Streaming audio on 64-bit Linux with 32-bit client

OK. You know that I've been urging LL to come out with a 64-bit Linux build for their client/viewer. In the past, I've been able to run the 32-bit client, but streaming media have not worked, and that precludes some of the wonderful things one can do in Second Life.

Today I had the good fortune to talk with Susyn Stenvaag, a wonderful lady--and she mentioned that she had LL's client working, with streaming audio, on 64-bit Ubuntu Linux. She pointed me at a thread in the Second Life forums, "Getting Second Life to run on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64 bit". There you will find the following instructions, which she also gave me, namely to run the following commands from a terminal window:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch
sudo apt-get install i386 lib32gcc1
sudo apt-get install libc6-i386

If you have the urge, you can do just one command, namely

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch i386 lib32gcc1 libc6-i386

In any case, you will have to have sudo capabilities and enter your password when asked for it at the first (and only, if you choose to do it all at once) command. It will download and install a bunch of files...

...and then you can run the 32-bit client and hear streaming audio!

I would go add a comment to the JIRA entry that asks for a 64-bit client, but it doesn't provide me that option.

In any case, many thanks to ever-gracious Susyn, and to Mark Lock, who posted the commands in the SL forum thread. If. for whatever reason, you prefer to run LL's client rather than a third-party SL viewer, you can now do so on 64-bit Linux without cutting yourself off from the world of SL music.

Busted 3rd Anniversary Issue

Remember how I would periodically write about the new Busted being out, and that it was, despite my thinking it impossible, better than before? Well... my not having written that for a while doesn't mean it hasn't continued to be the case, and the new third anniversary issue takes my breath away.

Amazing photography. Fine articles. It's all there. Go read it.

Hello again, hello...

I've been away, figuratively, rediscovering the joy of programming (and new skills, which are particularly important for a programmer, though I think that's becoming more generally true; the days of spending one's life at one company doing one job are long gone, save, alas, maybe in the government). Having taken that plunge, I think I can proceed with a little less obsession and a little more time for other things, including Second Life. It will be good to be back.

As smart phones improve...

...surely it will become reasonable (from a technical point of view) to port Second Life to them.

Check this out: "The ZTE Apache could beat Samsung's Galaxy S4 to the title of first eight-core smartphone, according to a report. According to China Times, ZTE is collaborating with MediaTek to release a flagship, octo-core device." Specs for the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 are leaking; supposedly it will have three gigabytes of RAM to go with its eight-core processor.

Combine that with the move to [icky portmanteau word alert!] "phablets", smartphones with displays of sizes approaching those of (small) tablets, and you have a device that one would think could run Second Life, if the effort is put into porting it.

I wonder whether anyone will try?

Above or below ground, for a while at least...

In the past I've mentioned that nowadays with alpha-based shoes I seem to hover above the ground or floor--and people have helpfully pointed me at the "avatar offset" knob that many third-party viewers provide to correct that and other similar issues, especially for tiny/giant avatars.

Nalates Urriah writes about how SSA (server-side avatar baking) will stop that from working. The new Firestorm doesn't have that knob--because it won't work on sims with server-side baking.

If these issues concern you, please do read Ms. Urriah's blog post, follow the JIRA entries she mentions, and, if you have the time, attend the Server Beta Meeting she mentions.

Keep DRM out of HTML

W3C, the group that develops web standards, has a plan for "Encrypted Media Extensions" that I hope you will join me in opposing. Please sign the petition in opposition to EME at the Defective by Design web site.

For more information, read the Free Culture Foundation's blog post "Don't let the myths fool you: the W3C's plan for DRM in HTML5 is a betrayal to all Web users."

Dipping a toe into Cloud Party

I finally spent a few minutes in Cloud Party yesterday. They moved away from requiring a Facebook login to create a Cloud Party identity, so now, thanks to Google+'s more enlightened policy, there's Melissa Yeuxdoux on Cloud Party. (Now, if Cloud Party would stop nudging me about Facebook each time I sign on...)

I went through the tutorials--zoom back from the wall they ask you to build, to avoid hassle when you extend it one dimension or another--and there I was. (Now, how to delete the wall I built?)

