CMT3313 - Week 19 Post - Social Networking

Today, when we say Social Networking Site the first thing that comes to mind is Facebook and if you get asked to name some other social networking media, if you are my age you would probably say MySpace and Hi5. But Social Networking media has been around for more than that!


Shifting
I had started using the Internet when I was about 12 to 13 years old and at that time I remember having mIRC, where you could have your own channel and you and your group of friends could log in and chat, share photos, plan to meet up and do the same basic stuff we do today on Facebook. Sure you didn't have profiles, albums, likes, etc... but you get the picture!
Then all of a sudden it seemed to have died down and all of my friends were moving on to MSN messenger, but why? 


You could do the same things in mIRC, we chatted, exchanged photos and stuff and what not but in my opinion, MSN messenger added privacy! You received requests from other users to chat with you for the first time, whereas in mIRC you could log into a channel and there would be loads of people you didn't know. I remember the first thing we used to say to a person on mIRC was 'ASL?' which translated into Age Sex Location? 
With MSN messenger you could know who that person was as everyone had a Profile and this was the golden ticket which made everyone shift. Now you could have albums with pictures of you and your friends, and other people who were on your Friends list could leave comments on them.


This is the reason why there is always something new, if its not MySpace, it's Hi5, but why? Why does the crowd occasionally shift?
It all boils down to who has the most competitive edge. Some new guy will eventually turn up with a new feature which no one else has thought of yet and steels the spotlight.


Why has Facebook grown so much
If you stop for a while and look at what Facebook is doing, you'll notice that its constantly introducing innovative ideas.
First it had the 'Like' button, mutual friends and the photo tag, then it incorporated the instant messaging service within the site its self, video chat, groups, fan pages, maps which record all the locations you were at, multi-player games which display scoreboards made out of your friends and most lately the Timeline profile which illustrates your activity across the years.
This constant introduction of new features helped keep Facebook at the top for so long now, but don't think for a moment that its guaranteed to stay there forever. Every beginning has its end and within a few years time we would laugh and ask ourselves why Facebook?


The Dark Side
Unfortunately, social networking has its drawbacks, the first which come to mind are; Addiction and Stalking.

Addiction
Its true that social networking makes us feel more connected to our friends and family, but is it worth spending 6.7 billion hours on social networking sites? That's the amount of hours spent on October 2011 alone.

Stalking
According to an article issued on April 2011 by The Guardian cyber-stalking is now more common than physical harassment and that almost 40% of the victims are males.












Conclusion
I just want to conclude with this interesting infographic which illustrates the growth of social networking and how it is effecting our productivity.

CMT3313 - Week 18 Post - Cloud Computing

Introduction

Representing the Internet as a cloud in networking diagrams has been done for years now, but lately the term "The Cloud" has become a buzz word.

But what is "The Cloud" exactly? Is it the same thing as the cloud image we are used to making use of in diagrams?

What is it?

Well it got its name thanks to the diagram yes, but its not exactly the same thing. "The Cloud" actually refers to any computer processing or storage provided over the Internet.

A good example of cloud computing is Google Drive (previously known as Google Docs) where you can store your data in "the cloud" (actually you would be storing it in Google's server farm) and work on or create new word, spreadsheet, presentation or form documents online.

Google Drive provides both SaaS (Software as a Service) and Storage Services and meshes them together. With this technology you can easily synchronize multiple computers to the same data.

Advantages

Cloud computing has grown impressively in the last few years and this all boils down to the attractive advantages it provides to its customers, some of which are:

• Reduced Costs - Customers don't have to worry about buying and maintaining expensive hardware
• Increased Storage - Companies can afford to store more data on the cloud than on their own computers as the service providers will take care of providing enough storage for their clients (this effects the subscription fee, but this would still be more cost effective than buying your own storage devices)
• Highly Automated - Applications hosted on the cloud are updated by the service provider (Example: Google Drive never asks you to install the latest update, it's just always up-to-date with the latest version)
• Mobility - You can access your data from anywhere you like as long as you have an internet connection.
• More efficient use of the IT department - Because the IT guys don't have to worry about keeping the software up-to-date, licensing or maintaining the hardware, they can focus more on innovation and more business required tasks.

