Off-topic.

This is usually a blog to document things happening to the avatar Olof Whitfield in Second Life ® but, as the 3D software Blender is no stranger to the content creators of this virtual world, I think, this post is not too far off-topic.

Today I got my DVD edition of the new, second open movie of the blender foundation called “Big Buck Bunny” or “BBB” for short. I pre-ordered that DVD to contribute to the project and to enable it because pre-ordering means financing the entire thing. They wrote “Everyone who orders and pays the DVD before october 1st will get a discount and his/her name credited in the movie credit roll!”. Of course, I immediately checked the movie, the DVD itself and the included data files (it is an open movie, that means you get all the scene files, the textures, etc. to rebuild the movie from the first to the last frame) and, guess what? I was not mentioned, although I ordered the DVD one day after the start of the pre-order campaign, that means several decades befor october 1st! Scandal!

Ok, there will be a third open movie (knowledge taken from the first interviews after the premiere of BBB) and there will be again a pre-order by me and I will again hope to get mentioned in the credit roll. I will make it on that damn credit roll!

Second Life ® trademark policy – little casulty

As an obedient resident of Second Life ® and maintainer of our shop’s update blog, I immediately updated our blog’s category name to reflect the new rules – I added an “®” to it. (How that is expected to look like has been outlined here!) The technique used to do that is called a named entity, that is you add an “&”, followed by “reg” and a semicolon into the HTML source code of your post or – in my case – in the category name. A web browser will later automagically expand that code to an “®”.

However, that turned out to be an not so clever step as my favorite feed reader can not read our blog posts anymore! That particular feed reader – FeedReader3 – is usually a very handy piece of software (and it’s free!) which does not make any problems, but in this case it just says:

Parser error ———-
Line:2
Reason:Reference to undefined entity ‘reg’.

Ok, there is always an alternative (isn’t it?) and so I tried the next entity by replacing “reg” by “#174″. And now, it seems to work. (Well, I had to save some of the blog’s post after updating the category’s name and had to update the feed in the reader…)

This was my little report on consequences of the new trademark policies, not as spectacular as exptected elsewhere, but hey, I did not even had my first “rezday”, so my problems need not be big ones!