World-Wide Web technology is primarily static. The technology is designed around slow repeated cycles of request-a-page/get-a-page. Technologies like Flash, Curl, and Laszlo are aimed at improving this interaction while staying within the WWW framework. But the Web isn't about interaction, it's about information and, to a certain extent, transactions. While these drivers remain unchanged, two stories in my local paper this week have shown me that the expectations of pace have changed. [Read More!]

In another sign of the significance of virtual reality, MIT hackers transformed the Harvard benefactor into a character from the popular video game.

Check out the movies of U.Minnesota's neato language lab. They're leveraging Croquet's open architecture to produce custom behavior, and the unique core model to make everything efficiently recordable. The third movie blows me away. (But watch 'em all.)

Greenbush Labs (edu software) has a couple of movies showing what you can do right out of the box. Some of the stuff they guy tries isn't working quite right, but it's still cool as snot. Must be the tunes.

No movies yet of the Krestianstvo installations being shown at the top Russian art museums. Nikolay has also combined Croquet and the Sophie/FutureOfTheBook projects – not quite as in this wonderful movie by Daniel Lanovaz, but heading that way, I suppose.
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My heart broke the day Julian left the University of Wisconsin: 11/1/05. We were struggling to get anything out the door. An amazing technology entrepreneur (and Lisp guy!) named Greg Nuyens was trying to hold startup Qwaq together with both hands. I knew it was going to be a tough time for Croquet.

Fast forward.

I have left the University of Wisconsin Division of Information Technology to work at Qwaq, Inc. Sweet!
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In this article, Linux entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth says, “We've started to use [Croquet] for planning and building Ubuntu.”

Linux works well. One of the hard parts with delivering on “Linux” (generically) is that there are a lot of variations. Croquet works on some combinations of kernel, libraries and device drivers, but not on others. I don't have a Linux box myself, so I haven't spent any time on it. (The Croquet Collaborative runs on FreeBSD, and does so as a graphicsless server.) It's tough to be trying to accomplish something while wrestling with configuration issues.

But Plopp offers a consumer-market product on many flavors of Linux (as well as Windows/Mac), but it doesn't (yet?) make use of the full collaborative Croquet SDK. Once it runs, it runs. I guess the Ubunto folks have got real Croquet running with their developer and business configurations, and are now starting to explore its use for doing real work.

A student of Ralph Johnson is being sponsored by Google for a summer Croquet project. Cool.

I just saw the delightful high-quality site on core computer algorithms Hacker's Delight. I was startled by the following notice about the corresponding book:

“After the first printing, an errata file was started. The publisher did not incorporate this into the second printing. For the third printing, he made all the corrections known up to that point in time. For the fourth and fifth printings, the publisher subcontracted the production work, and accidentally gave the subcontractor the files for the first printing. The sixth printing corrects all the errors known up to when it was printed (November 2006). Therefore, the best copy to obtain is the sixth printing, and the second best is the third printing.”

Good grief. This is the kind of thing that makes airplanes fall out of the sky — or my bank say “oops.” As an engineer, I have long been aware of how much stuff out there is truly not designed, transcribed, or built correctly, but this little example gives a nice compact summary to my unvoiced horrified sputtering. I wonder if more direct and immediate Internet technology (like Wikipedia and maybe Sophie) will help.

Something went horribly right...

Daniel Lanovaz has sent a message to the squeak-dev mailing list. I've reproduced it verbatim below the fold. Fun stuff. [Read More!]

This funny video features a scribe who is used to dealing with scrolls. He contacts the help desk to deal with the new “book” technology.

My colleagues at the office see it as a send-up of users. I'm thinking it's making fun of programmers...

Last week, Qwaq announced Forums, its enterprise conferencing product.

Yesterday, the Croquet Consortium announced its own formation, and the availability of the open SDK 1.0.

And yesterday, Impara announced an English language and free trial version of Plopp, its kid's sketching product.

The blogosphere is busy: croquet, Qwaq, Plopp.