Second Life.  Remember that?  It was all the rage a few years back, when it pioneered the idea of a virtual reality platform for online community and economy, and if I recall correctly there was a lot of hype around at the time.  Of course, I’m no sheep, so I steered clear of it at the time.  After all, I wasn’t a loner with no ‘real’ friends, so I had no need for an additional life to maintain.

So why is it that I downloaded the software last week?  Why have I been wandering around the Second Life worlds, exploring interesting locations, listening to music, chatting to people, dancing…?  I guess part of the cause is how cut off I’m feeling at the moment, having moved away from my circle of friends.  Sure, we’re living in a land of bliss, surrounded by beautiful countryside, the smell of cow dung floating on the breeze, and glorious hills to gaze at.  But we don’t know anyone.  Well, not many, and not as well as our ‘old’ friends.  I miss AM and Sarah, and the Phil(l)s, and my youth group at church, and my badminton partner, and all those other ex-uni folks who dropped in all the time.

Which leads me to an interesting muse.  What makes a friend?  And why is it important?

Facebook, like so many other online technologies, has its downfalls as well as its bonuses.  I has worked really well at bringing people together, reuniting friends, and allowing people to share with others what’s going on in their life at the moment.  Twitter has taken inspiration from that, with its focus on the “what I’m doing right now” aspect, but that’s slightly less interesting to me.  What I find fascinating is how I get really excited about finding old friends on Facebook, and then never actually talk to them.  Most of my uni friends are on FB, a lot of my family are too, plus people from church (x3), my secondary school, even my first primary school (in particular the first friend I ever made).  I have well over 100 ‘friends’ on FB, which is a reassuring and ego-satisfying list to read through.  But here’s the rub – I hardly ever actually talk to these people.

How is it that I can supposedly call these people friends, and yet have little or no communication with them at all?  How can I legitimately call myself a friend if I never speak to them?  Part of this comes down to a shortcoming in FB, where the only relationship possible is a ‘friend’.  According to FB, there is no distinction between my best and closest friends and some random girl I was in a class with at school a long time ago.  As fun as it is to have Becky on my friends list, I have absolutely no interest in what she’s doing, because she’s a very different person to me, and she’s very different to when we were at school together, and to be honest we were never really friends at school anyway (if you’re reading this, Becky, please don’t take it personally, I’m just using you as an example).

At the other end of the scale, I met a guy called Dave at church on Sunday, and came away thinking “there’s a potential friend there”.  We had spent so little time together, we know so little about each other, but his is a personality I think I could get along with quite easily.  I’ve known him a matter of hours, and he’s already more of a friend than a lot of people I’ve got on Facebook.

I know exactly why I signed up and downloaded Second Life.  It wasn’t to try out the technology or join in the community spirit.  It was to find new friends.  I’ve reached a point in my life where I need more people.  Unfortunately, Second Life proved to be the wrong place to look for friends.  To all intents and purposes, it’s dead.  I’ve spent hours wandering around SL, and found many beautiful locations, but very few people.  And none that seemed particularly interested in talking to me.  The only place I found that had people there were the ‘welcome’ worlds, where there were avatars constantly sat around (probably part of a team, on a rota) waiting to welcome new users to SL and answer any questions they had.  A fantastic resource, sure, but not exactly the best way to actually make friends.

To my disappointment, there is nothing for me on Second Life.  Facebook seems to be the best way for me to keep in touch with old friends, but it’s not going to find me new friends.  I’m hoping to be able to force myself into making better use of Facebook (ignoring all the annoying apps), and will try to contact people through it more often, but that’s more of a maintenance task than actually enjoying a friendship.  I guess what it comes down to is that, despite the wonders of the internet, I need to see people face to face to really call them a true friend.

Anyway, a byproduct of that temporary glitch was that I started looking into getting Linux working again.  I say again, it wasn’t actually broken before.  I had installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy on the PC over a year ago and never really used it because I couldn’t get it to recognise the wireless dongle I had.  However, having got Windows back online with a CAT5 cable I decided to see if I could persuade Ubuntu to go online too.  And that’s proved to be a mammoth operation, and I’ve got little work done today so far.

The first hurdle was to get Ubuntu to use the ethernet connection to access the internet.  Now, I wouldn’t call myself a hard-core geek.  Maybe a soft-core geek.  Whichever, I have never really played with Linux much before, and it’s all still rather foreign to me.  Last time I tried to get it online I spent ages looking through forums randomly typing commands into the terminal to try to get it to do things, and had no idea what any of the commands were.  I have a feeling that probably contributed to the difficulty I had today trying to reverse whatever it was I did last time, which I’ve completely forgotten.

In the end I think I managed to completely remove the wireless driver and all reference to there being a way onto the net via a wireless network.  I think.  A little more tweaking and gentle prodding finally yielded some positive results – Firefox jumped into life and started showing web pages!  Hoorah!!

Of course, that wasn’t quite enough.  6.10 Edgy is actually quite old now, and I needed to upgrade to the latest distribution.  Now, on most other operating systems this means buying the install CDs and either wiping your hard disk and starting afresh or upgrading your old system to the new one.  But because Linux is open-source it’s all free to download.  It’s like upgrading from Windows XP to Vista over the internet, or even Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard.  It’s a pretty hefty operation.  And it wasn’t working.

