Craig Mayhew’s Blog

I have a keen interest in virtual worlds, they can allow you to design anything you want providing you have the time and the knowledge. This is what originally pulled me towards second life. Unfortunately when I started to use second life I didn’t really understand how second life was used or how I could go about creating my items, objects, content etc. The learning curve was fairly long. I now understand how to do many of these things and intend to share it as much as possible with all of you (in a future blog post).

Learn by example and all that so let’s look at what second life is used for by looking at locations near my virtual house.

Second life is about communication, education and expression. It’s about designing things for others to use or for you to use with others. It’ about collaboration and meeting like minded people. Within 2 minutes of my house in second life I found the following places:

House of the wolf http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Orions%20Vale/244/221/98 This is a huge cathedral, it’s not short on detail with spiraling staircases, vast pillars and tall towers. I’m not sure it was built with a particular purpose, but it’s fun to explore. Hide and seek maybe?

Circuit la Corse http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Valis/67/6/122 This is very long race track for people that love driving in second life. It’s built by the Linden Department of Public Works http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/02/08/the-linden-department-of-public-works/ who are working to make second life a better place (More on this later).

1930’s Tokyo http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mordreds%20Crossing/121/7/161 This is a simulation of a section of 1930’s era Tokyo. Cars and trams are driving around their scripted routes. The area must consist of 100’s of buildings many of which you can enter. This was designed by a group called “Swing Era Japan”.

If you like exploring, your onto a winner. As usual the problem is finding the diamonds in the rough, as there is an unimaginable ammount of content is second life and most of it is of poor quality.

Second life is also starting to suffer many of the same issues as the real world. They are trying to build roads that interconnect densely populated areas, but they are having trouble finding a route without uprooting people from their land. Linden labs are also trying to create areas of beauty such as parks, forests and other simulations so that people have quality locations to meet in and to promote a positive image of second life.

Another major issue that has come about is the Intellectual Property rights of in world items. Programmers are able to easily copy items that may have taken someone else a very long time to create with use of a modified viewer. Some people are then selling these items at knock down prices, creating a black market. These issues sometimes spill over from the real world with people using textures they have found by searching Google and reselling them as part of an object within second life. Music is also suffering IP issues as it can be easily played on any parcel of land by the land owner. All they need as an exernal URL to stream it from. Most land owners do not pay royalties for the music they play and as far as I am aware, this is completely un-policed.

Second life has given me lot but it was just a stepping stone to something better. For me, second life didn’t allow me to design without limits. Mostly because it has an economy, an economy is built on rules and therefore limitations. I wanted a virtual environment that can extend and supplement my reality. I needed my own virtual space where rules are none existent unless I impose them. I needed my own simulation. Enter openSim. openSim is a complete virtual environment much the same as second life where essentially, I can run my own private second life server. I can use as much space as I like, build as big as I like in any way I want to. I’m not limited to a very small quantity of computer resources, I’m only limited by my hardware and how efficiently I use it. Slowly I have begun merging this with other applications that I use in the real world. I intend to blog about these uses I find for the tiny universe I have created and experiments I will run.

Watch this space.

Had to post this, as it’s an awesome idea. Also it appears that the plastic may have been printed out on a reprap.

Had a bit of a nightmare with this as you can’t even get into safe mode to fix the problem. Running a start up repair from the windows CD does nothing. This leaves us with two options for fixing or working around the issue.

Option 1:
– Revert to a previous restore point using the windows CD to boot into recovery/repair mode. Obviously this only works if you have restore points.

Option 2:
1. Insert your Vista CD/DVD into your drive and boot from it.
2. Select “Repair your Computer” from the list.
3. Select “Command Prompt” from the recovery choices.
4. At the command prompt type C:
5. Type cd WindowsWinSxS
6. Type rename pending.xml pending.xml.bak
7. Exit and reboot

Please remember that option 2 will cause problems if you need to update in future. If and when I solve that, I’ll write a blog and post a link to it.

I upgraded the VMWare server to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. You need to reinstall the VMWare server again. Here’s the guide which is the same as for the previous upgrade to Karmic:

Download VMware Server (2.0.1 or 2.0.2) – in gz format. You will also need a license key.

If you have tried to install vmware server already and something went wrong during the install, then do these two steps first:

first, delete the vmware modules

rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/

if needed (you’ll know if you need to do this one and you need to changethe version “2.6.31-13″ to the one your running.):

rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.31-13-server/misc/vm*

Install:

Run vmware-install.pl. Somewhere in the installation process you should be asked:
Do you want this program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]
you should answer: no

Then run the patch vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh.

sudo ./vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh

After this, run

/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

If the vmware-config.pl aborts, because it couldn’t shut down all vmware services then kill them manually and then rerun vmware-config.pl:

kill -9 $( grep -i vm | awk '{ print $2 }' )

And hopefully that should work!

It’s my last day in Germany today and before coming home I wanted to write about a few things they do (in my opinion) better here than we do in the UK.

Prepay Fuel Stations
On the way into Germany we filled up at a “prepay fuel station” (This was actually in the netherlands and not in Germany) where you have to pay for fuel before you put it into your car. In the UK alot of people are stealing fuel by driving off without paying. The solution most companies have come up with in the UK was to have a number plate recognition computer that black lists a cars number plate if it drives off without paying. This prevents people from stealing twice but doesn’t prevent them from stealing in the first place. Proffesional fuel thieves of course would have a fake number plate and would probably have a barrel in the back of the car so they can steal hundreds of litres of fuel in one go. In any case the prepay would fix all these issues and prevention is better than cure.

