People who go through my real life training sessions often hear me warn as a “default behavior” to uncheck the “Save Password” box on the Second Life login screen. This is especially important in the open labs, and it is a bug, not a feature as far as I’m concerned, that the actual default is to have it checked.

Here’s yet another reason not to save it, even on your own computer: GNUCitizen points out a very easy way that a knowledgeable person could get your Second Life credentials. I’m handy with computers, but not a true geek. I will admit that I don’t understand how to do this, but I know enough to realize that with a little backgrounding even I could figure out how to apply this. I suspect it is a no-brainer to a real geek, and that would be about the only protection other than refraining from leaving your password stored in the SL client–you have to depend on real hackers to find such an approach too boring and unchallenging.

You don’t have to understand it to get the point: your stored password isn’t safe.

It’s much safer to just not save the password in the first place.

Share this, please!

This is how you know something has started to become mainstream while still being on the leading edge: Second Life got a mention today in the Doonesbury comic strip.

Doonesbury has a longer life than most online comic strips–Trudeau keeps them up for a year, whereas most leave comics available online for a month or less. Still, if you want to see it, you’d best go look soon.

Share this, please!

We’ve been talking about Linden Lab’s plan to open-source the Second Life client. They did that on Friday, according to an article in the Second Life Insider–or, at least, a couple of pieces of it. Who knows what it portends? But, just as the open-sourcing of the client software came sooner than anyone expected, this initial trickle is sooner as well. Perhaps the server stuff will get completely opened up soon. If it does, expect another explosion in SL usage. I’ll be interested to see how much, if any, attempt is made to hook all the little independent SLs together. If it happens, it could truly be the start of something resembling the 3D Internet.

Share this, please!

The Second Life Insider put me onto this one. It’s a Web site that examines, explains, and points to the most interesting place in SL. You could spend hours with this stuff seeing some great builds, which should be inspiring to those of us who are considering ways to use SL educationally. b-places.com is run by Brussels Airlines.

Share this, please!

An ongoing issue for Second Life residents is the constant need to get up-to-date software. Usually, this comes from the need to update, but often it comes from being on a computer that is not your own–for instance, at a convention. It’s not all that hard the “old” way, but it involved going to the Website and having to click twice. For modern netizens that can be too much work. 🙂 Seriously, the problem for some people is remembering where on the page to find the link.

By the way, if you haven’t heard, the best way, it seems, for most people to your software when SL requires it (or suggests it) is to go to the Web site, not use the automatic updater built into the client. People report many fewer problems with just downloading and installing a “fresh” load. Your settings are retained, so no worries about losing information.

In this context, Jeff Linden has announced a personal project to make this process easier. To get the latest client build, just go to http://get.secondlife.com/. Reportedly, as soon as you go there the Web site will autodetect your operating system and start the proper download.

Jeff Linden cautions that any autodetection software can make a mistake, so if you are, for instance, on a Mac and it starts downloading the Linux client, you can stop the download and then go to the appropriate link for your platform:

• http://get.secondlife.com/win
• http://get.secondlife.com/mac
• http://get.secondlife.com/linux

You can read his entire post (which I recommend) on the official Linden blog.

Share this, please!

I’ve been looking over the new Multiverse client and server to see if it might possibly do better for our purposes at PSTCC.

My initial short answer is: no.

Let me take that apart a bit.

Our virtual worlds project really has two prongs: 1) to support the development of the new gaming curriculum, and 2) to explore the potential of virtual worlds for enhancing education. I think the Multiverse platform has a lot of potential, and eventually will be of great interest to the new gaming curriculum at PSTCC. For the foreseeable future, I don’t see it as very useful for the college in general.

It’s going to be great for the gaming curriculum as it matures, because the graphics are much better already than SL, and it seems like the platform developers provide enough tools to enable a world developer to create just about anything s/he desires. Unlike SL (or at least, unlike SL without a lot of under-the-hood messing around), Multiverse developers can create objects in, for instance, Maya and import it into whatever world is being built.

Why doesn’t this work for the average college student, then?

