opensim git mirror might soon get a new home

Appears my post on the dev list did find some fans of git - and Sean suggested we might have it on opensimulator.org.

Needless to say I'm quite excited about this. We did have a lot of discussions about dSCM a while ago, and Mercurial is another very viable alternative - I guess I got "stuck" to git because of the "first love" syndrome - and then mainly used the reviews to strengthen my highly biased point of view :)

I guess for the windows folks with the more pointy-clicky reflexes the git must be a pain in the neck. Although, I did find something which allows to run git on windows - since I am not really much of a windows guy, I do not have any practical experience beyond installing it and getting amazed that I get the whole unixy environment in just around 20 megs of download.

If you have any experience with dSCM usage in the crossplatform environment, that'd be interesting to know...

my current stance is that we should have probably both:
CVS->git, CVS->hg; and then the contributions can be easily pulled back into CVS, and picked up by the respective SCM's merges. (hopefully :)

Again, any practical experience in this area would be very interesting to know about - as mine is limited to merging my own small hacks - which are by definition quite small.

IBM Launches the 3D Data Center in OpenSim!

While the world is full of news of someone doing something somewhere, this one stands out for me - because the "somewhere" is opensim! It is extremely pleasing to see the opensim being used by "srs busns" :-)

Virtual World News has a longer description of this, so go take a look.

[flashmob] Now everyone please go and vote for "in-viewer web browser

Lillie was kind enough to point out in one of the comments in my previous post about the in-client browsing, that there is a JIRA request for it. Go vote if you want it :)

(NB: this has nothing to do with the inworld collaborative browsing, just to have a browser widget window within the SL viewer)

Browsing in-world: a step by step tutorial with no hacks at all

Lillie Yifu writes about the search window capable of displaying arbitrary URL, and suggests that there should be a hack to make an in-world browsing...

Well, it's there since a few months, actually :) and simpler than anyone thinks.

Here's a step by step tutorial on how to get an "in-client browsing":

Step 1: click on your avatar, select "Profile":



Step 2: click the "web" tab:



Step 3: enter the URL you want to browse to, into the URL field:



Step 4: browse as usual:




DO NOT FORGET to put back the "about:blank" afterwards or whatever URL you want to be shown by default - unless you want to tell the world what you were browsing.

Simple, no ? :)

On the topic of adfarms...

LL reacts to the ad pharm problem. Let's take a step back.

Ever wondered why is there so much spam in your mailbox ?

Especially why the stupid things like "Hello, I am [insert name here], the manager of the bank [insert some country], and we have 10 million and I would like to give you 30% for getting the money out" are still there ?

This is the answer - one of the comments on the above SL blog:

"Darn! Wish this was in place before buying ‘ad farm’ parcels at riduculous prices to keep our mainland communty clean."

You only have terrorists while you allow yourself to be terrorized, my friends.

There will be other loopholes out there. You will demand the government to fix them. You will get more rules and regulations, and then in the end whine about the oppressive governments...

Oh well. Up to you, SL residents. We'll see.

(P.s.: this is a much more sensible approach to the problem).

Dear content creators...please help...

EDITED: Thinking about this occasion - maybe it is all not all that bad and I should make a brand "Dalien Talbot" - and use it to help promote smaller enterpreneurs ? What do you think? A lot of small enterprises working together might make a big difference... please drop a note in the comments.


...please ensure you read the documentation (and if there is not one, means that someone has tried to mod the primskirtbuilder and did not do it properly - get the proper copy at the SLUrl on this blog.

Ok, now a longer version. I've got contacted by a SL fashion site for the wonderful clothes I built and for the permission to feature a line of clothes that I made.

So, to write it up once again - I do not make clothes :-)

The primskirtbuilder has in it the prim - which obviously had to be created by me, and which for commercial uses *should* be replaced by yours - otherwise all the skirts will appear as if they were done by yours truly, heheh ;)

Note that there was absolutely no evil intent in doing this - it was simply impossible to get something "working out of the box" otherwise.