Autobahn
The autobahn in many parts doesn’t have a speed limit. It also doesn’t have average speed check cameras in sections that do have speed limits. Despite the ability to drive as fast as you like there are relatively few fatalities on the autobahn. Some environmental groups have said that the higher speeds cause less efficient fuel usage and larger carbon footprints. However introducing a speed limit such as in the UK would mean journey times are longer and therfore cars are on the road for longer which increases congestion. Introducing a speed limit also means it needs to be inforced at additional cost. I personally always see people braking at speed cameras (even the average speed check cameras) we have in the UK which causes a larger carbon foot print. There are some stretches of road in the UK which would benefit from higher or complete removal of the speed limit and it would be good if we could put this to a public vote.

Double decker trains
Trains with two floors! Many parts of the German rail network are designed to have higher trains which are capable of having two floors. This doubles the per carriage capacity. Unfortunately in the UK this would be very expensive to introduce as we have so many bridges and tunnels in our rail network.

The trains are also open plan you can easily walk from one end of a train to other with no doors seperating the carriages. This makes policing a train much easier and increases overall capacity.

Indoor cash machines
Card fruad is a major concern in the UK and this is due to many cash machines being outside. This is convenient as it prevents huge queues with the bank. However from what I have seen many German banks only have cash machines on the inside of the bank. To get into the secure area out of hours you have to swipe a credit or debit card that they accept and it will allow you in. This also means they can easily track who comes in and when.

Fusion power should finally fulfill the promise of cheap and abundant electricity. Current worldwide energy supplies (stuff we haven’t yet pulled out of the ground) are like so:

Oil: 43 years
Uranium: ~150 years
Gas: 167 years
Coal: 417 years

This is not great, coal fuel is the longest lasting but also the dirtiest fuel. It’s also worth noting that these fossil fuels can be in very unstable countries. Only 1% of the worlds oil is located within Europe for instance. What we need is fusion, a completely different kind of power source.

So what does a fusion reactor need as fuel?

You need some Deuterium and some Tritium. Deuterium can be harvested from sea water and tritium is made from Lithium. When heated to 150 million degrees, the fusion of Deuterium and Tritium gives us Helium, a Neutron and loads of energy. That spare neutron can then be fused with Lithium to make more Tritium. So the main fuels are Deuterium and Lithium, with a little tritium to get the whole process started.

We have enough Lithium on Earth to support the entire human races energy needs for 30 million years.

What progress have we made so far? JET has been running since 1983, ITER will be functional in 2018 and DEMO will begin pumping energy into the grid some time in the 2030’s.

What can the average man do to make this technology happen faster?

Learn more about and teach others about the merits of fusion technology. There is a common misconception that fusion will create hazardous waste like our current nuclear reactors. It will create some but there will be far less of it and it will become harmless within decades as opposed to the hundreds of years for current nuclear power stations. I can’t stress enough that fusion reactors are completely different to the fission reactors that people are used to, in the way they work, safety and the waste they would produce.

For an example of misinformation, here is a Greenpeace article on the matter that doesn’t cite any sources http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/releases/ITERprojectFrance. They state “Fusion energy – if it would ever operate – would create a serious waste problem, would emit large amounts of radioactive material and could be used to produce materials for nuclear weapons”. I usually have a lot of respect for Greenpeace and the good they do, but they really dropped the ball on this one.

Sources:
Steven Cowley on TED.com
ITER website
ITER Presentation on Nuclear Waste
ITER and beyond
Fossil Fuels – Oil
Fossil Fuels – Natural Gas
Fossil Fuels – Coal

As a Virgin Media customer I’m not a fan of the new page that now appears when I misspell a domain name. This is mostly because it takes longer to load the Virgin Media branded Google results page than a simple “Server not found” error. In a quest to rid myself of the slower page I found the opt-out page:

https://my.virginmedia.com/advancederrorsearch/settings

Simply select “No – I would not like to use the advanced network error search” and your back to the faster error pages!

CUPS had me chasing around for a while to fix this issue. Whenever I tried to print I realized there were no printers and going to “System -> Administration -> Printing” caused the error “There was an error during the CUPS operation: ‘httpConnectionEncrypt failed’” when I tried to connect to the local CUPS service. The “/etc/init.d/cups” file had completely disappeared and reinstalling the cups package didn’t fix it! In the end I marked the cups package for “complete removal” which also removes the configuration files. After this I then reinstalled CUPS, “/etc/init.d/cups” reappeared and it worked once again. Unfortunately I had to reinstall my printers on this machine.

Steps were:

1. Complete removal of CUPS package including the configuration files
2. Reinstall the CUPS package.
3. Start the CUPS service with “sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart” in the terminal.
4. Reinstall your printers
5. Print stuff!

Run this code to install the sensor package and the applet.

sudo apt-get install libsensors3 sensors-applet

Then run:

sudo sensors-detect

This will prob your hardware for sensors.

Next, add the applet to your ubuntu bar by right clicking on the bar and clicking “Add to Panel”. Finally add the applet called “Computer Temperature Monitor”.

You should now have a temperature indicator in your ubuntu bar! There are further options if you right click on the indicator and edit “preferences”.