A Brief Visit

I didn't have much time to spend in SL this morning, but I had to go visit the gorgeous Costa Rica Ladies' Botanical Garden--a day late for the ball, but the photo of the site in NWN made me want to explore.

Good news from SLCC

News is emerging from SLCC for those of us who couldn't go (darn it), and some of it is good. From Philip Rosedale's keynote address:

• "We are going to ship mesh."
• Group chat and region crossing will be fixed
• Time required to display content at startup will be reduced by half
  

Good news... now, as Crap Mariner says, "acta non verba". More at NWN.

In the words of Slade...

"Keep your hands off my power supply."

Seriously, it's an Antec Neopower, and it runs very quietly indeed. I'm very, very happy!

UPDATE: OK, maybe a little less happy now that Newegg is selling it for almost half off this Labor Day weekend, but you can't choose when components fail.

The Great Slow Sims, Part One

So... there's a brouhaha over a video and blog entry by Chris Pirillo and a followup thereto. Pirillo, in response to someone who asked what happened to Second Life, went on at grimacing length about how it had been "overrun by people addicted to porn and gambling." Never mind that it's trivial to check that Linden Lab prohibited gambling in SL over three years ago. Apparently Pirillo tried SL long ago (he's "Wicket Pixie"), didn't see a point to it, and couldn't be bothered to do any research before shooting his mouth off.

A visit to New World Notes would also suffice to disprove the stereotype of Second Life (one we all chafe at; it's been spread by a lot of lazy and/or dishonest journalists). "75 Year Old Navy Vet Recreates His Korean War Vessel in Second Life"; "Chestnut's Choices 8-12/8-18: Attend SL Community Convention Inworld or in Boston, Immersive Pink Floyd-Inspired Art Performance and Much More"; "Keiko Takamura Debuts Her 1st Album Co-Financed with Linden Dollars from Second Life Fans". Admittedly, nobody asked the Navy vet whether he was into gambling or porn.

So... SL residents didn't appreciate gratuitous ignorant bashing (people are funny that way), and said so. Also, Oliver Szondi offered to take Pirillo on a tour. Pirillo agreed, graciously allocating a few minutes to the purpose. The result was another video rant, this one about lag and about sim owners' choice of background music (which one can turn off, but I guess if you are more interested in kvetching...), and wondering why SL users took him to task for pointing out how slow SL is. (They didn't; they took him to task for painting them all as porn and gambling addicts.)

I can sympathize with being frustrated by lag; a lot of SL residents are. (OTOH, over at Parktown Progress, Boyd Doghouse raises an interesting question: did Pirillo set things up to make SL perform badly?) But here again we see Pirillo either omitting information or not bothering to research. He sees SL as being as slow as it was years ago when he tried it and bashes Linden Lab about that, but years ago, if you were on SL you'd watch it groan and regularly crash under a load of 20,000 simultaneous users. These days, the maximum runs around 60,000. Linden Lab hasn't been sitting on its thumbs for years as Pirillo insinuates.

Chris Pirillo has a following, and yes, to the extent that some of them haven't already drunk the "SL is all sex" kool-aid, he may have put them off SL. Did Linden Lab miss an opportunity, as Grace McDunnough asks? No. There's no point in discussion with someone whose mind is already made up.

P.S. Troy McConaghy delightfully punctures some complaints about SL in "The Piano is Dead".

Protesting

Here's my photo for the protest of Qarl Linden's layoff. As a prim breast user, LL's laying off the man who was the major force behind sculpted prims, and later played a major role in mesh import, a feature whose fate people now wonder about, is especially significant to me. I hope you'll consider joining the protest.

UPDATE: I am pleased that I refrained from playing on any of the works of Rusty Warren, or Brian Eno's "Baby's on Fire", when making this post.

UPDATE: Qarl Fizz, né Linden, has joined the Emerald Team. I will give very serious consideration to returning to Emerald.

back as soon as possible

In the middle of a conversation with Susyn Stenvaag, my computer shut down. Power outage? No, everything else is on... Looks like it's the power supply.

So, I'm off the grid until a replacement is here and installed. Sigh.

A Farewell to Qarl

...and possibly to improvements in the appearance of Second Life, too.

Qarl Linden is the main person responsible for sculpted prims, which have revolutionized the appearance of Second Life. More recently, he's been similarly responsible for work to bring meshes to Second Life, which made it to closed beta, but may not make it any further than that, because Linden Lab has laid Qarl off.

This is a guy who helped with visual effects on some movies you just might have seen: 300 and two of the Matrix movies. He is highly enthusiastic about Second Life, as one can tell from his blog: "...i really do love second life. SL is the coolest thing on the planet - the world we’ve all built is literally incredible - beyond belief."

...and LL laid him off.

I fear this means we can kiss meshes goodbye. Incredibly, I've seen an assertion that this is a good thing, that you should be denied the improvements that meshes make possible so that some SL builders can continue to sell their stuff without actually having to like, you know, learn something. Mind-numbingly stupid, as was the decision to lay off Qarl Linden in the first place.

So... I will be doing a few things:

• Burning my sculpties in protest
• Closely following the ModRex project in OpenSim
  

You'll recall that Miriel Enfield closed her store and stopped making things in Second Life. In her words, "...I quit because I was frustrated with a lot of things, especially SL's artistic limitations, my own inability to work around those to my satisfaction, and my belief that LL is not going to ever give me the features I want." How long will it be until the really good content creators similarly give up on SL? Having features like mesh dangled before them and then snatched away is only going to hasten the flight.

Yet another wish list

It's been a while since I sat down and priced a computer for running Second Life. It's kind of fun, save for the part where I don't get to spend the money to actually put it together. :)

Case: I like not needing a huge heavy case, so it's Micro ATX for me. The Apevia Q-Pack 2 has been my choice for some time, but the package includes a power supply that isn't what one would really like: it's not modular, so you have to deal with all those extra cables, and these days graphics cards want more extra power connectors than it comes with. So, this time I pick a somewhat larger Micro ATX case that doesn't come with a power supply: the Compucase HEC 6T Series 6T18BB, $45 at newegg. (Yesterday it was a "shell shocker" and going for $25.) The Antec Neopower 650 is modular and not outrageously expensive, at $80.

