Let's talk business....which business? ain't it free?

Ok, business they say... ok lets talk business :D

Yes, the primskirtbuilder is and will remain free. However, I think i managed to find a way to help you in distributing it and to share the tips - so you can get money by distributing free software. Interesting ? read on...

I've created a primskirtbuilder distribution kit, which you will get inside any copy of the primskirtbuilder now, and also as a separate box to the right of it at the plot in Mindulle.

You get:

• a landmark to plot in mindulle


• a wonderful texture made by Vint to put on the wall


• the panel with this texture


• README file


• Primskirtbuilder itself


• A copy of the primskirtbuilder distribution kit


• My tip jar, which will give you 50% of the tips as a distributor, and will give the other 50% to me to pay for the beers :)

The the tip jar had to be made closed-source, to prevent any altering of it - (it does have to request the debit permission from you!), so check very carefully that the script is made by me, and that the tip jar has the same look as on the original distribution area. You can get anyway the full source of the script in the README notecard to check what it does. If you do not trust me - then delete the tip jar! :)

The kit itself is no-mod too, just to prevent the temptation of adding the stuff to it :).

What do I expect from this ?

1. increased distribution of the primskirtbuilder since it creates a financial incentive (variable and irregular, I do admit - but these are the rules) for people to distribute an open-source free product.


2. maybe, some more lindens for me as a result of this activity. I am curious if it becomes anything significant (and if it becomes anything at all :)

have fun!

Is popularity a good thing ?

Today one of my old SL friends, Dinova Yanyean, who saw the primskirtbuilder some time ago, and has been always telling me I should market it (which I hate to do, since it is a boring activity for me), decided to help me out with this, and notified a folks in a few groups about it.

The effect was incredible :) Well, see yourself.



Tons of people arriving, trying the stuff out, chatting - so, having a lot of fun.



After a while the wave started to decline, when I got an IM from Jerry Martin, whom I invited to the area to continue the discussion. In a nutshell the proposal is that I should close-source the primskirtbuilder and start selling it at L$2000. While the idea is interesting, it does not go very well with my principles, so the primskirtbuilder will remain free and GPL-licensed. (this does prohibit the close-sourcing of the derivatives of it and blunt reselling of them too, btw).

I will enclose the discussion for your information - according to what I know, the pasting of the public chat does not classify as going against ToS, so I presume it is OK.

I will enclose the start of the discussion for your information.

---

[17:55] You: hi Jerry
[17:55] Jerry Martin: hi there
[17:56] Dinova Yanyean: hey fashion officer
[17:56] Jerry Martin: pleasure you meet you all
[17:56] You: indeed.
[17:56] You: so wanna give it a whirl ?
[17:56] Jerry Martin: sure
[17:56] You: grab a copy and rez it on the floor
[17:57] Jerry Martin: holy cow , lock that thing up and put it in a vendor , charge 2000L for it
[17:57] Dinova Yanyean: looll
[17:57] Jerry Martin: not kidding
[17:57] Dinova Yanyean: i told him too
[17:57] Dinova Yanyean: lol
[17:57] Dinova Yanyean: but its now free
[17:57] Dinova Yanyean: and copiable
[17:58] You: well, its been free for a few months
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: lol
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: please test it i want to see what you think about it
[17:58] You: that's one of the reasons opensource is good..
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: its command free
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: a really new idea
[17:58] Jerry Martin: Dinova , i'm the original inventor of the PrecisionWear Dress Maker , it's been around for a year and a hlf
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: ohh ups
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: lol
[17:59] Dinova Yanyean: i didn't know
[17:59] Jerry Martin: it's currently in the patent pending stage
[17:59] You: i did not know about precisionwear either - i just saw a looprez freeb script and wanted to improve the user experience :)

---

Since Vint was quite an integral part of the creation of the primskirtbuilder (I did create it for her, as it quite obviously says in the script :), I did invite her - so the remaining part of the chat is to be continued on her blog.

Apparently, Ged Larsen (the creator of the LoopRez, from free version of which I did borrow the base logic - even though it was modified - Thanks Ged, btw! While the formulae are not difficult, rewriting them from scratch would have been very boring) did receive even some patent claims about the same matter.

What I have said to Mr. Martin, and what I will repeat here - I would like to continue as before (especially since now that the primskirtbuilder has been out there for some time and I can not control the distribution of the full-mod object - and especially since the only time I did hear about the prim skirt building was Ged Larsen's LoopRez script that I got from Vint). And while the conversation was interesting and entertaining, this is my decision.

Today I saw myself quite a few happy people - even those that did not have L$2000 probably. And this is something I am not willing to lose.

So - feel free to grab a copy and tell your friends :-)

p.s. I do have a couple of interesting ideas for all the users of the primskirtbuilder, should post them sometime within a month (if the RL does not interfere) - so check the news every now and then...

UPDATE: I did get a reply from Ged Larsen, where he mentioned that although my free script did pretty much kill the interested for him in pursuing a new version, but that I am all right to use the script that he has released into public domain.

