Andrew Fenn

I've been using OGRE for a while now and it is superb.

It runs on numerous architectures, has great documentation and has a full time developer who maintains it all.

One of the great things about this project is of course the community around OGRE. They have created numerous plugins, libraries and all sorts of things which make writing a game from scratch even easier.

Another great selling point of OGRE is that the rendering is abstracted so you can use OpenGL, DirectX or if you're porting your game to some weird alien technology you can write your own plugin.

This is a must have tool if you are doing anything from CSS + HTML to AJAX and security auditing.

The difference between this firmware and my original linksys firmware is amazing.

When I first updated it I was amazed at how much easier everything was to configure and there are so many more options available.

Just a note of caution that you should read the forums a lot before installing to make sure you get the right version and you don't brick your router.

I am using the Linux version and although it is in Beta I feel that the viewer has certain design flaws which won't be fixed for a few years.

The program also feels kinda bloated with all kinds of crap in there like a web browser. The idea is that you never have to leave the second life viewer and want to stay in the world 24 hours. I wished the viewer was just for viewing second life and they focused on that rather then including so many features that everything is broken.

The game has a lot of UIs which can put off new users from trying out the viewer.

Its very difficult to import your own objects from blender, 3D studio and other applications into second life. With each attempt I tried I ended up with an object with the verts all messed up. I wished they worked on an importer so you could upload reasonably sized objects without having to change them into a texture. That whole part of the system feels like a hack job to get a new feature.

Even with all these problems second life is an awesome idea and I love spending time there but I believe that problems with the viewer really slow down adoption rates.

If they could simplify the User Interface a little more then they have and work out all the problems it would be a great place to hang out.

I tried a lot of web cam programs on Ubuntu and the best is Gyachi. It's faster and looks better then any other open source program.

Using Ubuntu has been a joy. I have also been able to run a lot of my favourite programs such as Guildwars.

Quite simply if PHP didn't exist I wouldn't have a job or maybe never have gotten into programming. Its a very easy language to use but difficult to master.

Maybe I am wrong but from a glance this project is reinventing the wheel just so it can be written in .NET.

That doesn't sound very liberating to me and others who don't use Microsoft Windows. I suggest a name change.

Also the secondlife viewer has been released as GPL 2 (I realise this was not the case when the project started) and runs on Linux which makes the official project more valuable then this for the simple fact that its goal is to run on more platforms whereas this projects goal is to run on just one.