Motherboard: the GIGABYTE GA-785GMT-USB3 is a step up from the motherboard I currently use, and supports USB 3. $95.

CPU: One of the Phenom six cores is awfully tempting at $200, but SL doesn't take very much advantage of multiple cores, at least not yet. The Phenom II X4 945 is just $140... or it may be better overall to get one of the dual or triple core CPUs, or a Propus quad core if you are willing to forsake the L3 cache, for about $100 and spend about $100 on an SSD to put the operating system and Second Life and its data on.

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4 GB (2 x 2GB) is of a speed the motherboard supports and is about $100 at newegg. Watching the RAM usage when I fire up Kirsten's client makes me wonder whether 4 GB is enough, but maybe that's a memory leak.

The nVidia 460 is getting rave reviews for price/performance. The GIGABYTE GV-N460OC-1GI GeForce GTX 460 1 GB is going for $230.

We'll get a hard drive that's "just" 750 GB: Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS, $80.

DVD/CD burners are pretty much commodity items these days: ASUS DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS SATA DVD/CD goes for $24.

Not counting shipping, if you pick the six-core it comes to $854. We didn't go for cheap this time around.

Faster! Faster and Louder!

OK, not louder, but... someone named Niran has written a guide to installation and settings for KirstenLee's SL client. I will sit down soon and take its advice (mentally mapping Windows flavored paths to the appropriate ones for Linux). If you use Kirsten's client, I'd suggest you check the guide out. If you don't use Kirsten's client, I suggest you try it out... which may well be best done with the guide at hand or screen. Many thanks to Niran for posting this guide, which is clearly the result of a lot of experimentation to determine how to use Kirsten's client to best advantage.

Bearded Lady with an Attitude

Since I had on a Victorian dress to visit the wonderful Posture is Everything store and check out animation overrides, I decided to put on the beard and explore a bit. I had to take a picture; I didn't quite have it adjusted right on the first one I took. Here's the result, taken in the lovely Caledon Moors sim:

Joy of Blogging

The best thing about writing this blog is meeting or getting an IM or email from someone who reads the blog and likes it. I'm doubly happy if the reader found out about prim breasts in SL from the blog and joined SL because of it.

I've had that pleasure a few times, and it keeps me going. Thank you, Gentle Readers.

P.S. That doesn't include comment spammers like the one whose comment I just wiped.

News from RL

...from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Preview

Last night Janey Vansant asked me if I'd like a preview of a new outfit... I said something to the effect of "Yes, I'd love to see it"... and suddenly SL asked me, would I like to accept an item into my inventory? Um, yes... I wasn't expecting that! I thanked Janey, and asked if I could put up a photo. Yes, came the reply, as long as I make clear that it's not yet for sale. I agreed... so, here is something to look forward to when it becomes generally available from Ms. Vansant:


The skirt will be a bit more modest for those of you who don't share my predilection for legs as long as SL permits.

P.S. Those are bird of paradise flowers, and the photo was taken in Whimsy. (If you've not been to Whimsy, why not? It's gorgeous, and the hummingbirds aren't that dangerous...)

The next thing to drool over

The nVidia 460 graphics card. $200 for the version with 768 MB RAM, $230 for the version with 1GB of RAM. It's not a 480, but for less than half the money pretty darned respectable, and by the time I can kinda sorta justify getting one, it will be even less expensive.

UPDATE: Reviews say that there's more difference than just the amount of RAM. and that one should spring the extra $30 for the 1 GB version.

We can hope...

FuturePundit cites a report that suggests that fish oil lowers the risk of breast cancer. A study that will give us a better idea about whether this really works has been recruiting subjects since January. (They want both men and women; the study is looking at various illnesses.)

I hope it's true. The occasional fishy belch from a fish oil capsule strikes me as a small price to pay.

After-market modification kits

I've mentioned, here or in Pectoral Virtual Fashion or both, that there are people who offer the service of creating textures that adapt existing outfits or tops to prim breasts. That approach needn't be custom; there are those who mass produce packages that let you apply a clothing texture to prim breasts to let them work with an outfit or top.

So... I finally got around to purchasing such a package. This one is one of several from EPIC Proportions that let one use certain sets of prim breasts in conjunction with various colors of the Bugshit Gloss bustier. (No, that's really the name of the store. Honest.)

I got the purple one. The applicator for eCorps prim breasts works well with Foxbean Liebknecht's Nadine 1.5 breasts; the photo shows the results exactly as applied, with no followup tweaking as I've had to do with some other outfits. I'm quite pleased with Tenyene's work, and with the bustier proper, save that I'm too modest to wear the extremely short skirt that comes with the bustier; the skirt in the photo is from another outfit. (I also wish that the bustier came with a skirt that covers all the way up to the edge of the bustier; as it is from the back it resembles the horrid practice of having underwear visible above one's skirt or pants.)

Beautifully done, Tenyene; thank you.

UPDATE: Epic Proportions now has formal outfits. Pictures ASAP!

Rings on the Runway

As of last night, this is what remains of Mammatus.

UPDATE: These elegant glowing rings are the work of Elysia Snook. Thank you, Elysia!

Cutting loose

I decided to take a break from my usual mode of dress, starting with the hair. Off with Goldie Locks' elegant Aphrodite, on with a wonderfully outrageous mohawk from Digit Darkes, and so on. I couldn't resist half the Nanami outfit. (OTOH, my resistance for tops cropped way too short is very high indeed, so I went with a turtleneck and lace.)

I feel guilty about this photo on a couple of counts: first, it seems less than nice to take a picture in a store one hasn't bought anything from--but it was a great backdrop, and if you search for "city" or "urban", you'd be amazed at how full the results are of "dark urban roleplay", which I want to avoid, thanks... Second, I'd have sworn that I'd asked for high resolution. Are we back to those settings not being remembered? I hope not.

A Suitably Large Tribute

I visited the Mammatus sim again this morning. (That is in itself sad; I've been there far more frequently now that it is going away than I have for some time prior.) Very little remains, but now there is a far more appropriate tribute than the humble rose I left behind (since returned to my inventory).

Microsoft .NET vs Java - trailer [HD]

Born Museum of Fine Arts

I took a break from the dense and overwhelming SL7B sims and relaxed on the Born sim at the Born Museum of Fine Arts. On the first floor it's an airy, open space with lovely landscapes and still lifes, but if you want to relax, be sure to go up a floor to see the mandalas of Sheba Blitz.