Disadvantages

• Down Time - If the service provider suffers from down time, so do you and yes even the biggest players in the cloud computing industry occasionally have their bad days:Cloud Computing Service Outages in 2011. Apart from this, cloud computing also depends heavily on your internet connection, therefore if your connection is down you might as well go home.
• Security - If you choose a serious service provider, this would probably be more of an advantage that a disadvantage as these companies are guaranteed to have the latest state of the art security software and hardware installed. Software and hardware which you most probably don't afford, if you are a small business and not feasible to maintain. But at the same time there is still that sick feeling that your company's data is out there on the internet and most probably the best hackers are trying to hack into it while you sleep!

Conclusion

To conclude this post, after doing this research on cloud computing, my opinion on  the subject is that yes, cloud computing is a good thing and it has its attractive advantages, but don't jump on the wagon just because everybody is doing it. Evaluate the disadvantages, see if you can live with having your data on the internet and then take the responsible decision whether or not shift to cloud computing.

CMT3313 - Week 17 Post - Second Life - Virtual Lecture

If you remember a while back I had posted on Virtual Learning and had mentioned Second Life as one of the less popular options, well...we gave it another go, as our lecturer was ill and we all attended from our own home.


I'll start off by re-visiting something I had said in my earlier post, where I stated that you only get a chat box for communication. This isn't entirely true as I later discovered you can use audio. But this still didn't improve the experience a whole lot because instead we ended up having the lecturer continuously checking if we could hear him or not. 
This all boils down to lack of non-verbal communication, because in second life you can't nod your head unintentionally or output a face expression. Without this non-verbal communication it is quite difficult for the person who is talking to determine whether his/her message is going across.

Apart from this, we also met with the same problem we had previously experienced of loosing focus quickly as everyone ended up flying around, attempting to build their own prims (which resulted to a mess of prims all over the place) and basically making a havoc out of the lecture.


Conclusion
Sometimes second life is advertised as a great place for education...well it's not! We tried it out and its not effective what so ever, a simple video conversation would be much simpler and would have done a better job as well.

CMT3313 - Week 16 Post - Second Life - Note Card Giver

To continue on my list of things to do I decided to create a prim which would give a note card to who ever touches it.


But what is a note card? you might ask...well basically it's a note containing text which is given to an Avatar. This could be given in any way you would like, but the most common is upon touching an object.
So basically a note card is a sort of flyer, which normally advertises something. 


After carrying out some research on how to do this, I concluded that the following is the most straight forward way.

Creating a Note Card Giver
So the first step is to create the actual note card which will be sent. To do this I opened the inventory window from the controls on the left of the screen and went to the "Notecard" folder. Once there I created a new note card and typed in the text I wanted.


The next step was to create an object and for this I decided to create a levitating leather ball (keep in mind that this must attract the attention of the other user, so make yours as interesting as possible).


Once I was satisfied with my prim I went to the "Contents" tab in the Build window and by drag-and-drop, I placed the note card I had previously created under the contents repository of the prim.


Finally I created a new script for this prim and in the "touch_start" state I included the following line of code:

llGiveInventory(llDetectedKey(0),llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_NOTECARD,0));

This will get the note card ("INVENTORY_NOTECARD") from the root path ("0") of this prim.

Offering the Note Card

Opened Note Card

CMT3313 - Week 15 Post - Second Life - Building a Chair

Second Life Bench

Following the door object I had created in my last post, I felt I had gathered enough experience in using the Second Life Viewer's tools to create another object on my list of thing to do. Therefore I decided to create a bench on which an avatar can sit on.

Building It!

I started out by creating four identical bench feet by first creating one and then held down the shift key and moved the prim to create an exact copy of it. I repeated this process for all fours.

Bench Feet

Then I created the base and back out of two boxes, stretched and flattened them out as required and positioned them appropriately.

Base & Back

Now a wooden bench isn't very comfortable isn't it, so I added some cushions on the back and base of the bench and gave them a red colour just to make it took a bit better.

Cushions

After I was happy with the way it looked I linked all the parts together to make one, but I left the base cushions out as these I want to treat as three separate seating positions, otherwise the bench would be only available for a single person to sit on.

Linked Prim except for base cushions

Scripting It!
The final step now is to sit on the object I have create. By default second life offers the functionality to sit on any prim but this might not always have the desired result as the image below clearly shows

Unnatural way of sitting isn't it?

To overcome this I had to create a script in each of the base cushions which determines the exact point where the avatar will sit on the prim and a what rotation.

llSitTarget(<0.4,0.0,-0.60>, <0.0,0.0,180,0.0>;

I must say, at least these things are really easy to script as so many functions already exist in second life that you rarely have to have to create your own.

Final Result