are still companies that seem not to understand that customer service is marketing. Maybe even one of the most powerful forms of marketing there is. And that customer disservice is worse than the worst marketing choices you might otherwise make.“
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: GSLiS: Virtual World Librarianship in Second Life – “The two-hour synchronous sessions will meet online in Second Life. Asynchronous discussions will be posted to Forums on Moodle, the course management system used by GSLIS.“

• Second Life Education Workshop 2007 – “Welcome the proceedings of the 2007 Second Life Education Workshop. If by any chance you’ve seen last year’s proceedings, then the first thing you’ll notice about this volume is the size – almost three times the size of last year’s. This mirrors the staggering growth in the educational use of Second Life that has occurred in the last 12 months, as noted by Claudia and Pathfinder in the preface.“
• Global Kids, Inc: Best Practices in Using Virtual Worlds For Education – “Create as many opportunities as possible for teens to express themselves through building. SL is all about building so it is almost hard NOT to do this. Encourage them to build the facilities and material required for the program.“
• Jason Calacanis: Diet Tips For Business Travelers… – “Perhaps the biggest challenge for business folks trying to lose weight is traveling. When you’re on the road it’s hard to workout and even harder to find health food options. Plus, when you get to your destination–be it a conference or business meetings–you’re faced with huge amounts of unhealthy food.“
• Texify – “Meaning: to convert a regular text document to LaTeX format.“
• Builder.au: Monitor Network Traffic With Ntop – “Like the command-line tool with a similar name, ntop is a monitoring agent. Instead of monitoring system resource usage like top, ntop monitors network usage and provides some very sophisticated and informative data.“
• Mtch Wagner: Five Rules For Bringing Your Real-Life Business Into Second Life – ““

I’ve spent a couple of hours cleaning up my home office this weekend and the results are actually noticeable. I still have too many shelves crammed with books that I will in all likelihood never need again, but I can’t bear to part with them — I am sentimentally attached to many of the computer science textbooks from school and career.

My oldest books are the little handbooks once published by DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation). I bought these in junior high school and they are badly worn, but still of value to me. At that point (1972?) it was very hard to find any information at all about computers or programming. Fortunately, the school’s computer teacher chaperoned a friend and I to downtown Boston to hunt down some books. If all else fails I can still figure out how to program a PDP-8.

I was lucky enough to attend First West Coast Computer Faire and bought a copy of Computer Lib / Dream Machines directly from Ted Nelson.

I have architectural manuals for most of the chips that I’ve programmed — the Intel 8080, the MOS Technology 6502, and the Motorola 68000. I wrote substantial amounts of 6502 and 68000 code in my younger years — stories still to be documented here for posterity.

Odds are that I will never again need to write any PL/I, but I sure have good memories of my PL/I Structured Programming book. I really liked that class and that language. We used the Waterloo PL/W compiler at Montgomery College. I used to enjoy throwing in a random deck of cards (yeah, punched cards) consisting of a mix of FORTRAN, COBOL, and IBM 360 assembly language and watching the compiler turn them into some semblance of a workable program. In fact, I actually tracked down the original articles on the construction of the compiler and learned a whole lot about language processing and error recovery from reading them.

From there I went on to David Gries and his classic book, Compiler Construction for Digital Computers. I never quite grasped everything that he was talking about, but I definitely gave it my best shot and went on to acquire a whole shelf of compiler books. I doubt that I will ever write a compiler again, and if I did there are now high-level tools for the job, but I still have fond memories of the subject. I did find that most of the books gave somewhat short shrift to code generation, which I found to be the most interesting aspect of the whole program.

I’ve got the Smalltalk-80 language reference, the first three volumes of Knuth‘s Art of Computer Programming, and a zillion more. Of course I have a couple of linear feet of O’Reilly books; what developer doesn’t?

They are all old friends, and there’s no reason to let go of friends!

• Personalize Media: Corporations in Social Virtual Worlds – Psychopaths or Welcome Friends? – “Commercial organisations need to have character and an indentifiable personality in the metaverse and cannot rely anymore on corporate slickness, blandness or aloofness. To engage with audiences and inhabitants in these spaces they need to learn how to be human.“
• Ask The Wizard: Lessons Learned: Obviously, it’s not Obvious – “Make sure you provide explicit examples of the powerful use or implementation of your service and don’t just expect people to ‘find’ it on their own. Similarly, pay careful attention to the things that people do with your technology/service/product, because some of them may have discovered a powerful use for it that has completely evaded you.“
• Mitch Wagner: Exercise – “Imagine there were a treatment that would enable you to add decades to your life, and, during that time, you’d be happier, more alert, have more energy, and look better. The downside: It takes about an hour a day.“
• Web Worker Daily: Get to the Bottom of Your To-Do List by Making it Tiny – “I suggest you adopt a Tiny To-do List: one with only three important tasks for today, and perhaps a few smaller and unimportant tasks that you can group together (emails, calls, paperwork, routine stuff).“
• Build an Atom.

I spent a few minutes earlier this evening working on the Amazon Developers Islands, freshening up some promotions for some upcoming Second Life and Virtual Worlds conferences:

The conferences are:

• Achieving Real Business Growth Through Second Life – I am speaking.
• Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 Conference and Expo – I am speaking.
• Dr. Dobb’s Life 2.0 Summit – I am hoping to attend this in-world conference, but it falls right in the middle of my next trip to Europe.

• CNET: At IBM, a Vacation Anytime, or Maybe None – “Aided by broadband connections, cell phones and video conferencing software, 40 percent of IBM’s employees have no dedicated offices, working instead at home, at a client’s site, or at one of the company’s hundreds of “e-mobility centers” around the world, where workers drop in to use phones, Internet connections and other resources.“
• ABC News: The Future of the Workplace: No Office, Headquarters in Cyberspace – “IBM says it saves $100 million a year in real estate costs because it doesn’t need the offices.“
• SLNN: Free Kiosks and a Cash Prize Make Press Releases Fun – “Everyone loves a freebie and most people like entering contests to win lindens. PR Newswire’s new press release kiosks and contest covers both areas. The new kiosks are low-prim and rotate headlines of recent Second Life-related press releases submitted to the service.“
• SL Pulse: Second Life Press Releases, Announcements, and Events – “Here you can access the latest Second Life news directly from its sources. This service is free and open to all with news related to Second Life. All submitted content is posted directly by the authors.“