One of my ongoing projects in Second Life is the creation of an amusement park on my Island of Encogia. This amusement park has many rides and attractions. These rides allowed me to learn to program the Linden Scripting Language. You can see my amusement park here.

[img_assist|nid=76|title=Encogia|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=100|height=58]

The amusement park's Second Life search page can be found here.

Just released an article on Second Life commerce programming.
Commerce occurs in Second Life whenever money changes hands. Money, in Second Life, is the Linden Dollar. Although the Linden Dollar is not an actual currency, it can be freely exchanged for real-world currencies. Like many real-world currencies, the value of the Linden Dollar rises and falls against the US dollar. As of this writing, 1 US dollar buys approximately 186 Linden Dollars.
Writing Commerce Scripts in Second Life

I've begun the process of creating a new Drupal template.  I like this template quite a bit better than the standard drupal template.  However, it still has more work to go.  Drupal is very powerful in terms of how much you can configure it before you have to resort to PHP programming. 

To further promote Scripting Recipes in Second Life I've released all of the book examples to the Second Life Exchange (SLX). They are all on "sale" for L$10 each. This is about 0.05USD each. Of course they can all be obtained free from the Heaton Research Website or from Encogia Island.

I've added a new section on my island that lets you see the examples from my book "Scripting Recipes for Second Life". Here you can obtain free full-permission examples from the book. To see these examples visit the following SLURL:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Encogia/195/194/73

I just had a bots article published by DevX. This article shows how to create a hybrid bot that makes use of both web services and traditional HTTP programming. This article uses the Yahoo search API to scan for articles on a famous person. Then a traditional bot looks at each article and attempts to find the birth year for the famous person. From all of the articles, the program determines what it believes is the correct birth year for the person.

I just released a new book. It is called Scripting Recipes for Second Life. Second Life is very different than most of the MMOG's out there. Second Life can be programmed. In Second Life the world is created almost entirely by the users. This is done through a combination of 3D modeling and programming.

I am in the process of moving JeffHeaton.com over to drupal. Drupal is a content management system that will allow me to add many more features to JeffHeaton.com. Eventually HeatonResearch.com will switch to drupal as well. I do not have everything configured exactly as I would like, but that will be worked out over the next few days/weeks.