Ubuntu has a clever little system for installing software.  Rather than going to the provider’s web site and downloading an install program, all the available software is available from a central list, and you just click it to install it.  Ubuntu takes care of giving you the most up to date list of programs, downloading all the files needed for the software and installing it for you.  Nice.  Except that for that to work it needs to know where to look to find all these programs, and that’s what wasn’t working for me.  Neither could it upgrade the main Ubuntu installation, because none of the upgrade files appeared to exist online for it to refer to.  I would type in ‘sudo apt-get upgrade’ and it would complain that all the files it was looking for were not there – all of them gave a 404 error.  A quick check in Firefox showed that it wasn’t lying – the files really weren’t in the place it was looking.

After a lot of searching on various forums I found that the Edgy files had been taken off the servers because it was old and not supported any more.  That makes sense I suppose.  And after all, I didn’t want to upgrade to Edgy, because that’s what I already had.  I wanted to upgrade to Feisty, which is the latest release at the moment.  Finally I found someone telling me that to upgrade to Feisty I needed to change the locations in /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Feisty instead of Edgy.  Sounds simple?  Yeah, I thought that too.  I did manage to find someone’s blog post that went through it step by step though, giving the process of updating the sources.list file, so I did that.

Thankfully at that point it all started to work.  Or at the very least appear to work.  The apt-get update command found all the files it was looking for, and going back into the System Updates screen showed a whole list of updates that weren’t being shown before.  To begin with it tried to persuade me that I needed to upgrade to 6.10 Edgy, which was actually what I already had, so I cancelled that and went back and told it to upgrade to 7.04 Feisty.  Right now it’s downloading all the files, which is all very positive.  It hasn’t complained so far, it’s found all the source files it needs, and it’s connected to the internet.  Good stuff.  Whether it finishes the installation without any problem is another matter, but since the whole process could take a couple of hours I’ve got time to spare.

This all begs the question – “why do I need Linux?”  Am I turning into a geek?  Well, not really, because I was already almost a geek.  Almost.  I still wouldn’t call myself a geek really, not in the truly geeky sense.  I still have no idea what most of the commands are that I’ve been typing in, nor what their effect has been.  And it’s not like Ubuntu is going to become my primary operating system either, because it’s on the wrong computer.  If I installed it on my Mac it might be a different matter, but then I wouldn’t be using my Mac.  I like my Mac.  It’s fun.  In all honesty Ubuntu (if it works) will probably only get used for testing purposes so I can check that web sites look all right on Linux machines.  The plan will be to set up a VNC server on it so I can remote desktop into it from my Mac.

There is one quirky little thing about Linux I just find hilarious though, and that’s the command ‘sudo’.  I’ve no idea what it’s meant to mean, but as far as I can tell its main function is to override various security measures.  For instance, if I wanted to edit a system file it wouldn’t let me, unless I sudo it.  It’s like the following conversation between me and Ubuntu:

“Do something.”

“Hah, no chance.”

“Sudo do something.”

“Oh, all right then.”

However, there has been significant confusion in the world-wide-web community, because it’s still not available.  We were told that Firefox 3 would be available on 17th June.  It’s been 17th June all day, and here in the UK we’re running out of day in which to download the darn thing.  And yet there is no sign of it on the Firefox web site.  There are some clever people who have managed to locate the actual download separate from the web site, but that’s cheating somewhat, and I wonder whether those results will count in the world record stats.  Take a look at the comments on this news item and you’ll see people from around the world thoroughly confused at the lack of the promised download, wondering how, why and who screwed it all up.

Read a little closer, however, and the reason becomes apparent.  Since the internet is a truly global phenomenon, the concept of a ‘date’ and ‘time’ is a little difficult to quantify, so for all useful purposes we have to tie it down to a particular physical location on the globe.  When the folks at Firefox said their browser would be available on 17th June, what they meant to say (they probably did say it, but ought to have made it a little clearer) was that it would be available from 1pm Eastern Time, as in the time zone inhabited by those people on the east coast of America, and the 24 hours being recorded for the world record will be measured from that time.  The upshot of that is that here in the UK it won’t be available until 6pm, and people further round the globe will probably have to wait until tomorrow, by their calendars.  Practically it does come out at exactly the same time across the world, it’s just that the measurement of time varies depending on where you are.  Confused?  So were a lot of other people.

As I write this I’m pleased to note that in theory there is less than an hour before FF3 is available.  It’s also less than an hour before everyone else gets it, but if you’re in Syndey, Australia it’s currently almost half past two in the morning, 18th June.  Obviously if they download their shiny new FF3 when they wake up then their download will still count for the record, but I can understand if the hard-core Firefoxers are somewhat disgruntled to have to wait a full day before being able to download what everyone else had yesterday.  Of course in the global sense that’s not quite accurate, but you know what I mean.

Basically, time is a bit silly, really.  What we really need is a way of fast-forwarding and rewinding time so that we can all experience the same 1pm on the same date at the same moment, just for special moments like this.  There’s a phrase that says “Time is nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen at once”.  I hate to disagree with nature, but it would be cool to be able to experience life in a non-parallel fashion, dipping in and out of time as the fancy takes us.  That way I could get tomorrow’s work done yesterday so I don’t have to do it today.

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EDIT: It’s now 7:15pm and the Firefox web site has been updated.  Curiously though there seems to be some disparity between what’s advertised and what’s being offered.  Check out this screenshot from the front page, and note the version number listed – are they trying to tell us that Firefox 2 is the new Firefox 3??

EDIT 2: Panic over!  It’s now 7:35pm and the Firefox web site shows the correct version of FF3 available for download.  Got there in the end!