New Toys!

Well, I think I've solved the problems I've been having with my roommate's internet usage making C:SI dueling impossible. One solution mentioned was taking turns. I suppose that would work but as a computer scientist any solution that involves social interaction is always a last resort :P I ended up upgrading to a better router. It supports the QoS protocol, which basically lets me reserve a portion of the bandwidth for a specific program (like SL). Actually, I haven't had to set this up yet, as it seems to have fixed the problem by just having more capacity to queue and send out packets. I'd say this is the perfect solution for a computer scientist, since it involves expensive new toys and the opportunity to throw around fancy jargon like "protocol".

The long awaited C:SI update came out yesterday! But I haven't yet gotten the change to try it out yet. The infamous block bug is advertised as fixed. It will be interesting to see if this helps or hurts me, lol. There is a new feature to challenge someone to a duel. If the person accepts your duel, then your sword will not harm anyone but them until the duel is over. I'm actually not sure when I'd want to use this. I don't think I've ever been fighting and thought, "I really wish I couldn't hurt anyone but this person I'm fighting with." But as I was typing that, I remembered being accidentally killed while an innocent bystander in Shrouded ;) The new duel feature reminded me of something I was thinking about a while ago. If I ever get up the courage to dive into the SL Viewer code, something I want to do is create a sort of "duel mode" that will only render you and your opponent. My framerate drops about 5 fps for every person on the screen, so I think that would help a lot. Another great new feature is practice mode, which turns off damage on your sword. I think this is something I will use a lot when I'm teaching students. The problem with doing drills is that someone would drop dead after a little bit.

Not Again!

Gmail finally has IMAP support! I have been waiting for this for years.

On another note, I am once again having problems with extremely high lag in SL (ping times are 1000 - 2000 msec). This time it's not due to the Wrath of God, but rather to my roommate using bittorrent. Yes, I could do things like disable port forwarding on the router so that bittorrent doesn't work anymore, but I'd feel guilty doing something like that. I mean, we all split the cost of the internet connection, so he has as much right to use it as I do. If anyone has any suggestions for how to improve this, I'd like to hear. I've been trying to look into possible ways of limiting the bandwidth bittorrent can use, but I haven't been able to figure out how.

24

It's my birthday today! I liked having my age be a prime number, but now I have to wait 6 years until that will happen again. I wont have to wait quite that long to have interesting ages, though, because the year before that, my age will be a perfect number (a hyperperfect number, even!); the year before that, it will be a powerful number; the year before that, it will be a deficient number (ok, so most of the ages I've been have been deficient numbers); and the year before that (next year), my car insurance will go down, as will the price of renting a car.

I had a sad realization today, though. The last time my age was a sublime number, I was too young to realize it, and now I will have to wait quite a while for that to happen again.

Numbers

I was wondering about the numbers involved in creating a life-size Earth in Second Life, so I did some calculations. It would require 7,782,984 sims. That would cost $13,036,498,200 (13 billion) initially, and then $2,295,980,280 (2 billion) a month or $27,551,763,360 (27 billion) a year. Assuming each sim is run on a separate computer, that would be about 18,834,821 kWh of electricity. If Linden Labs became it's own US state, it would be ranked 36th (above New Mexico and below Idaho) in electricity consumption. The current size of SL is about 1/5 the size of Rhode Island. If SL continues to grow at the rate it grew between July and August 2007, it will reach the size of the Earth in 711,149 years. By that time, there will be 501,087,718,847 residents, so probably about 3,276 unique users.

The Future of Video Games

I was reading this article about the next 25 years of video games. It talked about PS3 Home (which is Sony's attempt at competing with Second Life, or more probably with imvu) like it was some new type of entity that has never been seen before. "Sometime in the Spring of '08 Sony will break ground on the kind of virtual world that has been predicted by, well, about 40 percent of the science-fiction stories written in the last 50 years." I guess if PS3 Home will "break ground" on these virtual worlds, then Second Life "acquired the building permit"? And then it gets worse: "...but even if PS3 Home dies on the vine, it will, at worst, serve as the blueprint the next virtual world is built from. It could be the Model-T of what could, generations later, turn into something close to The Matrix." I think that, at worst, it will be remembered as that Second Life rip-off that sucked and no one ever used. Anyway, the article is pretty interesting despite the author's ignorance of certain things. He also did one of my biggest pet peeves by saying about Spore "They're planning on half a million stars with millions of planets orbiting. When we say 'infinite,' we mean it." Actually, you don't mean it, because you just clearly stated finite numbers. The worst is when people use the term "literally" when they really mean exactly the opposite. I mean, if you were literally so scared you jumped out of your skin, you wouldn't be talking to me right now, would you?

And now for something completely different

Crackbook

Some people have put together a hilarious parody of Facebook. Make sure you see the news feed, applications, profile, and real profile.