I spent a little time tweaking my avatar--and have downloaded the Avatar Construction Kit. What a difference from Second Life!

Using Second Life height-related sliders is like trying to fly a helicopter. There are multiple controls that interact in perverse ways. Lengthen one part of your body and other parts shrink.

Cloud Party isn't like that. I wouldn't have thought  that the simple act of lengthening my neck and seeing that the sole result was that my neck got longer would give me such a feeling of... OK, I have to use a word that I have come to despise... empowerment, but it did. I have to suspect that one of the design goals for Second Life shape sliders was being difficult to use!

The Avatar Construction Kit requires familiarity with a 3D program like Blender, so it's going to take some time, a resource I don't seem to have much of these days, but eventually, I'll get there.

Mont St. Michel

I saw a photo of Mont St. Michel and had to go take a look for myself... and it is indeed a lovely place. It's a Second Life build based on the actual Mont St. Michel, a 100 hectare rocky island just off the northwestern coast of France (this bit of geographical knowledge provided by Google a few minutes ago). I had to take a photo...

...and link to this, as Debussy may have been inspired in part by the church on the island.

  

UPDATE: ...and to this, as the inspiration is pretty clear for this meditative piece by Mike Oldfield.

Project Materials Viewer

There is an early release Project Materials viewer (i.e. one supporting normal and specular maps) for Second Life. It's not the official release, but something people can use to try the features out.

Normal mapping involves taking information from a high polygon count version of an object and then applying it to a low polygon count version, so that you have the appearance of detail without the overhead.

Specular mapping lets one make things shiny. Without it, the best one can do is to paint on textures that show how an object reflects light for a fixed arrangement of lighting. With it, objects with a specular map reflect the light or lights actually present (if one can say "actually present" about a virtual world!). One has to admire the efforts of SL builders to prepaint highlights on their work, but having them actually generated on the fly helps enormously with verisimilitude, as you can see if you head over to New World Notes for Iris Ophelia's article on the subject with accompanying video and images that I suspect will provoke salivation.

One must note that

• Existing items won't magically become shiny or more detailed; builders will have to create new things to take advantage of the new features.
• They don't apply to avatar skins, alas. (Someday, I hope...)

That said, I am very happy to see the progress being made. Thank you to everyone working on Project Materials, and to Ms. Ophelia for writing about it!

P.S. Normal mapping will make gratuitously high-polygon mesh items even less desirable, because one can achieve the look at a much lower overhead.

P.P.S. Aliasi Stonebender points out in the comments on the NWN post that while stock avatar skins won't (at least initially) be affected by normal and specular mapping, mesh avatars with normal and specular maps probably will be. I wonder whether this will affect the adoption of mesh avatars?

Even if you don't build...

..be an informed consumer. You'll be better off for it, and so will Second Life.

Read the "Topology - the often neglected entity" thread in the SL Mesh forum. It describes the process builders go through to make efficient meshes that work well with animations. Codewarrior Congrejo does an excellent job of explanation, with illustrative examples and images. Note especially this point: just having tons of polygons does not make a garment high quality--in particular, it doesn't mean that a garment will track well as your avatar bends or moves its limbs.

If you are into digital photography, you may have read about the "megapixel race" and how megapixels aren't the sole measure of quality of a camera. In the very same way, and also just as it doesn't make sense to always use high-resolution textures (you've read Penny Patton's article on how huge textures applied to tiny objects needlessly make frame rates plummet, I hope), polygon count isn't the sole measure of quality for a mesh. Over in the JIRA entry for the mesh deformer, people have expressed concern about the issue, vide this from a comment there by Jesseaitui Petion:

I'd like to respond to a comment made a few times here already, about designers making high poly content because they are "inexperienced". That's often not the case at all. Many designers are purposely manipulating their content to appeal to the "inexperienced" consumers. Consumers don't understand "high" and "low poly" in the way you and I might. Many consumers won't touch a low poly model with a 10 ft pole because it looks subpar to high poly models (I'm referring to the clothing market here). Consumers don't understand that these models may lag them. What we see as "unneccesarily high poly", they see as "this content came from a skilled and advanced designer." What we may see as "good modeling, low poly" they see as "jagged outdated content from a subpar designer." One makes you money, the other doesn't...ultimately the fashion crowd will create what sells. On the other hand, there definitely are people who've no idea what they are doing and subdivide the mesh over and over when no change in appearance even occurs. But just know that a lot of the top designers in sl are high polyin' it on purpose, knowing full well what they are doing.

