Since Second life seems to have lost it’s luster, I’ve not heard much of 3-D virtual worlds. Then today I saw mention of three different 3-D virtual worlds. Robert Scoble had this post on Vivaty. Michael Arrington had this post on an agreement between IBM and Second Life. This is the first I’d heard about IBM’s efforts in a 3-D virtual world. Mike also had this post on Google’s entry into 3-d virtual worlds, called Lively.

So with all that buzz in one day, maybe this is it’s time? Some of these look more promising than Second Life as a virtual world, since they seem to have ways to overcome the limitations in Second Life. Time will tell.

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Vivaty, Lively, Second Life, Virtual Worlds

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At work I’m enhancing a Java test tool that needs to have scripting capability to run more dynamic tests, and to grade results on the fly.

So I’m considering which I should use. The users of the system are mostly Java and C++ developers on a Linux platform, so they’re used to the C style syntax but they mostly have at least a passing familiarity with shell scripting and makefiles, so they’ve seen about as convoluted a syntax as exists.

I’m considering Python and Ruby, as two languages that seem to be the favorites today, although their syntax would be unfamiliar to the typical user. they’re both object oriented. I don’t know what to suggest about the relative merits in this environment, but I can say that Google uses Python extensively, making it seem like a good choice. TCL is a third option, but I don’t know if it has the long term following the other languages have.

Right now Ruby is a language with much higher demand than the supply of developers, making it nice for the developer adding to her resume, but not for the company, necessarily.

Other programs on the site have added a home grown BASIC-like language to the tool, but home grown languages seem like a bad choice when there are so many known languages out there that you can actually hire someone who already knows it, and it enhances your resume if you’re looking for new work. In other words, a win-win.

Update 12:30 PM: found the Jakarta BSF project, which looks like a useful tool for this application.

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Software development, Scripting languages, scripting applications, Ruby, Python, Java

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37Signals posted on the way Bang and Olufsen does design. They don’t go to the office more than two or three times a month. They design with paper and cardboard in 3D and build it up little by little.

Greatness comes from successfully breaking the rules.

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37Signals, Design, Ban and Olufsen

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Via Phil Platt at the Bad Astronomy blog, I saw this smack down of Creationist Andy Schlafly by Richard Lenski of Michigan State University.

I have in the past been squarely in the Creationist camp. I’ve seen more and more evidence that evolution really works, and I’ve seen more evidence that the “Creation Scientists” play loose with the facts if they don’t fit their worldview.

So I’ve come to understand, like John Calvin, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, that the Bible doesn’t have anything to say about how or when God created, nor does science say anything about God, one way or the other.

In the meantime, it’s become apparent that many in the evangelical community would rather play the role of the Catholic Church when the church bureaucracy felt threatened by Galileo’s findings.

I’ve heard some say that religion and science are incompatible. They are wrong. Many would point out that belief in an ordered universe that obeys scientific principles is based on the Judeo-Christian belief in a rational God. Unfortunately, the Creationists are abandoning that rational God in an attempt to maintain their unfounded positions. It would be a capricious, devious God who would create a universe that appears to be something that it’s not.

In short, religion deals with questions of who and why, while science deals in questions of what and how.

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GameCareerGuide has an article discussing one path to becoming a game designer.

If you’re interested in Game Design as a career, go read it.

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Game Design

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Funny video spoof of Bill’s last day.

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Microsoft, Bill Gates

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Via @kiwork on Twitter, I read this press release from Sun, telling how their study of their flexible work program, they discovered that their employees on the program saved considerable money.

Main points:

• Employees saved more than $1,700 per year in gasoline and wear and tear on their vehicles by working at home an average of 2.5 days a week.
• Office equipment energy consumption rate at a Sun office was two times that of home office equipment energy consumption, from approximately 64 watts per hour at home to 130 watts per hour at a Sun office.
• Commuting was more than 98 percent of each employee’s carbon footprint for work, compared to less than 1.7 percent of total carbon emissions to power office equipment.
• By eliminating commuting just 2.5 days per week, an employee reduces energy used for work by the equivalent of 5,400 Kilowatt hours/year.
• Working from home 2.5 days per week saved the employees in the study an average of 2.5 weeks of commute time (8 hours/day, 5 days/week).

Earlier I had seen this blog post about working more intelligently, and allowing workers to work from home (or elsewhere). It discusses how to encourage your company to make the move to sanity for the staff. It’s interesting to me that many software companies, the very companies making it possible to telework, are some of the most resistant to the change. Crazy.

Of course, there’s the changes made at Best Buy headquarters, to move from the 9-5, time managed work environment to a Results Oriented Work Environment, where it doesn’t matter if or when you come into the office, or how much time you spend there. You are only judged on getting things done, i.e., results. Here’s another look at it.

Then there was this post about Herb Keller of Southwest Airlines at 37signals. His key word? Treat employees like customers. Then, they will take care of the customers.

The bottom line here, we can best achieve work-life balance by removing artificial constraints that remain from the work environment of the 1950’s, but rather move into the 21^st century.

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Been debating direction for future development efforts. I love the iPhone, and it’s getting a lot of press these days. Seems everyone wants development done on it, so there’s plenty of opportunity on it to make money doing development.

At the same time, I really like what I see coming with Android. It offers a totally open platform, where the developer is in control, not some third party company, such as Apple (with the iPhone). Since my current Verizon contract lasts into September, I can’t really change providers and get a different plan anyway.

Similarly, I heard an interesting discussion on an older MacRoundTable podcast discussing shareware on the Mac. They discussed how pleasantly surprised they were to find the really great applications on the Mac that do one thing, and do it really well. That caught my attention, as that’s the great feature of Unix/Linux applications as well, the Unix legacy applications do one thing, and do it really well. On top of that, they typically use text for input and output, making it easy to pipeline a number of simple applications together to do a complex task. Interestingly, I heard Joel Spoelsky discussing things on a stackoverflow podcast the other day, where he thought that Unix applications got this wrong, in that he seemed to think they all had different formats and didn’t work well together. I have a lot of respect for Joel, but I think he got this one wrong.

I guess the point of that last paragraph was that I’m also thinking of going with Mac Cocoa development, or maybe Java development. I’m doing Java desktop development for Boeing now, so that’s a real possibility, focusing on smaller applications that do one thing very well, much like MarsEdit, that I’m using to write this blog post.

On one final note, I’d provide trackbacks to the posts relevant to the above mentioned podcasts, but I don’t know which podcasts made the references. They aren’t in the shownotes, as far as I can tell.

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business, Macintosh, iPhone, Android, Verizon

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Seth Godin has a great post discussing the evils of voicemail trees that actually drive customers away.

In short, every CEO (and marketing manager) should call his company, including at odd hours, and go through the pain that their customers go through. Then get the problems fixed.

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Business

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PHD Comics had this hilarious take on going green a few days ago.

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PHD Comics, Comic

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