A Fresh Cup

First client Rails app successfully up and running at RimuHosting. I’ll be writing up my notes for future reference soon. Meanwhile, a few links.

• SimpleLog – A Rails weblog application I hadn’t run across before. By the way, I know my RSS feed for this one is still goofy; I’ll take a look when I’ve got spare cycles. Thanks for your forbearance. (via Same Shirt Every Day)
• Scripting Second Life with Rational Application Developer- – IBM continues to take Second Life seriously. There are also a bunch of crossover events from this week’s IBM/Rational conference being held in Second Life.
• JRuby 1.0 – The JRuby team announces full Ruby compatibility. I don’t personally have a whole lot of interest in JRuby (my ambition is to never work in an “enterprise” again), but it’s a nice validation point for the community.
• Rails Business: Weekly Review #1 – Roundup from one of the mailing lists spawned by this year’s RailsConf.

People tend to look askance at me when I tell them that I’m looking at two main avenues of revenue for replacing the .NET stuff that I’m giving the boot: Rails and Second Life. Rails they understand, but the thought that any adult might take Second Life seriously is still apparently a silly one to many people. So, time for a few words of explanation so that I can stop repeating myself.

Second Life is of interest to me on several levels. It has some game-like aspects, of course, and one can’t neglect that it’s fun (without having any particular goal) to hang out with online friends, just as IRC can be fun. And I do agree with those who think that some form of the 3D internet will take off over the next decade. While Second Life may not end up being the winning horse in that race (Linden Labs has plenty of opportunities to fail), it’s one of the contenders and a good place to get some idea of what might work.

But from a business point of view, right now, it’s also a place where real people make real incomes in real money. There are two distinct ways that this happens. First, there are around 100,000 paying customers (never mind the nearly 7 million signups; many of those don’t stick around) putting hard currency into the Second Life economy. Linden Labs does manage to take a house rake on every transaction that involves converting real currency into Linden dollars or back, but much of that money comes back out again. The paying population is the size of a medium-sized real life city, and that’s plenty big enough for some people to be making a living selling virtual stuff. Thanks to my wife’s jewelry business, our membership costs are already covered, and we’re on our way to being cashflow positive (not quite there yet, because we’ve invested in virtual land, but we’ll be there well before year end and making extra income as well).

Second, there are consulting companies – “sherpa firms” – who make money by billing real money directly to first life companies who have come to the conclusion “Hey, we need some of that Second Life stuff” and who have no idea how to go about it. Creating a place in the world for the company down the street is the equivalent of building web sites a decade ago, and we’re seeing a similar land rush just starting up. Right now most of this activity is big firms paying big dollars, but I expect we’re going to see some commoditization over the next year or two. It’s possible that one could make a decent living doing four-figure (US dollar) Second Life setups for small and medium businesses.

Anyhow, that’s the basics. If you want to poke around, you can try out Second Life for free. If you do get in-world, you can find me by searching for MikeG1 Schumann and I’ll be happy to chat with you there.

You know, I was worried about “slippery slope” censorship issues 20 years ago in zinedom, and here I am worrying about them again in Second Life. Some things just never change.

• New Noobkit is up! – This online Rails/Ruby documentation site has new APIs, comments, and other improvements.
• FiveRuns: First Production Rails Management Suite – Basic overview and interview at InfoQ. (via dzone)
• A conversation on ‘Keeping Second Life Safe, Together’ – Some of the “slippery slope” news, though it may not mean much if you haven’t been following Second Life closely.

In case it hasn’t been blindingly obvious, I’m ready to start talking to folks about Rails contracting. If you’ve got work on the web that needs doing, let’s chat.

• Sneak Peek: What We Built While You Were At RailsConf – The folks behind Lighthouse and Mephisto are working on a Rails-backed web-based Subversion browser.
• Komodo IDE 4.1 -This half-price promo is marked as being for RailsConf attendees, but they don’t seem to be verifying and the promo code is hanging right out on the web page. $147.50 instead of $295 for this Rails IDE.
• The Rails Documentation Project – Site tracking the big community-funded overhaul of the Rails API docs and associated projects.
• A Guide to Testing the Rails – Big tutorial on Rails testing, if you’re still not Doing The Right Thing.
• “Backhoe” – Large-scale Second Life terraforming tool. Only useful if you’re investing crazy amounts of money.
• Generate Google sitemap with Rails and RXML – Especially useful if you’re serving pages in frames.

Back home and recovering.

• Report on Self-Serve Trip Scheduling Experiment – Jeff Barr’s successful use of a wiki to set his own meeting schedule while on the road makes me wonder whether the same principle can somehow be leveraged in a consulting business. I need to ponder this.
• Ruby on Rails meets the business world – New Google group following up on a successful panel at RailsConf.
• Bloated RailsConf Presentation Downloader – For those who would rather run code than click on links.
• Hi – I’m Ruby on Rails, Part 4 – This is the one that was previewed at the RailsConf closing keynote.
• A tool for creating Sculpted Prims easily – I expect I’ll be wanting this when sculpties make it on to the main grid in Second Life.

It was an interesting weekend, watching the Twitterverse and blogging and Second Life all sort of melt together. Not sure where the business case is yet but all this energy must mean something.

• SLeek – A non-graphical Second Life client, a rather bizarre spinoff of the fact that Linden Labs has open-sourced the viewer code.
• Rails don’t know testing and Battle Royale – Testing – The folks over at GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS are taking a long hard look at Rails testing, and coming up with some ideas to add both sophistication and streamlining to the usual practices.
• Haml 1.5 – New release of this terse replacement for other templating languages (like rhtml) in Rails applications. I don’t think my brain is quite ready for another layer of abstraction yet, no matter how powerful it is.

Observant readers will have noted that I’ve been digging into LSL lately, along with Rails. LSL is the scripting language for Second Life , the virtual world created by Linden Research and its residents. There doesn’t seem to be much “official” documentation for LSL, but it’s reasonably well described in the LSL wiki . It’s a vaguely C-like scripting language with some interesting quirks (for instance, there’s no reasonable way to store persistent data). It does, however, have the ability to make both HTTP and XMLRPC calls to servers outside of SL, which means that it’s perfectly possible to create objects in SL that talk to a Rails application out in “First Life” – which is what I’ve been pursuing.

The interesting thing about Second Life is that it has a whole shadow economy going on, with a currency of lindens that are reasonably liquid and that do exchange with US dollars (one way in which Linden Labs makes their money is by taking a substantial rake off of such exchanges between players – if I sell you lindens for dollars, the house gets a cut). Some people have famously made enough lindens that their full-time job is now working in Second Life. I strongly suspect there is a steep, steep power law at work here, with the few poster children making good money, more making walking-around money, and many more making essentially nothing at all.

Still, playing with this stuff (and it is on some crazy boundary between work and play) does give me the chance to work with some more Rails code, and it does offer at least the potential that I could end up on the right portion of that power curve. I’ve got some ideas for goods and services that I don’t see being well-executed within the Second Life economy yet. So, who knows – it’s worth spending at least a few hours looking into this as a part of the next career.