Links for Thursday, December 14, 2006

• Casting Metal in Lego – “Here’s something you don’t see every day.“
• GWT 1.3 is Open Source – “*Today is quite a milestone for Google Web Toolkit: with the GWT 1.3 Release Candidate, our team is very happy to announce that all of GWT is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. *“
• Mike Pope: Why I Hate Slow Things – “I don’t like watching people over their shoulder while they work on a computer, because inevitably they work slowly. (Probably they use the stupid mouse instead of being on intimate terms with keyboard shortcuts.)“
• Zee Linden: Growth of Second Life Community and Economy – “Today I posted five new charts showing the growth of the community and economy of Second Life. I chose these statistics to show because they are most relevant to me as I analyze the in world economy and forecast the revenue of Linden Lab. Below is a short explanation of each.“
• PrimDig Blog: Terrain, or The Only Mesh in SL – “For private island owners, who get to download the raw terrain file, it is possible to deal with the land in a much easier format to control, a grayscale channel in a photoshop file.“
• Gwyneth Llewelyn: Upgrading Second Life, and Why It Is So Hard To Do So – “Second Life is, indeed, a chaotic system, with a limited predictability base. Like a weather system, you can simulate it. You can recreate a system that does not have 5000 sims but just 50, and not 15,000 simultaneous users but at most 150, and see how it behaves in a controlled environment.“