Philip returns

M Linden has stepped down, and Philip will be interim CEO.

As someone once wrote, "Therefore moun we singen Deo Gracias."

Link to Emerald

If you've gone looking for the Emerald SL client lately, you've probably found it somewhat frustrating. They've moved, but the old links still show up at the top of Google searches.

So, to save those who read here the trouble, and, I hope, to move the current link further up the heap, here's where to go for Emerald, or at least, so it seems. I'm a bit puzzled, as the Linux download there is 1.23.5.1635, but OTOH, in the directory where I keep the various SL clients I've fetched, I see a 1.4.0.2164 that I fetched last Saturday, and I don't recall where I retrieved it from.

UPDATE: Thanks to Nalates; by all means take the advice from the comment, and head for http://blog.modularsystems.sl/.

MaggieBluxome.com

Maggie's got a new web site, and it's very much worth your perusal. It's filled with her excellent fashion photography, selectable by various categories. Also, it has many SLURLs of interest, especially to the prim breast user.

Don't miss it.

They're Tearing Down Mammatus Sim

...and I know it's partly my fault. RL gets busy, it gets to be far too easy to put off going there--but I will be forever grateful for the many friends I made there and at Big'Uns's previous locations.

I hope the rose I placed there is not too much of a bother.

(If you don't recognize the Night Gallery reference, track it down and watch. It'll rip your heart out and stomp that sucker flat.)

A peek behind the mesh curtain

SLOG has a post about a brief raising of the NDA veil over meshes for SL, and just what was revealed during that interval. Get the details there; I don't want to spread bad data based on a misinterpretation I might make. That said, it sounds very exciting.

UPDATE: Be sure to watch at least the first video there, of the creature playing Paganini. It looks like it's an example of something the blog post mentions, "rigging", which allows actual wearable clothing rather than body paint.

UPDATE: I'm kicking myself, remembering the first mesh demo video which showed a mesh figure of the Hulk. It just begs for a filk... "I was there at Linden Lab late one night, when my eyes beheld an eerie sight... (it was a mesh!) It was a Monster Mesh..."

Not me and my shadow

So I had spare time today... I can wander about the grid to my heart's content, right? Well, sort of.

Early on things worked and I got some nice photos. But then I thought, "Gee, why not try SL on the computer connected to the nifty big LCD TV?" So I did... and I saw something that I've noticed here lately. Try a new client and the first time or two you get Caspered. I signed on again, or rather, the client crashed and I signed on again... and there I was, a swirling white cloud.

Back to my main computer, and still the cloud. Then I noticed something really strange: I was Caspered, but the client (Kirsten's 2.0 flavored client, build 24 I think) was able to correctly render my avatar's shadow--not the attachments, just the avatar. Then I visited with friends, a long overdue and joyous meeting, and I found that everyone else could see me. I was only Casper to myself, and here's the proof:


If it's across multiple clients, it's either code common to the clients or on the server side. I saw one claim that it's a known 2.1 code problem, and that the fix is to load one of the default avatars (do they mean the shapes?) and then switch back. I tried that, with no luck.

I hope this is fixed soon.

UPDATE: It's consistent across Kirsten's client, Emerald, and LL's 2.1 alpha and 2.0 clients, and continues despite cache clears and even "mv ~/.secondlife ~/.secondlife.bak".

UPDATE: If I were an English major, I would probably have worked in a line about how "I wandered lonely as a cloud". Ah, well...

UPDATE: Just after posting that, poof! Back I came. I hope that I'll stay.

Wireless keyboard/pointer for SL?

I have a computer connected to the TV now... a nice 32" LCD HDTV. Download KirstenLee Cinquetti's latest Linux client, install, fire it up, and... OK, well, it seems every time I try out a new client with no cached textures and stuff, I take forever to rez, at least to myself. Then I try to move and look around...

...and have to force myself not to scream with frustration. I have a wireless keyboard/trackball combo; it is essentially the Adesso WKB-3000UB. I ended up having to play Twister with my left hand to hold down ctrl-alt and the left mouse button and fiddle with the trackball with my right, and I don't have a good surface to set the thing on. I ended up apologizing to all and signing off.

It looks like there is a right-hand reachable left mouse button, so I'll give it one more try, but does anyone else use an HTPC for Second Life, and if you do, what do you use for a keyboard and pointing device?

(N+1)st thing I wish I had L$1 for every occurrence of

...flying into the air when I type something in the 2.0 client without giving the chat text entry field focus.

An encounter with old media

Newspapers are fading out, and it's about time. At a local grocery store, the local newspaper has been giving away issues and trying to sell subscriptions. The first time, I accepted a Sunday paper; it sat unexamined for a week until I finally got rid of it. News is available from other sources, including the paper's own web site; store coupons and machine readable versions of their Sunday ads are available online, and I wouldn't be surprised if you can get coupons fed to your smartphone. Physical newspapers are not worth the hassle to recycle them.

That said, I happened upon a stray issue yesterday and looked through it. Alongside the (very shrunken... and Bill Watterson thought newspapers were shrinking comics back when he did Calvin and Hobbes!) comics was "Goren on Bridge". For a second, I misread it as "Gorean on Bridge", and suddenly this mental image of a pseudo-Frazetta portrait of four Goreans sitting around a table studying their cards, kajirae at their feet, went through my head.

Fortunately, it passed quickly.

In honor of Little Orphan Annie...

...and to gently nudge LL about VWR-17063, we're changing the masthead for a day. Wish I could've found Sandy. ("Arf!" Yes, I know, but I didn't have time...)

Voice morphing in 2.1

The 2.1 alpha SL client is out, and it supports voice morphing. With it, you can rent any of several "packs" of five voices, L$750 per month per pack. The packs that exist are "Scary", "Feminine", "Masculine", "Tiny", and "Techie".There's a page with a link to "Voice Island" and a video demonstrating some of the voices. I watched the video; it doesn't demonstrate all of them, just a selection.

I guess there's an "uncanny valley" effect for voice, too; the scary, tiny, and techie voices don't fall in, but the feminine ones in the video certainly do--they sound metallic and phony. I hope the voices improve.

