Ben's Ramblings

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been sucked into the world of Second Life. Its nearly endless growth in size and the possibilities that lie in the future for such a rich 3d world. But there is one rather painful downside of having a world completely created by its users. The fact that users while creative are rarely good at producing optomized content. Texture sizes of all different dimensions, runaway scripts which can grind a simulator ( the term for a single space of 256×256 sqm of land on a server) to a halt. My recent run in with a new user and his car really hammered this point home. 7 scripts in his car, compared to over 700 total in the simulator. Only problem being his 7 scripts were using 35% of the resources avalible. Needless to say when I inquired if he was aware of the problem, I was told he paid 2,800 $L (inworld currency), which is about 10 USD. That price for a laggy car will have to be saved for another rant.

Jungledisk is a front end to Amazon S3 storage service that provides the ability to share files between computers AND backup your data on the cheap (0.15 cents per GB)… What I like about this best is it has software for all 3 operating systems (Windows, OSX, Linux) and surprisingly works quiet well on Ubuntu but its not as integrated as I’d like. Mainly, I can’t mount and unmount the Jungledisk without considerable headache. So a simple how to on how to get it working (Hardy 8.04)

Step one, edit /etc/fstab

sudo nano /etc/fstab
add line:
http://localhost:2667 /home/yournamehere/jungledisk davfs nolocks,user,noaskauth 0 0

step two:davfs2

sudo aptitude install davfs2

step three: fix the davfs2 install

sudo chmod ug+s /sbin/mount.davfs

step four: fix the davfs2 config so that admin (instead of staff) can use it.

sudo nano /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf
###
# General Options
# ---------------

# dav_user        davfs2            # system wide config file only
dav_user nobody
# dav_group       davfs2            # system wide config file only
dav_group admin

I have seen a few TED presentations via YouTube and other links and for the most part they are all very interesting, but I have not seen an argument laid out on copyright and the problems we currently face in the United States as well as this one has. Watch and learn?