Wes Maldonado: Data Junkie

Jodi and I had a strange experience Tuesday in Paris. We were walking down the Champs-Élysées and saw the Renault ING Experience, entered the store and walked into Second Life. Inside the store/experience we saw the usual, race cars, shiny things and then a strange row of computers with signs screaming “Welcome to Second Life!”… It turns out that the Renault Formula One team has decided to go virtual by opening up a space in Second Life. Being a geek, I spent some time in Second Life learning about the racers and tried to get Jodi to try it out, but she was too cool for Second Life since we’re on a “real life” vacation in Paris.

Silverlight Security

The Silverlight security system (described here, here and here in Shawn Farkas’ blog) promises to be very useful.

Unlike CAS that was hard to understand, the Silverlight security model is very simple and can be explained in a couple of minutes. This should be useful very useful to folks running untrusted code like SecondLife.

Interesting mention of Silverlight referencing SecondLife from Miguel de Icaza: Rodrigo, Mark and Marek Join Novell’s Mono Team

Jeff Barr provided this link via his linkblog:

Information Week: Inside Second Life’s Data Centers

“The servers support 34 Tbytes of user-created content, and the traffic load for accessing that content is very different than a conventional Web site.“

Today the scripts running on Second Life are a bit slow, so they are looking at Mono and the CLI as a way of providing more speed to their users and hopefully allow developers to write in other languages other than their Linden Labs Scripting Language.

They have a compiler that translates their scripting language into CIL bytecodes, and the preliminary results give a performance increase between 50 and 150 faster execution with Mono.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Aug-03.html

Yes, people actually do use Mono in “the real world”.