Every morning as part of my ‘get started’ routine, I check most of the OpenSim websites, plus technorati and google searches for OpenSim news. I like to keep informed as to what is being developed, and who is putting OpenSim into production. The problem is it takes a good 15-30 minutes to trawl everywhere.

RSS is the obvious solution - unfortunately every single RSS reader for Windows seems to be stuck with an identical UI - a UI based on Outlook’s terrible RSS reader, which I happen to think makes every attempt at making casual reading as disinteresting as possible. In short, they all suck.

I have a iMac on my desk for testing - and on there I have installed Times. Times is an attempt to make a virtual newspaper built from RSS content - for the most part it works pretty well, but has a few really big drawbacks - it requires OSX (which I rarely boot into for normal use), it’s also uses way too much eye candy - viewing a single post gets half of the text area obscured with a silly ‘bent page’ effect.

Microsoft apparently made a similar application called Codename: Max - unfortunately it was discontinued somewhere after WinXP SP2, and is no longer installable on any system (trust me, I tried). So for the last few weeks I’ve given up and just keep searching manually - until this morning when I decided I’d built my own.

Wordpress has some pretty nifty ‘magazine’ themes, which do automatic translation of blog content into a newspaper-style viewing. Combining this with WP-o-Matic which turns RSS feeds into posts automatically; I have a pretty cool setup going. It took about 3 hours to install and customise (I ended up adapting the ‘Magazine-Basic’ theme with the TTF Titles plugin and stripping out a lot of the navigation) - and then I inserted all the feeds from Planet OpenSim, Technorati, etc.

Overall it works pretty well - I have it configured to load all the OpenSim news, and it shows up in a nice chronological listing (screenshot above is scrolled back about 30 pages into late January). The layout is fairly consistent and easy to look at and being Wordpress & PHP, pretty easy to customise further.

So I accidentally didn’t notice my domain was running close to expiring until it actually had expired. Doubly unfortunate has been all the deadlines coming up at the end of the year and my inability to recover my domain host’s username/password becuase the email was linked to said expired domain and their support was unresponsive over the holidays. (Of course).

Mad props to Will for getting it fixed for me before I had to fax documents to france.

I’ve got this switched over to adamfrisby.com now - the previous domain will still work of course, but this was the intended URL from the start (just had some minor fun getting that all transfered and setup).

If you have any links or whatever going to the previous URL they will still work and be redirected to the appropriate site on the new domain without issue.

I have added a password to a post listed earlier on this blog. As stated within that post, I do not enjoy writing negatively about people, products, groups, etc - and getting into arguments on the interwebs wins you nothing, but is great at wasting time.

In this post I made certain specific claims about a group and their public behaviour, that group has agreed to me to be more careful about what claims they make publically and improve general behaviour, and in doing so I have agreed to withdraw that post from the public domain. A password is now required to view the post and attached discussion - if you have a legitimate reason to want to read that discussion, my contact details are on this site.

While I still hold that the substantial portion of the original claims are reasonably correct - these claims are between myself (and certain specific developers) and the group, and a degree of confusion about the topic at hand has lead to an agreement that despite being cliched, there was a good deal of misunderstanding involved, one that if it is to be posted at all now, it should be posted in a terse clarified form which I will post if there is ever a need.

I love you Joshua, and I could not be happier. Of course I will marry you.

This is just a very quick shout-out to the guys over at Microsoft - in particular Zain Naboulsi, their Virtual Worlds evangalist, for introducing me to David and Gerhard, the Project Manager and Lead Programmer respectively on the WPF Graphics Team, who have graciously offered me their time to help answer some performance related questions with regards to the Xenki viewer I have been developing.

My absolute thanks - it’s great to have such esteemed assistance on-hand, and I will be sure to be contacting you guys with all sorts of hairy questions about things I shouldnt be doing but am. *grin*

In which I extend my congradulations to Justin Clark-Casey in getting hired to work on OpenSim, I presume fulltime. He’s done a lot of great work already and I expect to see interesting things in the future from him and the FRI.

OK, so saying I’d put this site back online by December 2003 was a little optimisitic I admit. Admittedly I have been sidetracked in the time since, ending up with several jobs simultaneously that keep me somewhat busy.

The reason I’m setting this up is mostly so I can post thoughts, arguments and comments on things - mostly around the OpenSim project at the moment. I know I do have an account on the opensim wordpress site, but splitting this off distances me from any official opinions the group has, and gives me freedom to post my exact thoughts on things.