UPDATE: Upon reflection, that metallic sound reminds me of an inexpensive pitch shifter I once played with. If that's all that's being done, it can be easily reversed, and in any case the effect has a distinctive sound, easily recognized. It will carry as much stigma as not using voice does now.

UPDATE: Prad Prathvi put up a post embedding a video that goes through all the voices, and listening to it I realize that people are going to want to stack them. If they've found some voice that they like, they may well wish to modify it further with "radio" or "intercom" to get that effect on their preferred voice. I wonder whether that will be possible.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: I've submitted JIRA entry VWR-19885 to request the ability to apply multiple voice modifications. If you'd like that ability, you may wish to vote for it.

Next year, in OpenSim?

LL has laid off 30% of its employees, and some are saying more layoffs are coming. The virtual village idiot is busy gloating, while others mourn.

Some fear the end is near, others look forward to SL access via the web. (If Hamlet's right, that will happen via WebGL, a way for web pages to get to OpenGL, so this does not necessarily mean smartphones and netbooks will be able to get to SL.)

All I can say is, thank goodness for OpenSim. One of the virtues of Open Source is that you're not held hostage by a sole source, and if worse comes to worst I think we'll appreciate that greatly.

Cheyenne and Sweetie get some of the recognition they deserve

Cheyenne and Sweetie's Robot Sanitorium is Editor's Pick on the Linden Showcase. It's long overdue. Visit the Sanitorium, and stay to see Whimsy and its surroundings. You'll be glad you did.

Maybe they were thinking of Raquel Welch?

I see that if you look for "Neolithic" on Google, the quoted blurb for the Wikipedia page reads

The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or Sexy Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BCE...

Someone has noticed, and the Neolithic is less sexy than it used to be according to Wikipedia, but it just goes to show: trust but verify.

Appreciation for ancient technology

All I wanted to do was get the sun to shine as it did the last time I took a photo in caLLie cLine's store on the beautiful stairway... and I could not do it! It makes me wonder whether SL mimics the way the sun's path through the sky changes over the year.

So, good work, you folks who built Stonehenge; you have me beat.

Goodbye, Mammatus

I'm very sorry to report that the Mammatus sim will close at the end of June. The stores in the Mall, as far as I know, all have other locations, but I fear for the other businesses and features on the sim.

Long, long overdue thanks to Aspen Normandy for his friendship and all he's done for prim breasts and prim breast users.

P.S. Any resemblance between the title and that of a Philip Roth novella or the movie made from it is purely coincidental.

Hairdressers for avatars?

Check out this post in Technology Review's blog. It deescribes a setup to let one create a virtual hairdo by... hairdressing! I hope that someday SL hairdos can be created with this user interface.

Conservation

Whew! I've saved 15 GB of disk space by converting old .bmp SL photos to .png, and I haven't even gotten through all of them yet!

How to do it? I used Image Magick (in particular the "convert" program) to do the conversion, iterating over the images. I was not smart; I didn't use touch to preserve the time stamp, but I have a backup that I can use for that purpose.

png compresses, and unlike JPEG doesn't use lossy compression, so there's nothing to lose save maybe an excuse to get a bigger hard drive. :)

" It's a wonderful Second Life: Breathe 2"

New World Notes has had a lot of really good items lately... but this machinima, I think, tops them all. (The NWN post includes SLURLs for all the featured sites.)



It's a reminder of what SL can be, and I hope that while LL tries to increase its retention factor and make things easier for new residents, it doesn't forget that.

After you watch the video, be sure to read Cheyenne's latest, at least slightly tongue in cheek (I hope!) commentary about the matter.

UPDATE: The finalists for this year's Linden Prize have been announced. One of them is, I kid you not, Sion Chickens. What a joke, and I fear my aforementioned hope is, if not dashed, near the rocky shore with no functioning lighthouses.

Speaking of new clients...

My sincere apologies to all, as I forgot that going to a new client seems to require setting various preferences again--particularly the one that causes IMs sent to one while one is offline to be emailed. I've gone a long while without SL, and because of my oversight been relatively incommunicado. Please forgive me.

Ruthification

When the SL client started displaying a swirly white mist for unrezzed avatars, some waxed nostalgic for Ruth, the ancient default avatar that the client would use if it couldn't retrieve an avatar's shape, skin, or hair.

They needn't have worried. Something about the 2.0 client makes it Ruthify you the first time around. Each time I've tried a new LL 2.0 client lately, I've started out as the mist, and the client would, one after the other, say "can't load shape, can't load shirt, can't load..." and use a new piece of white clothing, a default shape and skin... and poof! There I stand, Ruthified save for perhaps a hat or hairdo that it managed to load somehow.

It's very frustrating.

NWN must-read by Tabitha Eichel

I did not see this as it originally appeared in NWN, so I am especially grateful to Hamlet Au for seeing it and making sure it receives appropriate notice by making it a post unto itself. Tabitha Eichel makes an eloquent case for SL identity not being tied to RL identity. I strongly urge you to read it.

JIRA entry with landmark proposal

Back in November, I described something I wish SL would support, namely a landmark that really just points at another landmark which the creator could update when the site/store/etc. the landmark points at moves.

Shame on me; I did no more than kvetch in my blog. Ann Otoole, OTOH, has proposed said feature in a JIRA entry, VWR-11679. Thank you, Ms. Otoole, and I hope that all of you reading this will consider voting for it. (Think for a minute about just how many out of date landmarks clutter your inventory... that should motivate you.)

So long, Annie

My sister in eyelessness (at least with the 2.0 SL client), Little Orphan Annie, will disappear from newspapers in June of this year. June 13th is the date of the last strip. Ave et vale, or, to translate from the Latin, "Arf!"

UPDATE: Hey, that's a thought. On June 13th, take a self-portrait using the 2.0 client with shadows activated, dressed up as Little Orphan Annie. (Does anyone have that hairdo?)

UPDATE: Gee whiskers, there is a Little Orphan Annie avatar! Perhaps having a goal and a deadline will induce me to do my first serious texturing; that dress will require a special prim breast texture...

The ongoing popularity of Apollo_009

One of the things flickr lets you see is how many people have viewed each of your photos, along with a graph of total views per day for the past few days. For serious photographers, it's probably useful information. For me, it's just interesting, much as Google Analytics data are interesting... and the photo that seems to be the most viewed of all I've put up, getting views just about every day, is the one above, Apollo_009.

