My wife has purchased a new mp3 player, the Samsung YP-P2 8gb. It’s a cool little gadget (native A2DP Bluetooth, mp4 video capable, pictures, touch screen, etc, etc). Unfortunately, out of the box it only speaks MTP. My lovely wife’s PC boots a Debian GNOME desktop, which only groks UMS. What’s a bald hacker to do?
I own an actual iPod, created by the magic elves in the Apple factory and invested with the magic that makes it work with the iTunes store. At least, it was… Then, I found iPodHackers.net.
What’s going on with Google? Tom Barbalet, an artificial life developer responsible for material distributed by Apple, keeps a website based on his code called Noble Ape. As it turns out, Noble Ape (including the specific sites for his software simulation and his bio and vitae) have been de-listed by Google with no explanation or stated reason.
There’s an article on MIT’s Technology Review that talks about the work being put into the effort to make all the various virtual world protocols transparent to users and their avatars. Jaron Lanier seems to think that it will come together, but that it will not be a non-proprietary solution.
What does an avatar or other virtual creature (potentially an artificial life organism) need to expose to various APIs to be “protocol transparent”? Sounds a lot like the work required to build an Alife SDK.
Tom Barbalet of the Biota.org podcast has asked for feedback on the contents of an Artificial Life SDK. This would allow video game developers to hook their physics engine into an already-present software toolkit for representing ALife in their games. This is a fascinating question, but the comments on his blog post haven’t resulted in a lot of useful responses.