Saint Paul College

Comments for Everyone!

Posted Tue, 03/23/2010 - 15:57 by Michael

Comments are now open to everybody! You can post comments anonymously to any article on the website. After one of us approves the comment, it will appear on the article. This is to prevent spammers.

Open Wonderland Foundation Launch

Posted Tue, 03/23/2010 - 13:15 by Michael

Sorry that I'm late with posting this, but better late than never, right?

Open Wonderland Foundation Launch

St. Paul, Minnesota, March 10, 2010 – Today Ken Miller, the CEO of Virtual Learning Labs, announced the formation of the Open Wonderland Foundation and the creation of the Open Wonderland virtual world platform. The Open Wonderland platform is a “fork” of the Project Wonderland toolkit originally developed by Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Miller, who will serve as the Foundation’s first President and Chairman of the Board, explains that the non-profit Open Wonderland Foundation will provide direction and governance for Open Wonderland (http://OpenWonderland.org), a free and open source platform for creating 3D virtual worlds for education, business, and government applications.

This week, I finished modules 2 (started last week) and 3, "I/O Fundamentals," and started on module 4, "Console I/O and File I/O." I've been able to apply what I'm learning here to projects and assignments I'm working on for my classes. Things are starting to come together; what I learn from this tutorial is reinforcing what I learn in class.

Java tutorial

Posted Fri, 03/19/2010 - 14:49 by Sue

During the week ending 3/12/10, I finished the entire "Building Blocks" section, and module 1, "Exceptions and Assertions," of the next section. I also started on module 2, "Collections and Generics Framework." Learning about assertions and about collections (I'd previously only dealt with arrays) opens up a whole lot of programming possibilities. I'm definitely more excited and more involved as I get further into this; my confidence in my Java programming ability is starting to grow.

realXtend

Posted Fri, 03/12/2010 - 14:40 by Josh

The realXtend Open Source Platform for interconnected virtual worlds.

RealXtend, also known as Rex, is a fork of OpenSim that incorporates the open source graphics rendering engine Ogre into it's viewer to give better particle effects and enable mesh files. The biggest advantage to RealXtend is that it extends the features of OpenSim to surpass the features offered by Second Life. For example users can import mesh files to use as avatars and the avatar editor in Rex has an extended feature set.

Engadget Previews Playstation "Move" Motion Controller

Posted Wed, 03/10/2010 - 21:07 by Michael

Image courtesy of Engadget.

Engadget just put up an article with pictures and a video showcasing Sony's version of motion control. From using them, they seem light, have a main and sub-controller, and shiny glowing orbs on the top that seem to change color. It's still in development, and it shows when they are playing a demo. The demo, according to Engadget, wasn't as precise as Wiimotes, and the refresh rate was slower as well. These controllers are scheduled to be released this fall.

The Sun Microsystems ex-CEO blog.

Posted Wed, 03/10/2010 - 11:09 by Josh

Jonathan Schwartz, the one time CEO of Sun Microsystems, has a blog about what he couldn't say as CEO. His post entitled "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal" is a description of his encounters with sinister forces like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer.

He's an interesting guy. The first CEO of a major company to post his resignation on twitter. He posted it in the form of a haiku.

What in the World is WoW?

Posted Tue, 03/09/2010 - 11:40 by Josh

For those that don't know World of Warcraft or WoW, as it is often referred to, it is a virtual world. It is classified as an MMORPG it has more than 10 million subscribers worldwide. It has won many awards and is considered to be one of the best video games of all time.