Craig Mayhew’s Blog

I’ve installed the release candidate and had a play with the new media on a prim feature. At the moment it’s only supported by the Second Life viewer. So, even though the OpenSim server supports it, none of the open source viewers do. I’m very impressed with it although I quickly hit limitations as you can see in the image.

You may immediately notice that may avatar refused to render at all in the second life viewer. It does render fine in other viewers so I’m not yet sure what the reason was for this. That aside, the media on a prim feature was limited to 4 prims. Any more than that and they just appeared white. The closer I got to the prims, the less problems I had and clicking on a prim would force it to display at the expense of another previously working prim.

I’m not sure what causes this limitation, it may be hard coded into the second life viewer or may be something that can be modified via settings, but despite looking I haven’t yet been able to get it to display a whole wall of media enabled prims.

More on this soon!

After my last post about second life, it’s time I got back on track about what I wanted from second life. 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.

Updates soon :)

Is growth in the processing power of folding@Home exponential?

2nd November 2006: 0.2 Petaflops

16th Sep 2007: 1 petaflop (11 months later, 5x increase) Due to PS3s

May 2008: 2 petaflops (7 months later, 2x increase) Due to support of graphics cards via GPU2.

28th Sep 2008: 4 petaflops (5 months later, 2x increase) Due to support of graphics cardsvia GPU2.

27th January 2011: 23 Months have passed and we are only 0.3 native PFlops better than Feb 2009.

In short, yes until the end of 2008. After that we had no additional hardware, no major software advances and one huge recession to deal with. However I think that’s about to change. Once the new version the folding@home client comes out of alpha/beta testing and into the main stream we should see another jump. This is because the latest version of the client utilizes multicore and the gpu by default with no complex setup and no need to download an advanced client. This will mean every new install will be a multicore cpu and a gpu install.

There are nearly 300,000 CPUs folding but only 24,000 GPUs. I will assume the folding@home considers a cpu to be 1 core so we will have to average this a bit as some computers will have upto 6 cores. ‘ll assume an average of 3 CPU cores per computer. So within two years of the new release I expect upwards of 70,000 GPUs to become actively folding. Or to put this another way, an additional 10 Petaflops. During that time I would hope the world has left the recession behind and had a doubling of hardware performance. So with a little luck we could be looking folding@home bringing in around 30 Petaflops in 2013  if they released the new software tomorrow.

The folding@home stats page is available here.

The Monte Carlo method was first coined by Von Neumann in the 1940’s.

Essentially, the computer tries randomly different simulations of the game in full from the current state. Each time, make a note of what the next move is and if we eventually win or not. Draw a statistical conclusion from this information and play the best move.

This works brilliantly for a game such as chess, but requires alot more processing power for something such as go. Current computers (at the end of 2010 at the time of writing) simply cannot get through enough simulations to draw any meaningful conclusions. For instance there are billions of variations in just 3 moves of Go.

Some nice 360 degree videos, might be the direction youtube takes as well as 3D? Of course, we would need an inexpensive camera to be main stream …

A talk on exaflops, problems of scalability with the multi core/processor architecture. A brief history of folding@home and where they are heading in the next few years.

http://nvidia.fullviewmedia.com/gtc2010/0923-b-2007.html

This video made me think about the multi thread problem faced by software designers. If the trend is to have more and more cores into the future. Then as Vijay Pande has said, how does software benefit from having a million or even a billion cores? Some problems just can’t be broken down into that many pieces while others can.

Awesome talk on sleep by Dr. William Dement. It cover’s what’s really a healthy sleep and what’s not, experiments they have done over the years and the effect sleep can have on increasing mental and physical performance. If you feel tired all the time or only wake up in the evening or snore (or share a room with someone that does) then you need to watch this…

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.