I've only used Second Life a couple of times and in either time I didn't spend enough time to have a good feel for the experience - I'll confess I'm not a gamer, unless you count the occasional GT5 and Rock Band - but Mary pointed me to a recent event that seemed compelling.

You may have heard about Sun's DataCenters in Broomfield and in Santa Clara. Greg P and Dean Nelson recently hosted an event at Second Life that focuses on how to improve cooling through different arrangements in those Data Centers. Check out Mary's note or go see the video; I found it useful and even entertaining. You can also go directly to the Sun Pavilion in Second Life, the artifacts are there, but I couldn't figure out how do something like play with the airflow simulation during my short visit.

On a related topic, we have been talking about doing an online event for the GlassFish v3 FCS launch. If you are interested in applying to be in the organizing committee, send me email with your info.

Arguably, the best part of the recent OpenESB/JavaCAPS release is not just the bits but also the very capable field engineers that help out customers around the world. One of them, Jason, has an interesting experiment putting Project Wonderland to work to run a virtual distributed workshop. Jason's post explains how this offers a sort of private second-life session with sharing of running applications (with participants being able to take control of them). There's even a short video to give you a feel for the end-user experience.

On a related note, the European JavaCAPS (Horizons) user conference in Munich has now a final date and a fairly stable agenda. Registrations are also open.

Update: Louis has his take on the Wonderland experiment.

The OpenSSO Project is soliciting feedback on their Early Access Build -- OpenSSO Express Build 5. With the release of this build, community members now have the opportunity to participate in the Early Access (EA) program for Sun's next commercial offering. Review the Early Access documentation and hammer away at Express Build 5! Send your EA feedback to opensso.eafeedback@dev.java.net so we can make the product perfect. Thanks in advance!

Virtual hosts (or servers) are very popular and GlassFish supports them (see SJS AS 9.0 Doc Book). The support for virtual hosts has been improving in GF V2 and early in the cycle Jean-Francois explained how to Dynamically Add them. Now Jan explains the concept of a virtual server docroot and the new flexible mechanisms in the latest builds

Check Jan's blog for details. The SJS AS 9.0 docbook has a good chapter on this topic; just note that it uses the term "virtual server" instead of "virtual host" and "http-listener" instead of "connector".