Tainan is a city in Taiwan, by the way.

I came all this way to visit New Jersey:

Blank concrete barriers under smog,
Highways robed in rice paddies.
Granaries coated in rust rust
Idly. Trade rice for more
American grains, and this drive
Is one more trip through waste, waste
Of nature, of wild.

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Sulka Haro sends word that Mud-Dev 2 is apparently having domain troubles. So if you were looking, that’s where it isn’t.

Edit: going there seems to redirect me to http://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/mud-dev2?, but it looks like it works fine.

Another edit: Nick Koranda, the moderator, writes and tells me that the MX records are pointed to my.binhost.com, so everyone should be getting emails fine.

3pointD.com has more on that mainframe project, and I still don’t get it, because of some rather odd statements in the interview.

It will “rely on the Cell’s processor for rendering.” Uh, a metaverse with a processor requirement for clients? Or do they mean server-side rendering, which seems unlikely and a bad idea anyway?

“We see this technology moving into banking and retail and anything where the consumer is involved in a transaction of commerce that they would today do over the Web, online shopping, online banking.” Banking? Does anyone at all want to do their banking in a virtual world? What value-add does a virtual world bring to doing banking? Being able to interact with a menu on an ATM was a vast improvement in efficiency and accuracy for the typical person going to a bank.

Their big concern? “The problem is that rendering is kind of weak. We haven’t figured out how to accelerate that yet, and how to marry that to transactions.” Rendering is the weak point for online worlds? Despite the fact that it’s been shown over and over again that customers just don’t give a damn about the visual representation? On the other hand, there’s a comment about clients for mobile phones, music players, TVs, and so on. Or maybe they mean something like timeliness of rendering given latency, given their comment about transactions…

From stuff within the article, it seems that this is both a hardware solution and a product suite designed to run on that hardware — mention is made of Hoplon’s messaging and physics solutions, of a billing system, and so on. I’m not clear on to what degree you are expected to write your own virtual world atop all this, or whether IBM is planning on creating the server software too.

The International Herald Tribune discusses IBM’s new game server platform:

International Business Machine’s new video game server blends a mainframe computer with the company’s Cell microprocessors. The result is a server system capable of permitting hundreds of thousands of computer users to interact in a three-dimensional, simulated on-screen world described as a “metaverse.”

The machines will be priced beginning at hundreds of thousands dollars.

Uh, does anyone really think the future of online worlds is in Big Iron?

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for (iLevel = 1; iLevel iMaxLevelAllowed; iLevel++)
{
currentMonsters.hitPoints = X * iLevel;
currentMonsters.attackStrength = Y * iLevel;
currentMonsters.graphics = GetMonsterGraphics(iLevel);

currentTreasures.value = Z * iLevel;
}

The above came from a Slashdot thread about LOTRO, and was pointed out to me by John Szeder, who followed up with the question, “Why haven’t more people looked at making games without treadmills?”

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This is a first for me! GameJew (a frequently hilarious gaming culture video web show — the intro should give you a good idea of what it’s like) has done a video review of the book. Extreme close-ups of cartoons for the win!

My home office has had some misadventures lately: first replacing some faucets in the adjacent bathroom, then there was an unrelated flood which required moving everything out into the living room, then I found that the tile dust from the faucet replacement had almost killed my CPU fan, causing my computer to overheat and crash quite regularly (thanks to m3mnoch for helping me get running again!).

So today I got the recording stuff all set up again for the first time in ages. And this tune was the result. The recording is a bit muddy, and a bit messy — I didn’t actually write parts for anything other than the mandolin, so everything else is just improv and more than a bit rough, since some of the parts stomp each other or collide. But what the hey, it’s dinnertime and I have been working on it for around 6 hours, so I am posting it.

Given that I overdubbed virtually every instrument I have, Kristen said it should be called “Pick ‘Em All Up.” So it is. However, the ukelele and the mountain dulcimer did not in fact make the cut. But you can hear the old 1894 banjo in there — my banjo debut! — as well as the ‘62 Gibson acoustic.

The Agile Partners weblog has audio of the panel I was on. They also have better audio of the lecture I gave.

Obsolete_Your_Idols has a rough transcript of the panel I was on alongside folks from Club Penguin, Gaia Online, and Second Life.

Courtesy of f13, available here. At some point, I’ll transcribe it and match it up with the slides.

Edit: even better audio here, courtesy of the Agile Partners blog.