Will the Next Linus Be Female?

Here's a classic story.

Hacker gets tired of missing functionality; hacker thinks "it can't be that hard"; hacker takes a bit of open source code as a starting point, knocks up something over the weekend; next day, the revolution begins - in this case, being able to access Second Life from a browser (that is, without needing the stonking SL client or upmarket video cards).

But where things get even more interesting is that the hacker in this case is just 15 - and female. Katharine Berry's blog posting on her AjaxLife hack is here, and there's already an interview with her. Let's hope she isn't too put off by the media circus that is sure to descend on her (not me) to carry on honing the code.

Happy hacking.

Second Life in a Box: OpenSim

The recent opening up of the Second Life Viewer code was big news, but the thing that everyone is waiting for is for the server-side stuff. Well, that may be a while off - see my interview with Cory Ondrejka for some more background on this. Meanwhile, though, the libsecondlife group has taken under its wing the OpenSim project, which as the home page puts it laconically:

OpenSim is a project to develop an Open Source Simulator.

This is great news, because it means that people can start developing other Second Life-like virtual worlds, completely independently of Linden Lab. It will also mean that people can start to explore some of the thorny issues of multiple, compatible virtual worlds now.

Open Sourcing Second Life

Here's a subject close to my heart: opening up Second Life. And this is what the alpha geek behind it, Cory Ondrejka, had to say on the subject yesterday:

As we’ve talked about, the long term goals for Second Life are to make it a more open platform. Part of that process is learning how projects like libSL can be beneficial to all of Second Life. We should be thrilled that we’ve built an interesting enough set of technologies and communities that people want to tinker and explore. In the long run, this is why we’ve talked about wanting to be able to Open Source eventually. My hope is that in 2007 we’ll be able to get there.

Also of note:

HTML and Firefox . . . ah my two favorite topics of all time. We have an external contractor who has tons of experience working on it right now. Basically we’ve been trying to make sure that we can get Flash working correctly because so many of the interesting parts of the Web are moving to Flash-based players/plugins/etc. Getting the control inputs and updates to work correctly is a bear but they do seem to be making progress, which is very exciting. The order of operations will be to roll a full internal browser first, then supplement the parcel media types with URLs, and then move to full HTML on a prim. Note that HTML on a prim has several pieces, from being able to interpret straight HTML in order to build text, do layout, etc, all the way to having a face of a prim point at a web page. In terms of timeline, the next major Firefox roll out will be in Q1 – ie, more functionality in the existing pages that use it plus a floater that is a browser – followed by the parcel URL in Q2. HTML on a prim will be part of a larger rearchitecture of textures – we need to go to materials per face rather than texture per face – which several of the devs are itching to work on, but will realistically not start until Q2.

Firefox in Second Life: perfect.