FriendFeed: Simple Update Protocol – “SUP (Simple Update Protocol) is a simple and compact “ping feed” that web services can produce in order to alert the consumers of their feeds when a feed has been updated. This reduces update latency and improves efficiency by eliminating the need for frequent polling.“
Zen Habits: 12 New Rules of Working You Should Embrace Today – “With new tools, new models of collaboration, and new freedom and mobility in working styles, some New Rules of Working are emerging. Not all of these have asserted their dominance yet, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever totally supplant more traditional rules and ways of working. But they are emerging, and in my mind, they’re all positive and exciting developments.“
Business Week: Business, and Startups, in Second Life – “Virtual worlds, of which Second Life is the most populous, are becoming more than just a place where Web surfers socialize, play games, or sell nonexistent products to imaginary people. Increasingly, tech-savvy businesses are using virtual worlds to design, create, and even test product concepts before they make their debut in the real world. “
CNET: Sarah Lacy takes on Gnomedex – “Lacy began the session by posing the theory that in some ways, the PR industry has co-opted blogging–taking advantage of the fact that many bloggers trying to earn a living are so eager for page views that they will post just about anything they are spoon-fed. ” And there’s Andy again. That kid sure does get around.
Reality Prime: How SL Primitives Really Work – “So how does one efficiently build 3D volumes to make so many prims, and do quickly enough? Simplicity. There are hundreds of mathematical models for constructing volumes. There are sweeps, lofts, extrusions, implicit and explicit surfaces, subdivision surfaces, metaballs, and more. The key for us was keeping it to a small set, and my personal contribution to this was making one small piece of code that could do them all.“
Adam Frisby: Resources For Running Your Own OpenSim – “I’ve noticed that there are a lot of resources out there for how to run your own OpenSim instance, but they are so disparate that finding them all can be a challenge, especially as each tends to have it’s own self contained target use case.“
Babbage Linden: Mono Launch – “The integration of Mono is the first step in the evolution of Second Life into a true software development platform. Thank you to all the residents who have helped us take this first step.“
Miguel de Icaza: SecondLife Rolls Out Mono-Powered Servers – “This are clearly hugenormous news for us, and for everyone that worked with Linden, for everyone that fixed bugs and implemented new features in Mono to run under the conditions that Linden has. “
Common Sensible: Second Life: True Development Platform? – “I have said before that 99% of all Second Life residents haven’t the faintest idea of the technical power of Second life. Rendering a 3D image thirty times a second, when a few years ago a single frame would have taken hours if not days. And now, not only a 3d virtual world, but soon a true development platform.“
Wagner James Au: An Introduction To OpenSim: the “Apache of Virtual Worlds” – “Right now, it’s only possible to move avatars between SL and OpenSim; the far greater challenge is trust management– creating a workable, agreed-upon system for moving virtual objects, currency, and other valuable items in between worlds.“
James Quinn: The Great Consumer Crash of 2009 – “By 2005 practically everyone had a large automobile and a beautiful house. By 2010 many of these people will be asking where is that large automobile and will realize as the sheriff escorts them out of their house that this is not my beautiful house. There is plenty of blame to go round for this predicament.“
Jay Leno: It Ain’t That Hard, Folks. Make Better Cars. – “Every time you use the turn signal, it’s like breaking a chicken leg. In order to make the more expensive car more appealing, U.S. companies feel as though they have to dumb down the cheaper car.“
Raphaël: JavaScript Library – “Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. In case you want to create your own specific chart or image crop-n-rotate widget, you can simply achieve it with this library.“
The Economist: Risk and the Credit Manager – “We thought that we had focused correctly on the non-investment-grade paper, of which we held little. We had not paid enough attention to the ever-growing mountain of highly rated but potentially illiquid assets. We had not fully appreciated that 20% of a very large number can inflict far greater losses than 80% of a small number.“
Terry Tao: On Time Management – “There are also many situations in which it makes tactical sense to defer, delay, delegate, or procrastinate on any given task, and go work on something else instead in the meantime; not everything is equally important, and also a given task may in fact become much easier (and be completed in a much better way) if one waits for one’s own skills to get stronger, or for other events to happen that reduce the importance or need for the task in the first place.“
Circos: Meaningful Search – “Circos is the only search engine that uses complex algorithms to understand the actual meaning of words and the people who write them. We scour the web for reviews, blogs, and recommendations about places, products and services, and our algorithms understand the words in context.“
Google Open Source: Distcc’s Pump Mode: A New Design for Distributed C/C++ Compilation
– “Pump mode works by pushing even more processing onto the servers. Based on an incremental static analysis of the source code, pump mode is able to quickly identify the sets of files needed for the preprocessing phase of compiling C/C++ programs and send them to the compilation servers for preprocessing. This achieves a dramatic decrease in the CPU load of the workstation and of course much better build speed.“
TeachStreet Blog: TeachStreet Comes to P-Town – The Official Announcement! – “TeachStreet, the first free website dedicated to helping teachers and students connect with one another at the neighborhood level, today announced that it has opened its virtual doors to the residents of Portland, Oregon. Just as Powell’s is renowned for its extensive collection of books, residents in and around the Rose City will now be one click away from discovering more than 25,000 classes, instructors, and schools currently available on TeachStreet.“
Tom Raftery: Do You Telework? – “Personally, I love working out of home and at this point I’d find it very hard to going back to working from a central office. Working from home means I can be far more productive. I can (and often do) stay working on long after the typical 9-5 workday.“
Robert Reich: The Heart of the Economic Mess – “The long-term answer is for us to invest in the productivity of our working people — enabling families to afford health insurance and have access to good schools and higher education — while also rebuilding our infrastructure and investing in the clean energy technologies of the future.“
CNN Money: Let’s Make America Thrifty Again – “Tufano and Princeton’s Daniel Schneider have proposed adding a line to tax forms so you could get part of your refund back in bonds. Aside from the convenience, this would send a signal that Uncle Sam thinks saving is a good thing to do with your refund.“
Nancy Duarte: Tips for Remote Presenters – “High stakes communication is handled best with everyone in the same room. But we all know with gas prices going up, and spending going down, it’s likely that your critical proposal will end up being communicated via an online presentation. So how do you make the most of it and connect with your audience?” – Via Sara Peyton.
Charles Hugh Smith: An Empire of Debt – “Right now, Bernanke and Paulson and Congress and the rest of the power elite have the shock paddles frantically pressed to the chest of the American financial system, hitting the erratic heart of our Debt Empire with shock after shock, hoping and praying the debt bubble of the past 25 years can somehow be extended. “
Kippie Friedkin: Second Life Viewer Cheatsheet – “My gift to you, fellow Second Life® Residents, is version 1.0 of my new project, a Second Life® Viewer Cheatsheet. It contains all the keyboard shortcuts of which I am currently aware.“
