Chris's Random Ramblings
Interaction between people in virtual worlds is a richer experience than using IM or IRC. Its much more than just a communication channel as you can actually do things with other people. For example, Kelly seems to spend just a bit of time shopping with other people in SL ;-) But there are other things such as playing Avatar Chess, where a separate person plays each piece on the board. I'm not sure how well chess strategy through democracy works. But I can certainly understand why virtual worlds such as SL are attractive to people who are geographically separated, and want to be able to do more than just be able to "catch up" with what the other has been doing.
Linden Labs recently changed their terms of service. One of the good modifications has been to explicitly allow people to use 3rd party clients if they wish. I don't know of any other fully functional ones out there yet, but it does clarify the situation a lot more for the open source libsecondlife project. There are quite a few changes I'd like to make to the client, so hopefully a fully-functional open source client is not too far away.
A few of us at the office bought Nokia E70 phones so have new toys to setup. The E70 has a neat fold out qwerty keyboard, a very nice screen and on top of doing the standard phone stuff supports 802.11g as well as making voip calls. It was a pretty straightforward process to get it working with my Asterisk setup at home, so now when my mobile phone is at home its just another extension. Incoming calls on the PSTN, VoIP or mobile provider lines will all ring the phone and outgoing calls on the mobile phone will by default go out on VoIP by default rather than making a more expensive mobile call.
Synchronisation of calendar and contacts with Linux has been a bit of a disappointment. OpenSync tries very hard to synchronise between evolution and the phone, but there are obviously quite a few problems remaining. Its very easy to get duplicate entries, and it simply doesn't like some entries generated by evolutions which causes the synchronisation to fail.
The phone runs the SymbianOS for which there is a documented development environment free to download, but its not an easy process to do so on Linux and as far as I can tell the Series 60v3 used on the E70 isn't yet supported by the Linux tools yet. The culture of development for Symbian seems pretty similar to other PDA like systems - more of a shareware or commerical one rather than Open Source.
I've tried about half a dozen java Jabber clients (some of the Open Source) and the all were pretty bad. I get the impression that portability has been gained at the cost of usability and looks. Some of the native ones looked pretty good, but were shareware or commerical. As a result I'm sadly considering having to write my own. On the good side, you can get Python for the phone, an effort which appears to be supported by Nokia. So maybe I can whip together an IM client reusing existing python libraries. It least it would be an excuse to finally get around to learning Python.