Not that I mind the fame and all, but I feel sorry that someone who put a work into creation of a nice stuff, would not get a credit for it.

As such, I'm looking for the designer of the below shown item "reika-sweet". I googled on the name a bit and think that the avatar's person is located in Japan - but maybe this is just a coincidence.

Please locate yourself if you want your name to be featured in the fashion site :-) - I've already sent the mail that it's not my creation, but would be awesome to find the real author :)

Here's the photo of "not my" creation :-)

DHT regionmodule test - bamboo-dht

This is how it looks for now:

~/tmp $ python get-opensim.py "OpenSim Test"
c3c06f80-474f-40b2-a1e4-1d194fa17a51
~/tmp $ python get-opensim.py "c3c06f80-474f-40b2-a1e4-1d194fa17a51"
simulator
127.0.0.1:9000
1000,1000
OpenSim Test
~/tmp $ python get-opensim.py "gridcoord:1000,1000"
c3c06f80-474f-40b2-a1e4-1d194fa17a51
~/tmp $ 

(update: reverted to store test url for now. This needs to be thought out more to avoid the easy DoS...)

The registration is done only once, with short TTL, so it dies rather fast.

Another issue, of course, is the "authenticity" - all these values should be signed, since bamboo allows multiple independent puts under the same key (one can imagine potential mess that can happen)

I think eventually the best thing is just to store the external URL for all three - and to have all the signed info stored at that URL (backreferencing the key, name, and coordinates as part of the region information). This way the "registration" with a grid would be a one-time event - that is, supplying the public key of the region to the grid.

The DHT can then serve minimal info, and most of the things would be pushed to the region itself, offloading the grid server.

Of course, eventually we'll need more than two servers for the DHT (I noticed that the opendht seems a bit iffy - some servers are not up) - ideally one server per sim - to spread the load.

If you feel like it and have some space/cpu/bandwidth to waste, create a new user "opendht", go to /home/opendht, grab and untar the file http://opensim.be/bamboo-opensim.tgz - and start "bamboo/planetlab/run-it" (it's a tweaked startup script from planetlab.

If we have a decent number of DHT servers, we might increase the minimum replica count (which is now set to 2, which is ridiculously low from redundancy perspective) - and see how it survives the "death" of some server, and how does the performance look like.

Opensim: attachments & (unofficial!) git repo

Yesterday I've committed my initial prototype code for attachments, after some hesitation and the discussion with the other folks - even though it is quite ugly, the ugliness was considered low enough for it to be pushed to the trunk.

So - enjoy attachments. Just keep in mind that it barely-works now :) The best you can do is put the cube on the head and run around. (Note, that to take it off, you will have to logout - I did not implement the "Detach" yet). Also - you can only wear the objects from world, not from inventory.

Another new thing I've done is the totally unofficial git repo for the opensim - mainly for my own convenience, but if anyone is interested to use it - feel free.

There are two repositories:

• http://opensim.be/git/opensim-svn.git/ - the "pristine" mirror of the SVN official trunk. Immutable.
  
• http://opensim.be/git/opensim-dt.git/ - "DT-tweaks-in-progress" - the above (the 'master' branch still mirrors SVN), but also contains a few other branches of varying degree of uselessness
  

Of note in "DT tweaks in progress" repository is the "dht" branch - I'll be playing with opendht/bamboo-dht for the purposes of sim status publishing (and maybe push some more stuff into dht). Currently there's a regionmodule called "DhtBambooModule" which does just that - registers to bamboo dht - the couple of instances that I run on my servers.

public landbot - cancelled

hmm appears the infamous public land bot got cancelled - reading the logs I can't help but point the immaturity of the developer, as well as the usual desire of the crowd to fingerpoint into someone until the wind starts blowing from the resulting hole.

On the other hand - the solution is very simple:

1) have LL install captcha to confirm that every land purchase is made by a human

2) have LL license the "automatic" access to the API for search/buy, making it additional source of revenue to them.


Instead of spitting poison on each other.Poor people...