My photo nomenclature is pretty mundane; rarely do I come up with creative titles for them--just the name of the sim and a sequence number, so, as I'm sure you recognize if you've been around SL for very long, you know that this is the ninth photo I took in the Lost Gardens of Apollo. (And if you haven't been there, by all means go. I believe it's one of the longest-lived scenic areas in SL--the New World Notes post about it is over four years old.)

So this photo has been viewed 2,781 times since it was posted in March 2007. It obviously predates Windlight; the background is flat. Why has it been viewed so many times, I wonder? It's probably not that people trip over it while searching for images of the Greek god or the moon missions; I have a bunch of other photos taken on that sim, viewed nowhere near as many times. I know that when I changed the classification of my images, trying to accurately categorize them, viewership plummeted. It's a rare photo since then that has as many as a hundred views. It is a puzzlement.

Crossblogging again...

...because I want to make sure the word is spread: a new magazine, BUSTed, is coming out. It will be of interest to all those who use prim breasts, and those who appreciate them. More info at Pectoral Virtual Fashion.

Failure? Not entirely.

Back when the whole CSI:NY/Second Life crossover happened, the general opinion was that it fizzled out.

Perhaps it didn't result in a huge influx of people into SL, but I respectfully submit that any action that has the results that Sarra Foggerty describes is in an important sense as far from failure as you can get.

Many thanks to Hamlet Au; NWN today has an article on the Two Three Six Five blog, whence comes Ms. Foggerty's post.

Whew!

I upgraded to Lucid Lynx, and was afraid I'd broken something... but it was not the case. It's fine now, and well worth your checking out.

SL client frustration

Sigh. Kirsten's SL client doesn't have the SL 2.0 client bug in which enabling shadows stops your eyes from rendering... but it's become unusable for another reason. A minute or so after I start it, it consumes all available RAM and slows to a crawl. I hope that's fixed soon.

snapshot metadata

If you use Linux (and GNOME), open up a directory you have RL photos in and right click on one of them. Choose the "Image" tab, and there you will see a lot of information: I was taken on a Mumbleflex BS9000, so and so f-stop, 1/120th second exposure, ISO 400, on March 25th 2009 at 3:15 p.m., and I'm X pixels wide and Y pixels high I bet that someday there will be cameras with GPSs that record where you were when the photo was taken..

Right click on an SL snapshot. You'll see the image size.

Many are the times that I wish I could remember where I took a picture in SL , the camera's orientation, what Windlight preset I was using, what my graphics settings were, the draw distance, the pseudo-time of day on the sim... but that data isn't there. I expect that just about anybody who's taken a picture in SL has wished that as well.

Please consider voting for VWR-19178, which asks that such information be stored in the metadata for SL snapshots.

UPDATE: Sorry! I fixed the link to the JIRA entry; it now takes you directly there.

UPDATE: I rummaged around my cell phone's settings, and it can store the location as determined by GPS with the pictures it takes. How much easier it would be to do in SL!

Photographing again

I had to go back to caLLiefornia to take a picture now that Kirsten's SL client exists for Linux and renders both shadows and eyes. What a relief!

Thank you, Cheyenne, and SL bloggers

I just crashed out of a dance held by the SL Bloggers group for the second time. I had a wonderful time, and met lots of great people. Thank you, Cheyenne, for inviting me there, and I apologize to everyone for dropping out so unceremoniously.

FarmVille

So, FarmVille is a "casual game", Flash-based, that has drawn in a huge number of players. It has a system of rewards and levels, something that Hamlet Au really, really thinks that SL should have in order to cut down SL's high initial attrition rate. It's casual because it doesn't require great skill to advance, just grinding away. One can, though, select crops and fit the varying rates of crop ripening around one's schedule to optimize one's rate of advancement, or take advantage of game features, e.g. confining one's avatar in a tiny space so that you can harvest and plow without waiting for your avatar to walk around.

I have friends who play FarmVille. (I can't play it--to really play it requires a Facebook account, and we all know Facebook's attitude towards avatars.) What do they talk about? About FarmVille forgetting about their last however many minutes of work, having difficulty signing on, ignoring one's attempts to purchase items, not being able to rotate buildings, and so forth. Sounds kind of like complaints about Second Life, only more so... and in FarmVille, all you have is a square plot of ground in not particularly realistic isometric projection. There's a half-hearted attempt to show "neighbors'" farms as being next to yours, but each farm is really like a "room" that one teleports to or from. No notion of geography at all.

I think I'll stay with SL, thanks.

Only a week to go!

Ubuntu 10.04 is getting very close. The Release Candidate version is now downloadable. Give it a try; you can do it without touching your computer's hard drive.

Boobquake for Second Life?

Recently an Iranian cleric has asserted that women dressing immodestly increases earthquakes. Jen McCreight of Blag Hag proposes an experiment: Boobquake.

On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that's your preferred form of immodesty.

Perhaps we in Second Life should join in the experiment—or would that introduce an extra variable that might skew the results? Perhaps it's the reaction of the viewer that moves those tectonic plates, in which case virtual immodesty should add to the effect, or perhaps not.

Blog burnout?

SL Fashion Police and What the Fug? seem to be fading out. The former hasn't had a new article since mid-December 2009 (enough to get it on Cheyenne's list of "Dead (and Missed) Blogs"), and the latter has only run four articles this year.

Perhaps there's only so many things one can make fun of.

Apple Shoots Itself in the Foot

Details here; I think that this will pretty well assure that developers will prefer Android/Chrome OS.

P.S. Ironically, I appreciate Apple's thumbs down to Flash, because I hope it hastens Flash's demise in favor of an open standard.

You know you've been in Second Life a long time...

...when you see email with the subject line "Got Big, Ugly Carbon Feet? Fly into Second Life for Help!" and you have an urge to check your appearance and wonder if you have the right skin on.

Kirsten's viewer for Linux

Many thanks to Athy for pointing out in a comment that KirstenLee Cinquetti is once again making a version of her SL client for Linux.

I've given it a short trial run, and... I like it, but I'll have to read the instructions to find out how to make go away what in LL's 2.0 client has a little >> thing to click on to make go away--and after reading about how this client has solved the problems that shadows (aka deferred rendering) have had in the past, it's kind of frustrating to find that, after twisting all the knobs to turn shadows on, they doggedly refused to appear for me.

