http://www.mikedickey.com a leafy-green world of ones and zeros Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:16:53 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My latest toy has me even more excited then the Mac Pro: a Saluki made by Rivendell Bicycle Works in Walnut Creek, CA. These guys design, build and sell bikes that are practical, comfortable, and exceptionally beautiful. Their craftsmanship and attention to detail is outstanding, and I've ... http://www.mikedickey.com/2007/06/01/my-new-saluki/ Microsoft has been on a downward spiral ever since the DOJ rained on its monopoly parade in 2000, causing Bill Gates to pass the reigns over to Steve Ballmer. Since then, nearly every major effort at Microsoft has turned out to be a failure. While the S&P 500 has ... http://www.mikedickey.com/2007/05/15/the-trolls-in-redmond/ Today I released my first 3,000 lines of open source (LGPL) code. libpion is a library that makes it easy for C++ software developers to implement lightweight HTTP interfaces. I've been working on this new project on and off for the past few weeks and using it as a way to ... http://www.mikedickey.com/2007/04/29/libpion-010-released/ I received my shiny new 8-core Mac Pro today, and boy is it FAST! I've been working lately on a C++ project in Xcode (libpion). It's new and therefore was already building fairly quickly on my MacBook Pro. But on my new machine I hit "build", watch ... http://www.mikedickey.com/2007/04/19/mac-vms-revisited/ Virtual machines have come a long way since I first started playing around with VMware several years ago. As a software developer and Mac user, I've been anxiously following the great leaps forward made by Intel, Apple, Parallels and VMware over the past year. http://www.mikedickey.com/2007/04/14/mac-virtual-machines/ 3PointD, one of my favorite blogs about the Metaverse and 3D Web, had its first birthday yesterday. To celebrate, Mark Wallace made a few predictions on "the Metaverse ahead." Mark's discussion on mashups and convergence got me thinking about how this relates to my work on SPUD. http://www.mikedickey.com/2007/04/02/the-metaverse-ahead/ OpenID is an exciting new protocol specification relating to online identities and single sign-in authentication. Lately, it has been attracting a lot of attention and support, and I'm planning for it to play a major role in SPUD. Today I read a blog entry discussing OpenID by Tim ... http://www.mikedickey.com/2007/02/26/on-openid/ Robert Scoble reports that an Australian company is working on a new Second Life competitor called "Outback Online" that replaces centrally-hosted servers with P2P technology to provide better graphics and more scalable islands. You can sign-up on their website for an Alpha version they plan to release this summer. http://www.mikedickey.com/2007/02/20/aussies-using-p2p-for-new-virtual-world/ The OpenSL Project (which is sponsored by The Electric Sheep Company) has taken the lead on open source Second Life development, being the first to release an ("alpha") open source server for the SL client, called "OpenSim." When SL opened up their client software in January, I predicted that ... http://www.mikedickey.com/2007/02/01/opensim-open-source-second-life-server/ Lately, I have grown disillusioned with Clay Shirky's and other's posts about Second Life on Valleywag. The tone of these seems to have shifted largely from objective criticism to an obsessive pursuit that demeans Second Life's accomplishments by attempting to make it synonymous with "sex." For those who ... http://www.mikedickey.com/2007/01/30/second-life-bad-content-or-ui/