Please, be an informed consumer. Ask sellers how well optimized their mesh products are. Ask reviewers to provide the information that will let you decide--including photos of the model not just in graceful runway poses, but also in poses that show how items work when the body parts they cover move or bend.

UPDATE: I asked over in the SL Mesh Forum how one can be an informed consumer, and Codewarrior Congrejo kindly responded, suggesting the following (I summarize):

• Wireframe (ctrl-alt-R toggles it) is your friend. Get demos if they're offered, wear them, and turn on wireframe. Then you can see whether an object is built efficiently.
• Performance tools show useful information.
• Develop > Show Info > Show Render Info (toggle) will show triangle count ("tris").
• Read reviews.
• Read store ads; some brag about their wares' high polygon counts.

Follow the link and read it straight from Codewarrior, who is a far better explainer than I am.

High FIdelity

....If you want to get the crowds to come around, you've gotta have glorious Technicolor, breathtaking Cinemascope and stereophonic sound. -- "Stereophonic Sound", from Silk Stockings

Hamlet has written about Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity project in NWN. It will involve, at least in part, a "next-generation virtual reality system" and may be based on voxel-based rendering (a voxel is a 3D pixel).

I hope it happens. The Second Life client has the new CHUI user interface changes (which enough people don't like that I've seen posts about turning off client upgrades so that they can avoid it), but the mesh deformer sits, completed, awaiting release. Normal/specular mapping are, Nalates Urriah reports, somehow both "arriv[ing] soon" and "still a ways off", sort of like Schrödinger's Cat. It makes me wonder how much effort is actually being put into improving Second Life (vide "Linden Lab Leaving Second Life Behind, Announces 'Patterns'" and "Linden Lab Strikes Again").

That said, any system ossifies with time. People don't like changes that break existing items that they spend L$ on, even if they are beneficial as a whole. (How many now-useless shoes with invisiprims do you have?)

I fear that serious improvements in virtual worlds will come from places other than Linden Lab, and outside of Second Life. I hope that either I'm wrong, or that High Fidelity will let us do what we do in Second Life, only more efficiently and more beautifully, so that we can continue to have, to borrow a phrase, an engine fit for our proceeding.

Big Texture in Little China

OK, actually it's a wooden cup, but it's the principle (and a chance to allude to a wonderful movie).

Penny Patton does the detective work to find out why a newly-rebuilt Milk & Cream had one spot where frame rates plummeted. Read about it, and her suggestions about how to motivate builders to avoid the problem, in her post "Why Second Life Fails".

Lolas store moves

I was reading the interesting and very long-lived thread "Where Did You Get Those Boobs?" on SLUniverse and noticed something that Lolas fans and those considering Lolas will want to know (and many thanks to Marianne Little for posting it): the Lolas shop has moved. It's now on Lolas/193/225/47, and with the sim actually named Lolas, I suspect that's a long-term move, and I will definitely go looking to see what else might be there. More news as it happens.

UPDATE: So far, there's just the Lolas store and some lovely surroundings, including some hills and a nice beach...not that there's anything wrong with having a well-designed store in a beautiful setting! Do take a look.

Tacky stuff for SL... does it already exist?

I was chatting with Milky Atlas this morning, and couldn't help thinking of some very silly stuff to let Second Life imitate, um, art:

• an SL "smartphone" with something looking like a lens and a light, with accompanying gesture so you can take fake mirror self-portraits. (The light's there because you may need a flash, after all...)
• A "duck face" animation.

Now, the question is, has someone already come out with these?

A group and blog for Tango fans

If you wish to follow the proliferation of Tango-only clothing, there's a Second Life group and associated blog that will be of interest to you: the Tango Clothing Group. Here's a link to the blog: Tango Clothing Group.