1. If you haven’t checked, Maya is a pretty expensive program. I’m sure open source projects are or have already been developed, but if you’ve ever messed with open source (and I have–a lot), you know this isn’t a simple, free alternative. To put it bluntly, to create objects in Multiverse you’re going to either have to have quite a bit more money than you would for SL, or you’re going to have to know a lot more about code in general and be comfortable not having a lot of documentation/hand-holding for your object-creation software. Gaming students will probably go there anyway; the average college student will not. Awkward as it can be, the built-in object creation software in SL mean that the average student can be creating stuff within minutes of figuring out those basic movements like walking and sitting.
2. Speaking of walking–it also became clear as I tried to walk around Multiverse’s demo world that you have to have a really high-end computer for it to run smoothly… or much at all. My laptop has only ever choked on two things: trying to record video (which requires at least three tons of memory and hard drive space), and trying to move around in the Multiverse demo. It choked harder on the video recording; nevertheless, moving around in Multiverse on my laptop reminded me of the last time I had a serious dental procedure that involved happy gas. I should mention my laptop was state of the art, but a couple of years ago. That’s the point. Again, the gaming folks are likely to have the bleeding edge computers needed to deal with the crisp graphics and smooth movements. The average student is less likely.
3. It’s still not clear to me if it is or will be possible to move from one world to another, if, for instance, the world developers allow it. If they do, then that would be great. I can foresee a time when virtual space will become more like Web space in that regard, where you can seamlessly move from one Web server to another without even being aware you have made a change. Today’s virtual space is much like the Internet prior to the Web, when Compuserve users couldn’t necessarily talk to GEnie users, who couldn’t necessarily talk to AmericaOnline users. If it will not be possible to move from world to world, then we will truly have planetary isolation and lose much of the advantages of virtual space education, in my opinion, i.e., the ease with which students can interact with people of different cultures.

My experience with my own students suggests that many of them do not have computers capable even of running SL. Since my laptop has never had a problem with any of SL’s stuff (except when every other resident had a problem), and yet it won’t run Multiverse well enough to actually use it, it suggests we will continue to use SL for most of our virtual world education for at least awhile.

In the meantime, we’re learning the best practices for education in a virtual environment. I’m quite sure we’ll want to develop our own virtual space eventually. Whether that will be built on a future version of Multiverse, or whether Linden Lab will successfully open source their server software first…. Stayed tuned!

Share this, please!

PowerPoint can be a great tool when it’s used correctly. It seldom is, of course. I think that’s one of the reasons the current crop of college students absolutely hate being subjected to PowerPoint presentations, generally. It has been used on them so badly for so long, they tend to react negatively to any PowerPoint presentation.

Comedian Don McMillan doesn’t teach you how to use PPT correctly, but through his comedy about “How NOT to Use Powerpoint,” he at least sensitizes PPT abusers to be aware of their sins.

Share this, please!

The official Linden blog has a good article that includes the history but focuses on the usefulness of the “debug menu.” This is a menu that is not open by default in your SL software, because it does have the potential to, um, mess things up. I don’t recommend just mucking around in it. But Torley Linden explains “10 debug options you should know about” in such a way as to enhance your experience while keeping you safe. It’s at least worth knowing that “yes, you can do that.”

Share this, please!

This blog has been relatively quiet this summer. For one thing, we’ve been on “summer break.” That doesn’t mean much, except that I wasn’t physically on campus as much. Other things had more of an effect.

• I had two (really, three or four) major PHP projects for which I was committed.
• I taught an online speech course.
• My youngest daughter wound up in the hospital again, her 18th hospitalization.

We’re not back in regular session yet, and Hannah isn’t home from the hospital yet. But I’ve turned in summer grades, and I have a connection from the hospital, so this is as good a time as any to crank it up.

I need to do something. I have bookmarked 33 pages that I had intended to tell you about, and that I haven’t had time to get to yet. I hope some of them still mean something by the time I get it all taken care of.

Share this, please!

I have mixed feelings about this one. I don’t gamble, and find the gambling activities in Second Life to be obnoxious–not because of the usual moralistic concerns, but because of what it does to the landscape. Much of the mainland has been overrun by casinos, and they tend to be flashy, noisy, intrusive (in the sense that objects are scripted to talk or shout as an attention-getting strategy), and lag-inducing (scripts and crowds). From a personal standpoint, I’m glad to see them go. There will be much more land that is attractive for buying, “living” on, etc.

On the other hand, I wonder about the economic impact. Will there now be a mass exodus from SL as people who came there primarily for gambling? Will that leave tons of abandoned land, as casinos shut down and owners no longer want to pay tier? Will that cause a drop in the real estate market? How will the lack of spending/paying/winning/losing affect the exchange of real-world money with Linden dollars?

Also on the other hand, one of the things I appreciate about SL is its “mind your own business” libertarian approach. It seems ridiculous to me that so many governments are attempting to extend their brand of running someone else’s business into virtual space. It makes as much sense as attempting to include the moon in Columbia’s jurisdiction just because it happens to cross over its “airspace” while orbiting the earth. Anything that lends legitimacy to such lunacy should not be encouraged.

In any case, they have announced a new policy, effective immediately, that unambiguously shuts down gambling across Second Life, regardless of local laws and their application. In other words, it’s now a Term of Service. Whether online gambling is legal for you where you live, either as a participant or a casino owner, is immaterial.

Details can be found in a an official Linden blog post.

Share this, please!