Wednesday October 10, 2007

How real is Virtuality?

We travelled north up the strip, and had dinner at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba. It was a bit of a european thing with a bunch of brits, french and germans. This cafe has an excellent if more limited wine list and we were fortunate to have the advice of Eric Bezille and Dave Tong. Our waiter was excellent, knew what he was selling and very patient. It must be hard selling to a bunch of opinionated engineers.

We talked about a number of things, of which one was second life. If you've been following the suncec2007 technorati feed, you may know that we broadcast the general sessions into various rooms of second life and some of us have been preparing for the conference by signing up and preparing our accounts. Sun also haven experimental virtual world, about which you can find out more at Horst Thieme's blog. I don't think I spent as much time there as some of my colleagues, but the second life team had built a Vegas virtual world representing the two hotels we actually used. Now since one of these was the Paris, or is that Paris, we have a software implementation, of an imitation of a real place. Very eXtisenz! In fact, the first time it went onto the screen, Dan Berg on the stage in an imitation of Paris, met Dan Berg in Second Life, in a virtual imitation of Paris. This is odd, nearly as odd as Las Vegas. I didn't think highly of the video quality and wonder if it was due to the number of people in the 'island'.

My feeling is that the virtual worlds will take off as we develop new metaphors for problem solving. I wonder if one modelled a data centre, for instance, if you could enhance the systems management console, by for instance illustrating where jobs were using colour coded object overlays and illustrate the system utilisation. Visualising the temperature of the air and the systems would also be possible. This is a fairly poor example of what I mean in that new problem visualisation techniques are required that rely on having three dimensions (or more) and the 3D value becomes compelling. (I am not sure the above example is.) I have not yet tried to have a virtual meeting in Second Life, so I can't comment as to how effective it is in replacing the conference call, but there now a number of desktop tools that enhance the conference call, and second life conferences can't be joined if participants only have a phone, although the voice quality might be mightily enhanced by the necessity to use a laptop, connect to the internet and use voice over ip.

Mike Ramchand & Olaf Schnapauff also explored the theory that the Linden Lab scripting language didn't enable any insight into the problems being represented. One manipulates second life, and doesn't model reality, or even the virtual reality of the problem.

I am not sure I get it as a game, but if Second Life remains merely a virtual reality implementation of the real world, while it may not fail, it will not become the next big thing.

If you havn't already, see also "GetaFirstLife".

tags: technology suncec2007 winebar booze food+drink tapas lasvegas secondlife virtualworlds

The biggest wine rack in the World

I went down to the Mandalay Bay again to visit the Aureole. This is a wine bar with a four story wine rack. The bar staff use a trapeze to retrieve the wine. It has to be seen to be believed.

And now, you can see it! It claims to have 69,000 wines. As you can imagine a hard copy wine menu would be a bit of weight, requiring the restaurant to employ the world's strongest man as somelier. However, they use a tablet pc as the wine list, not quite web 2.0 but cute all the same. The service was immaculate and the company at the table can be pretty fussy. I thoroughly recommend you visit this place either for a "sharp one" or for dinner.

tags: suncec2007 winebar booze food+drink lasvegas

Beyond the strip

I popped out to Henderson to visit a friend of my father, which gave me two views of Las Vegas, the suburbs and the strip from ground level. I only had my phone, which I know is pointless for pictures like this. Next time!

tags: suncec2007

Wrapping Up

I participated in Constantine's wrap of the show as the stage came down.

tags: suncec2007

Last Words at CEC 2007

Onto, the final general session which stars Don Grantham, Executive Vice President for Global Sales and Services. He talked about the progress over the last 15 months, and the revised focus for the next 12 months. While David Brent gets confused whether a companies greatest asset is its customers or people, and Dilbert's boss thinks its the paper clips, I believe Don Grantham's commitment to talent in people is real, substantial and genuine. One of the things that CEC reminds one is that we have great people, just imagine what we can do if we're equipped and empowered appropriately.

While doing the Q&A, Dan Berg, the CEC host and my new boss, stated that the CEC messaging team would produce a White Paper, documenting the CEC Messaging Platform. While no-one likes to be bounced, this is something we should do and I know that the two key developers are happy to do this. I'll keep you in touch.

tags: suncec2007 talent

Queueing to ask Questions

We had a couple of services minders to help us understand the value of the questions. I have to say that volume is often a good guide, and we may have buried some good/important questions, but John Greaves and Ian White asked people to use the floor mics, and some good questions came in. This re-inforces the fact that many services staff do not have company laptops or mobiles.

Actually I am not happy with this; our experience is that many questions from the floor are self indulgent and of, at the best, minority interest. Have you noticed how they always introduce themselves? Actually the ones I hate are ,

"Hi, my name is xxxxxx xxxxxxx, I agree with everything you say, please could you say some more"

and my second most resented quesion is,

"Hey dude! What are you doing about the stock price?"

The best answer to this that I have heard is,

"What are you doing? I have stopped selling it!"

tags: suncec2007

Oops, where the DR consultant?

It started early when we turned up back stage to discover that two of our backstage laptops had been stolen. The security cables connecting nut had been smashed. The disastrous thing was that one of them had the SMS management software on it, and we had automated the feed from SMS into the database.

Over the last few days, we have adopted a permanent beta approach to our software (, or we like to flatter ourselves that we have, which meant that no-one knew how it works). I suspect we are on the third iteration of the software. This was exploited by one of my 'so-called' friends had guessed the database password, so we had, failed to, change(d) it the night before and none of the management software could log into the database. We looked completely shagged.

However, Rob Holt implemented our fall back plan for SMS and got version one of the software working, and was joined by Simon Cook who arrived just in time and allowed us to get the current version up an running. As John Greaves walked onto the stage, we were ready to go. It was a truly exciting 45 minutes.

tags: suncec2007