The Rebirth of the Cool

Finally. Today I had time to seriously clean my computer, paying special attention to heat sink fans and fins.

Results: wonderful! I spent a whole hour and a half in world with nary a beep. I heard a slight noise from the graphics card fan when I first powered up again that makes me worry a bit, but the noise seems to have gone away. (I'll ask the card maker about a replacement fan in any case.)

Now for a plea that I expect will do no good. (Like I expect motherboard, heat sink, CPU, and graphics card makers to read this blog...)

For heaven's sake, all you above-mentioned people, please hurry up and adopt the Sandia Cooler. It's

• ten times smaller than current coolers
• very quiet
• immune to dust fouling!

OK... I feel better now, both for having written that and having corrected the problem I was having. I'll be in-world more often now. I've missed you.

Something else to do for St. Patrick's Day

It's Saint Patrick's Day. In America, alas, it seems to be a day for stupid people to drink insane quantities of beer that's been dyed green. (In Chicago, the Chicago River is dyed green, but I once saw it on another day, and it was still green--just a different shade.) In a bizarre promotional campaign, Arby's is tying a bogo offer for its Reuben sandwich (whose invention is attributed either to a Lithuanian or a German) to Saint Patrick's Day. (?!)

This Saint Patrick's Day, though, you can do something a bit different. Trinity College Dublin has made the Book of Kells viewable at no cost in its entirety online. If you aren't familiar with the Book of Kells, suffice it to say that it's one of Ireland's, and the world's, art treasures, an amazing work of calligraphy and illumination. I'd include an image here, but trust me, you want to see it on the web site where Trinity College Library has made it available. Images I could put here wouldn't do it justice.

I will, though, share a wonderful song by the highly talented Susan McKeown. (Unlike a certain other song, this one actually is an Irish lullaby.)

The sad part

I fell for the begging scam, aka the "flatterbot", a few months ago. Alas, I was caught before I entered a store in which a very helpful person was pointing out what was going on, and I have to admit I should have noticed some things that didn't quite add up.

So... I lost a few L$, but now I see I've lost something else.

In today's email came this:

Hi there, my name's [redacted] and I stumbled upon your vida segunda blog one day recently... I like it, especially the pictures you've taken. I'd really love to get into second life, but I've always been afraid I'll get addicted to it! But your pictures and your accounts of your experiences make me want to jump in too, haha. So I just wanted to say hi and that I enjoy your blog, and... Maybe if I join SL one day, it would be nice to chat with you :) thanks for providing some inspiration, ~[redacted]

Now I can't help wondering--is this flatterbot v2.0?

UPDATE: Yes... that's the real loss. Being burned once poisons future possible interactions, and I fear that my having written about it has done just that, though it was not my intent. Darn it.

Hoping to be back soon

Events have conspired to keep me away from the grid in large part.

• Remember "The Melissa Yeuxdoux Chair of Second Life"? That unfortunate episode has replayed, save that I didn't have time to seek out alternatives, but instead wobbled atop a failing chair until I could get a replacement. It didn't give me much motivation to use my main computer.
• Lately my computer of choice for SL has, I think, developed heating issues. At first, landing in a new spot caused beeps that eventually went away after a while--perhaps after all the new textures and such from the new sim were loaded? Now, I arrive at Whimsy and in a few seconds the beeps start.

Now that I can sit at the computer desk without feeling at risk, I can open the case and do some serious cleaning and inspection. I hope that I will be back in SL soon. (I'm way overdue for a "price an inexpensive SL computer" article.)

Must-read from Whimsy's Closet

"Aphrodites vs. Vstrings vs. Tangos: the New Queens of Prim Breasts?" is a great article comparing (and contrasting, as my English teacher would say) the three breast attachments of the title. It's informative and thorough, and the nice part is that Ms. Melgund doesn't have a horse in that race; she supports them all and has no ax to grind, though at the end she does get up on the soapbox about the issues of adapting clothing to breast attachments. It's not trivial, she convincingly argues, UV map compatibility or no. Please do give it a look.