Second Life (SL) is like a MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role
Playing Game), although many of the people hanging out there will be
offended if you called it a “game”. It is a 3D virtual environment
created between a database on a huge farm of Linux servers and viewer
programs running on home PCs. But besides the bare simulated ground,
everything in SL is created by one of the “residents” there. Objects
in SL can have snippets of code inserted in them to add behavior. I
have found this to be a fascinating environment to program in. I'll
start this talk with an overview of what SL is like and briefly touch
on the organization of the servers. I'll describe the scripting
language, data types, programming environment and the foibles of the
API library. We should be able to go “in-world” live and show some
projects I'm working on in Second Life.