UPDATE: I found the sequence to close the sidebar. Unfortunately, if an IM window is also open, it makes it go away too.

UPDATE: I managed to miss something, I guess--shadows are now enabled, and I can see my eyes, so Kirsten's managed to do something that has escaped LL. So... back to photography, thank goodness. I have photos to do for Pectoral Virtual Fashion articles.

Elf Clan must-read

You should read "Turning Point—An Open Letter to the SL Community" on the Elf Clan Social Network.

While you're at it, you also want to read Ariane Barnes's “'New Era' of Second Life: Role Play Getting Screwed!"

Yay! It won't be long now...

I blush to think that I didn't notice when it actually happened, but the countdown to Ubuntu 10.04, "Lucid Lynx", is underway. (10.10 already has its nickname, Maverick Meerkat.)

Bright Eyes

We're not talking the Watership Down movie here.

Back when I could see my eyes, there was one thing that kind of killed verisimilitude: if anyone was waiting to shoot until they saw the whites of my eyes, they didn't have to wait long. They positively glow in the dark!

I'll check the textures next time I'm on the grid. Meanwhile, does anyone know of a good source of emerald-green eyes with non-phosphorescent whites?

I'm surprised

What's up with the Alphaville, née Second Life, Herald? It seems to have become worth reading. Someone must've read Strunk & White and paid attention to the "Do not affect a breezy manner" section... or perhaps it's just that whoever currently holds the reins has ditched the "too cool to care" attitude. Whatever the cause, I applaud the result.

Ouch!

So I was back in the grid last night, getting my rent in at the last minute, when a dear friend IMed me, saying hello, and asking whether I wished to dance. Alas, I had to pass the chance for dancing and delightful conversation by--and ironically. it was because in RL, my left knee was complaining about my having sat too long in one position.

Unintended connotations

Am I alone in seeing the name Utherverse and thinking it's a RPG set in the world of King Arthur?

Maybe not a wizard prang, but...

I'm away from home, and SL 2.0 Beta doesn't work and play well with the computer I have access to for some reason. It crashes in pretty short order with unfortunate regularity. (Apologies to friends I've been talking to and then abruptly leaving--this is why that's happened.)

I hope that LL can find and correct the problem--I do send the dump information in.

UPDATE: I'm back home, and just crashed immediately after IMing a dear friend--I'm so sorry, Susyn! I hope this doesn't become common.

Whew!

I was unable to access my Google account for a day. Very scary, but I think it's OK now.

Well, shucks!

Two shucks:

1. The Ubuntu graphic hasn't switched to a countdown yet.
2. Fiddling with the settings in Gwyneth's article haven't done anything to make my eyes visible.
   

Graphics-related options on the 2.0 Beta

As an SL resident, you really, really want to read Gwyn's Home, Gwyneth Llewelyn's blog... and if I were smarter, I'd be keeping up with it better, and wouldn't have just discovered her March 5th post, "SL 2.0 Beta still running too slowly on your Mac? No worries!"

I don't have a Mac, but it's still well worth reading. I will be experimenting with the settings just as soon as I can. Thank you, Gwyneth!

So close...

I zoomed out on the map, picked a place at random that had a number of people present, and teleported there. I found myself in a campfire (eek!), but got out and went exploring where I ended up, a sim called Nuba. I forgot all about seeing what all the people were doing—with that many, it was probably a place I wouldn't want to go anyway—when I saw this wonderful scene, and I had to take a picture.

Just for a comparison, I should've turned off shadows and taken another picture, same POV, same time of day, same Windlight setting. I'm sure it would be far less immersive.

OK, so we have a lovely landscape photo. (Hey, if you take enough pictures, some of them have to turn out good, right?) The only problem is... if I put a person in, thanks to VWR-17063, it would turn into an instant horror show, because the subject's eyes wouldn't rez. Unfortunately, shadows (technically "deferred rendering") is officially an experimental feature in the SL 2.0 client—nearly two years after work started on it—and I fear that the JIRA entry will be marked "resolved--wontfix". Take a look at what can be done in SL with shadows (e.g. Dirk Schooner's gorgeous video of a matsuri in Hosoi Ichiba), and if you are so inclined, please vote for the JIRA entry.

β-2

Two days to go...

On March 18th, there will be reason to celebrate after St. Patrick's Day, because the beta release of Ubuntu 10.04, "Lucid Lynx", will be available. You'll know when it happens because the Ubuntu graphic in the right-hand column of the blog will change over to a countdown to the official release, scheduled for April 29th.

I've been running Alpha 3 (not, as they say, on a production machine), and it looks nice. If you're tired of brown, you'll be happy. :)

UPDATE (March 19th): the beta was held back a day to get fixes for a couple of nasty bugs in; expect the beta some time today.

Immediate Nostalgia

From back in the old days, i.e. about five weeks ago, when I had to do screen captures to get images with shadows turned on, and trees and arches and windows flickered in and out of existence as I moved my POV around, but at least I could see my eyes!

Seriously, even if you aren't interested in clothing, go to caLLie cLine's store in caLLiefornia just to admire the glorious architecture and decor. (You'll be interested in the clothing soon enough.)

About that last photo...

Yes, there were harsh shadows in it--my face was in the shadow of my hat.

That's a bad thing, or it would be if the photo were taken for a reason other than to provide evidence for a JIRA entry. But where SL is concerned, it's a good thing, because it means that SL is a better environment.

Consider the musical analogy.

A sampling-based musical instrument, when you do whatever it takes to play a note on it, plays back a recording, possibly modifying the gain or picking one of several samples based on how hard you strike the key or blow into a breath controller or whatever. The person who has the most control over that note, though, is the nameless person actually played the instrument that got sampled.

There's another kind of instrument, though--it does what is called "physical modeling." It actually solves the differential equations that describe the behavior of the instrument in real time, and it takes the same inputs that the instrument being modeled takes. That means it's possible to play it badly!

Oh, you can play a sampling instrument badly--you can hit the wrong notes at the right time, or the right notes at the wrong time. But the individual notes will be exemplary notes of their kind as played by a good instrumentalist. You can't play a sampling instrument badly in all the ways you can play the real instrument badly--but you have full control over the physical modeling instrument, so you can play it badly.

