Open Wonderland Developer Meeting 2010.03.31

Today I attended the Wonderland Wednesday for 2010.03.31 Edition. This is an Open Wonderland developer meeting. Today's topic was an overview of the jME:

http://blogs.openwonderland.org/2010/03/30/wonderland-wednesday-jme-briefing/

We discussed with the jME developers, various integration topics and what is on the horizon for that. I need to get more familiar with that so I can follow the discussion better.

Next we attempted a discussion of MTGame but had some issues so we are going to get it together for next meeting.

Open Wonderland Developer Meeting 2010.03.24

Today there was another Open Wonderland developer meeting. The topic was a walkthrough of the Sample Module code. The code is here, under the :

It was the end of a long workday for me so I followed along as best I could, and could only attend for the first hour. Luckily Nicole is putting together a video recap so we can review. The couple notes I have for myself to go back and review are:

SampleCellFactory.getExtensions () is apparently a powerful and useful method.

The annotations in the code are important.

Open Wonderland Developer Meeting 2010.03.21

I attended the new Open Wonderland Developer Meeting today. Today the topic was an overview of the source code hierarchy in NetBeans, and when my client was off in the weeds I recall discussion of the core and web hierarchies as well as some debugging hints.

Next meeting is Wednesday 3/24 but I forget what time so I'll have to check the Wonderblog.

http://blogs.openwonderland.org/

The topic for next meeting is an overview of the module tutorials I believe. That will be a good review and a chance for me to get more familiar with the code. I completed the first two tutorials but didn't get a chance to poke around much. Also, developing with an IDE is new for me. I've always been a command-line type of guy and probably will stay that way, but I don't see that it will hurt having skills in both methods.

Open Wonderland User Meeting 2010.03.20

Today there was an Open Wonderland Community meeting. It was announced on the Facebook group. If you're interested in Open Wonderland, join the Facebook group!

There is a Cafe Press store now that people can buy things from with some of the proceeds going to the foundation. As of today there is 1 item but there will be many more to come.

http://www.cafepress.com/OpenWonderland

There is an Immersive Education Summit coming up in April that the project team is looking at attending.

There was some discussion around an 0.5 Preview 4 release. What is needed as a foundation is a process for deciding when it is time to put out a release. There is also a forum thread on this topic which goes into more detail.

http://groups.google.com/group/openwonderland/browse_thread/thread/ff2986e3308e3d62

There will be a new "help wanted" link from the project page pointing out where the team could use help with things. I'm looking forward to that.

There is a regular developer meeting in the works which will be announced once it is organized. This will be a separate, more technical, meeting to complement the more general community meeting. It sounds like the first one will be tomorrow so I hope to attend.

The Genographic Project : The Human Family Tree

On 2010.03.18 myself, my daughter Jocelyn and her boyfriend Mikey, and my daughter Hayley, attended a screening and post-show discussion for the film The Human Family Tree. The film is a product of The Genographic Project, a long-term joint effort by many scientists and people at IBM. The project as stated on the website, "is seeking to chart new knowledge about the migratory history of the human species by using sophisticated laboratory and computer analysis of DNA contributed by hundreds of thousands of people from around the world." The film is a document about these efforts. Read more here:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/human-family-tree-3706-interactive

In the film, the researchers describe how they have taken DNA samples from people on one day on a Queens street, and correlated that with DNA from previous research to chart paths not only of how people of related, but how people have migrated around the world. For example, one black man from America finds he has roots that stretch back through Europe. Things like that don't necessarily make sense to people until one puts the evidence together with lots of other people and finds that we all have common roots starting somewhere in Africa. It's beyond the scope of my post to describe in more detail, but I'd encourage folks to read the background and watch the show.

For $99 you can get your own kit to participate by sending in a cheek swab sample and get your DNA charted in the same way as the people in the film. As soon as I think I can afford it I want to get myself and my kids to participate.

So, do I believe that every human on earth today can be traced back to a small group in Africa? It's believable. The film was designed as an hour and a half to tell a story, rather than an in-depth scientific analysis. There are finer details to how the research was done that were left out of the film that I think could have been included at the expense of some of the storytelling. As with any scientific proposal, I want to dig more into it to a finer level of detail before saying "count me in as a believer".

Assuming the science is solid, what does that mean for me? It doesn't change anything. I think I would feel a deeper connection to other people on the planet, but I've always sort of felt that way after having practiced Buddhism and really exploring what it means to be "not separate". I'm fascinated by the science used. I've been getting into genetics and biology lately and this is a way to take that science and knowledge and apply it. There's something that boggles the mind here that is a game-changer for some people in the way they see themselves fitting into the world, and for others a validation of what they have suspected anyway.