Big Brother in Second Life: "This seems to be piling the self-referential onto the virtual to the point where it becomes impossible to maintain the suspension of disbelief necessary to survive in what has recently become the hippest and trendiest of online environments."

The third leg of my dumpy link stool - interaction-related stuff:

1. Some workshop prototyping techniques;
2. Send Tufte to Baghdad!
3. 37signals on flow;
4. Nice video of hand gesture control;

Similarly, I've had a load of development related stuff pile up. In particular we're spending a lot of time at FP looking at the software development process and seeing where we can improve things (in a pragmatic, rather than embrace-Agile-cos-its-so-shiny, way)...

1. Amazon have released their persistence layer, Carbonado; sounds interesting, anyone done a comparison with Hibernate?
2. The road to build enlightenment. We're now using CruiseControl to provide automated builds of all new projects we take on, and it works very nicely thus far;
3. Photos of an XP Team Room;
4. Alistair Cockburns project risk reduction patterns;
5. A pragmatic project, an interesting examination of a team that managed to unit test massively subjective outputs (the subjective quality of a rendition of a piece of music);
6. A nasty programming puzzle, perhaps one for the dojo?
7. The myth of project management: "When you work in IT, you deal with the consensual hallucination of Project Management. There is an almost universal belief that it is possible to predict ahead of time how long a project will take, how much it will cost and what will happen along the way."
8. Moving from software production to software publishing;
9. CaseDetective, a tool to analyse FogBugz data. I've been looking at tools to mine the vast quantity of info which we've accumulated in our bug tracking systems over the last 2 years recently...
10. Why there is no rational software design process;

A veritable feast of mobile links, spat onto your screens in an attempt to reach some sort of GTD nirvana within NetNewsWire:

1. Customisation and personalisation in mobile;
2. The Economist on how mobile is changing the landscape of politics and enabling collective organisation;
3. Don't shrink designs to small screens! I ended at last weeks MoMo with a plea for better user experiences, but I feel increasingly that this is a pretty bland thing to be saying nowadays;
4. "People are the mobile internet's killer app": One World. No Borders. 2.5 Billion Connected Citizens;
5. A global MVNO, WorldSIM, is launching: targeting roamers;
6. Mobile 2.0 happened. Kudos to Mike for writing up the event in a brutally honest fashion. Mind you, no-one's yet topped Robert's approach to event sponsors IMHO;
7. Externalising image resources in J2ME - this is very handy when you want to update the UI for your MIDlet over the air, we've done it on a few projects now;
8. Blyk, an ad-funded MVNO. Russell, who knows a thing or two about mobile advertising, has posted some thoughts. Personally I doubt it's sustainable if it's based on the kind of primitive ad models we've seen online so far: response rates, and therefore revenue, have a tendency to drop. And the first dot-com boom inoculated me against the "they're rich clever guys so they must be right" line of thinking. Still Eric Schmidt of Google thinks this is a goer...
9. Another simple phone from Motorola;
10. More gorgeous handset design from KDDI;
11. Local apps with web content, an examination of the new GMail app (which I've not successfully used yet);
12. 3 sees a boom in instant messaging - I'm really interested to learn more about this after my conversations with operator folks indicating this might be problematic;
13. O2 seem to be cautiously optimistic about I-mode;

Mobile, Web 2.0, Hype, Reality, and Openness: "How anyone that’s been paying attention to the evolution of mobile can say that mobile AJAX being something like web AJAX is a benefit is beyond me. Like the way that WML being kinda like HTML made that a raging success? No, I don’t think so. Saying that mobile AJAX is a good idea is putting the cart before the horse. AJAX on the web is a hack, every developer knows it’s a hack. What makes it an elegant and compelling hack is that AJAX based websites work with the browser the user already has installed on their desktop while increasing the usability of the web application. That’s the real “AJAX model” that the mobile world should be following: turning the handset and software the user already has into a more pleasant to use and useful device through clever programming."