So my ability to take a bad picture in SL means that SL itself is improving!

The plot thickens...

I would've sworn I saw it the other day, but I was on a wildly gyrating hovering dancing disk. Now I have proof. For some reason, now I can see other people's eyes, but not my own using the 2.0 Beta with shadows enabled. *scratches virtual head*

P.S. This suddenly reminded me of Jonathan Coulton's classic "Re: Your Brains"; is LL more unreasonable than the zombie coworkers of that song? :)

"How I Discovered Ubuntu" winners announced

Congratulations to the winners--though all the entries are worth reading. Check them out.

Must-read on women in open source

Do read Amy Vernon's article about groups that are doing something to encourage more women to get involved in open source software.

nvidia users, check your driver version!

WOW.com reports "If you're using an Nvidia graphics card you should check your drivers, as there is a chance the newest drivers could cause your card to overheat during World of Warcraft, the Starcraft II Beta, or even Warcraft III." They link to BlizzPlanet, which in turn refers to threads on the nVidia forums. The (Windows) driver they refer to is 196.75. The latest version available in a PPA for Ubuntu is 195.36; I am very hesitant to try it now.

P.S. How much sooner might this have been found and fixed were the nvidia driver open source!

It's not just me...

Other people have found that the 2.0 beta doesn't render eyes if shadows are turned on.

I hope this is corrected soon. I'm right on the edge of being able to take pictures with shadows enabled, without having to worry about parts of buildings or trees vanishing...

UPDATE: Oh, yes. If you have anything to add that might be of help in diagnosing the problem, please add it to VWR-17063.

Photos with Shadows

Just to show it works: I took this photo with the 2.0 beta client. The shadows are there to hide the problem of the disappearing eyes. The subject, of course, is the beautiful and talented Foxbean Liebknecht.

Now, if I could only see the eyes...

Tweaking the SL 2.0 client

Check out Viewer 2 Tweaks. Alas, they involve editing files, but it beats not having the capability at all.

Many thanks to the beautiful and talented Foxbean Liebknecht for pointing me at the page.

On even less than usual...

Hardware problems... aaargh!

"Doctor, My Eyes..."

Actually, the Jackson Browne song doesn't apply. Using the 2.0 Beta client, I can't see anyone's eyes. So what we want is It's A Beautiful Day:

Second Life 2.0 beta

I want to give it a while, so I give it a fair shake... but so far:

• It's pretty.
• PHOTOGRAPHS WORK WITH SHADOWS TURNED ON! (Next time I'll determine whether they've fixed the flickering alpha textures with shadows on bug.)
  
• "/me [predicate]" in IMs doesn't look right; it doesn't display as a contiguous sentence.
• After tens of minutes online, neither my eyes nor my prim breasts ever rezzed.
• I still don't know how to do things. That will just take time.
  

I have hopes for it... but perhaps I'll just wait for Emerald to adopt it as a base and get the familiar interface and the shadows fix (fixes, I hope!).

UPDATE: Yes, I think it's fixed the flickering alpha textures, but the dueling alpha textures problem is still there... and while my prim breasts have finally shown up, my eyes haven't.

The Joy of Convex

For a long time, I've been "clothing" my prim breasts the same way most "clothing" in SL works. Aside from attachments, people in SL walk around like those models with body paint designed to look like clothing.

Unfortunately for SL, clothing doesn't work that way. Real clothing is a separate object from one's body, and it assumes the position of least energy. In particular, it jumps over cleavage. Shirts and blouses look very, very wrong in SL—text on T-shirts is illegible and images on them distorted past recognition because they're just textures painted on the body.

Ironically, the only tops that look right in SL are those that are designed to work with prim breasts. That clothing layer can be made to take the shape that actual clothing would take. JIRA entry VWR-1080 asks that something be done about cleavage and clothing for the standard avatar, but it's languished since its proposal nearly three years ago, with no comments since June 2009.

For a long time, I've been rationalizing, because I was doing just what non-prim breast users in SL do. Now that I have prim breasts with a clothing layer, the increased verisimilitude is so much better:



I cannot thank the creators of prim breasts enough.

From a distance... a Caledon Smiley Face

If you've been in Second Life any time at all, you're familiar with the map, which gives you an aerial view of SL letting you pan and zoom. It makes it easy to find places where people (or bots... sigh) are, or that have geographical or geological features you might be interested in.

Some places are built to call attention to themselves for the map user. Most often I've seen buildings with labels or ads painted atop them. This morning, I finally noticed another approach taken in a place one might think of as staid and formal.

If you've yet to see the many lovely sims that comprise greater Caledon, I urge you to take a look. You might want to start at Caledon Victoria City. You'll arrive at a central telehub in a circular lawn surrounded by some of the many excellent stores that one can find in Caledon. One one side you'll find wagons laden with a sampling of quality freebies. You will want to take advantage of them as a thrifty and quick way to dress for the region.

Nothing struck me as unusual about the arrangement. It seemed purely utilitarian, until I took a look at the map:


Caledon Victoria City greets you on the map with a smiley face! (Come to think of it, the walkways are almost reminiscent of the old black and white TV test pattern...) Guess I'm slow on the uptake, Guv'nah...

Time for a change...

Seeing the elegant brush script on the masthead of Maggie's blog made me reconsider the handwriting font I'd chosen. I tried to find a clean, austere type face, and I like the result.

Return to Lemondrop's Forest

Maggie has such lovely photos up taken in Lemondrop's Forest that I had to visit. It's an amazing place, especially by night:


But it can be a place of wonder in the day as well, especially with a little help from Windlight...


Yes, I do like that dress a lot.

Yay Maggie!

I'm very happy that you're feeling better.

If you've not made Maggie Bluxome's acquaintance... she's a sweet, beautiful woman with impeccable fashion sense and a great talent for adapting prim breast tops to outfits (and taking wonderful pictures of the results). Take a look at her blog; you'll be glad you did.

New Emerald!

Inspired by Jan Hobson and Her Bad Review's Raccoon Song...

There's a new Emerald... YAY!
It doesn't fix shadows... yay...

UPDATE: For those of you who haven't had the pleasure:



Also, having heard the original, you should also check out "Raccoon Legs", a wonderful mashup of "The Raccoon Song" with the Art of Noise's "Legs".

Another reason not to use voice

A couple of times today I've been on and found that voice was enabled. Going over to a shell window and running "top" showed that SLVoice was eating all the CPU cycles on one processor core. I disabled voice... and SLVoice was still running. I exited the SL client... and SLVoice was still running, and now using up almost all the CPU cycles on both processor cores. kill -9, and away it went. Good riddance.

The SL client uses enough of my computer already.

Upstairs in a Chinese Room

Philosopher John Searle famously wrote against the notion of artificial intelligence describing an imaginary construction called the "Chinese Room", in which a man in the room receives cards with marks on them and, following a list of instructions, makes marks on other cards that he sends back. The marks happen to be grammatical Chinese, such that the Chinese speaker outside the room writing the cards that go into the room judges the sequence of incoming and outgoing cards to be a cogent conversation in Chinese.

Searle's claim, which I disagree with, is that the "Chinese Room" cannot be said to understand Chinese; like the magician, he misdirects your attention to the fellow in the room who is just following the instructions. You're supposed to think of him as a doofus who just reads the instructions and follows them.

The opinion I hold, the "systems reply", is that it's the room as a whole that understands Chinese. Searle's response: OK, let the guy in the room memorize the book of instructions. If he didn't understand Chinese before, he doesn't now... so how can the room as a whole understand Chinese?

While it may not have anything to do with the issue of AI, I would argue that anyone following those instructions will learn Chinese. Searle wants you to think of the instructions as having purely to do with the marks on the cards, but if the output cards are, by hypothesis, judged to be a sensible conversation in Chinese, they can't be just that. If the incoming card says in Chinese "Who won the Super Bowl in 2010?" the instruction book has to say at some point to go find that out; to do otherwise will tip off the Chinese speaker outside. There aren't enough sources of just the information one wants to be able to always get by with "go look at this table on this Chinese language web site and fill in the ideographs you see in the second column of the row that has '2010' in the first column," the kind of ignorance-preserving instructions that Searle wants you to imagine. With enough conversation going on, eventually the harried follower of instructions will realize what the marks mean, and the technical term for that is "learning written Chinese".

Why am I telling you all this? Because it occurred to me, while at some random place looking something up on what even the label "smart phone" is becoming laughably inadequate for, that eventually we're all going to be Chinese rooms, and if I'm right, we're going to learn quite a bit. I look forward to it.

UPDATE: About that title: here you go. (I'll not embed the "video", as the page has links to other songs you will want to hear.) If you're unfamiliar with the amazing music of Laura Nyro, you have a lot of good listening ahead of you.

The column vanishes...

OK, this is weird.

After restoring files, I went to look at the blog... and found that the right hand column had gone missing, aside from the Free Software Foundation link.

I tried creating a new user on my system that would have a freshly-created profile. Same thing. I upgraded to Firefox 3.6. Same thing. I tried a different computer. Ditto. I tried Opera. No change.

The only way I can see my blog in its entirety today is to use Chromium (the Linux version of Google's Chrome browser).

Time to go seek out help from Blogger.

UPDATE: It's something about the FSF link I had in that column--the referenced Javascript file has to have changed somehow. I've let them know about it, and for now, it's gone.

There is, though, a bright side to everything--it motivated me to back up my Firefox profile and restore just the important pieces of it. Now it renders the middle column nice and wide, as Chromium and Opera do.

OK, here goes nothing...

Backing up and doing a clean install of Karmic Koala. That's where my evening is going, but maybe it will clear up the weirdness with SL... and if not, at least I will have moved to ext4. (w00t!)

Dark Whimsy Sunrise

I've been bad.

I had pictures taken of Whimsy in winter, and lots of time to put them up... and I didn't. Part of it was procrastination; I hear that there are classes in how not to procrastinate, and someday I'll take them. Part of it is that this year there's been plenty of RL snow.

So, I was wandering about the now snow-free Whimsy, playing with Windlight, and I found a setting that made it look as if Sweetie had decided to experiment with removing most of the atmosphere over Whimsy. It made for a striking sunrise, and I had to take a picture.

Tell it to the...

Looking at the various announcements of new fashion releases I came across one store on Paris Island. I went there, and it was a lovely store, beautifully landscaped, but something didn't seem right...

...until I googled. The Marine Corps Recruit Depot is on Parris Island, with two "r"s. Never mind.

Avatars United

I signed up for it a while back, and it became another one of umpteen social web sites that I don't keep up with... but now, LL has bought them, and activity there has spiked with that imprimatur.

I hope that they make some improvements--how about a search feature for groups? Also, I hope they don't expect me to use their blog feature. Too many people have already gone to "real life" blog facilities like Blogger and established blogs that have reputations, links, and familiarity. I fear I've been remiss in keeping this blog fed with new material, not to mention Pectoral Virtual Fashion--no way can I do justice to yet another blog.

UPDATE: I was mistaken. There's one search that will find avatars or groups.

How did you start using Ubuntu?

Just Me, Anna has posted about a competition for International Women's Day in which women's essays on how they started using Ubuntu will be posted and votes gathered to determine a prize winner. Also, Jono Bacon will be picking one at random to also receive a prize.

I should say prize package rather than just prize, as they will include a variety of neat Ubuntu and Open Source-related items.

There's also a post on it at the Linuxers blog; do take a look. Even if you also go to Just Me, Anna, the Linuxers article is worth a look for the elegant Ubuntu Women logo and the other articles.

Wear Red Day

Finally, I'm ahead of the game, and not posting about an event after it happens.

I hope that you'll join in National Wear Red Day on February 5th, even if your first life nation isn't the US. I look forward to a day when we think of heart disease, and someday disease in general, the way we think nowadays about smallpox or polio--oh yeah, people got that a long time ago, didn't they? For now, though, heart disease is the number one killer of women. Please help with the fight against it.

Keep "Tips for Linux" and "All Things Linux" Alive

Amidst the various links to blogs from this blog is one to the blog of helios, a blog by a fellow whose passion to bring Open Source computing to disadvantaged youth in central Texas is an inspiration.

I hope you'll make a point of reading the entry "A Monument to Bruno", and consider helping to keep Bruno's simple but effective web site "Tips for Linux" and the "All Things Linux" forum on the air. (And supporting Helios's work, too.)