So - thanks a lot to Ged! And folks - Ged does make other stuff, so go and check out his blog at http://slged.blogspot.com/. He has a very nice LinkRez generator which will help you save some time if you are building the necklaces.

Financial regulations in SL - good, bad, or inevitable ?

With the unfolding of the WSE-gate, and the Ginko fighting bank run (presumably the second is caused by the rough moves of the LL to smash down the casinos in SL), it is interesting how the future would develop.

Financial institutions are to a huge extent based on trust in the good will of the establishment - none of the real world banks holds the cash reserves equal to 100% of the deposits - otherwise they would simply have no instrument to work with to pay the interest. So, the situation with Ginko is just a typical consumer rush - reading the interview with Nicholas Portocarrero, he seems to be a reasonable person, so hopefully this is a temporary - assuming that the latest news do not shake the economy hard enough to eliminate the high-return opportunities.

But the WSE story does set quite a few interesting examples and questions.. Will the investors just eat the pill and continue as is, or will they form any kind of controlling entity ?

IRL the financial establishments are regulated by the government, does this mean we need to re-run the SLelections with real voting, and all the boring stuff that comes with it ?

SL has been always touted as "a new society", and what I am observing is that the humans behind the screens drive it more and more to be just a replica of what we have already in the first life. So, then, what's the point ? I do think that the interface in firstlife is still way better than in secondlife, and is free to join :)

I've been thinking about this and more and more come to a conclusion that the only way to achieve anything cardinally different is to apply cardinally different rules to build it.

Here goes my pick, just for a mental experiment :-)

1. The privacy is eliminated. Anyone has the right to know anything about anyone, and the target should be made aware of the activity of obtaining such a knowledge. No animal is more equal than the other.


2. The ground rule would be "do not do to others that you would not like to be done to you".


3. A dispute is resolved by a random selection of N members of the society, in a sufficient quantity to avoid the possibility of bribing/biased opinion - who judge the action based on the previous rule, by applying it to themselves.


4. The only measure of punishment is a temporary of permanent full expulsion from the society.

While the first one does sound scary and orwellian - it is not. The scariness of the lack of privacy comes from the fact of the unequal lack of privacy, and of the imperfection of the ones that have more privacy than yourself. There is only one drawback in this system which I see - it would be vulnerable to privilege escalation by the ones "in the know" of the system of enforcement/informing - which obviously has to be fully automatic and distributed. This needs further thought. However, assuming the "cybergod" could have been made perfect, I think these rules would might form an interesting society. Best ? Probably not. Coherent ? I think so. Definitely more coherent than we have today - the rules will take care that only the "similar" will remain. And, since according to Bruce Schneier, the majority of the people are good - it should lead to the good society.

But until there is a platform to try those things out and experiment - we'll need to wait, and meanwhile we return to our regularly scheduled programming...

UPD: Nice coverage by Wrath here. The "last lottery" winner does make me think I was a bit too naive in the above post, and everything is a bit more fun :)

A very impressive Javascript IDE

Aptana - if you have to do anything with javascript, make sure you take a look at it. It does resemble the functionality of Eclipse with Java at the first look - at least when it comes to outlining capabilities.

Not sure what goes with respect to refactoring (did not try it much yet), but surely much more promising than /bin/vi :)

BlogHer'07 mixer party

Hmmm... I do admit to be terribly guilty. I did promise before to write when I play and I a little bit forgot... so I owe a huge *thanks* to Vint for mentioning that I do perform there.



It was a lot of fun, as usual. Classically, I did mess up a few times, otherwise it went great :-) I was using a couple of Shure mics without any effects whatsoever - since my normal "streaming laptop" is not around at the moment. Apparently it was usable (although I'd still like to find a free (as in GPL) solution for effects before the streaming. Oddcast is great, but no effects.. any suggestions ?).

Besides yours truly, there were Grace McDunnough and Montian Gilruth, both with very impressive sets, which were complemented by a presence of the dances, and the possibility to use them too :)

Thanks to everyone who dropped by despite of my "secrecy". To a little bit rehabilitate, I will do another gig sometime soon, which will definitely be announced on this blog beforehand. Will be one of the weekends in the evening CET time - singing at 1am today might have been bit challenging for the neighbours :)

Just out of geeky pelasure, I did login a second SL client, and made an "in-world TV broadcast" into a location where I have the vnc2sl demo. Apparently it seems to have worked, indeed with the imperfection of one frame per minute, I think I need to work on the frame rate ;)

Couple more impressive photo tools

Not so much SL (again!), but may be useful in the future..

greycstoration - image enhancement and more. (check out the examples!)

autotrace - convert a bitmap into a vector graphics.

Non-vertical verticals

or, fixing the perspective.

All the time I was happily looking at the photos, totally unaware about the perspective, until Vint did convince me it does exist :-)

Today while surfing I have found this little gem, which caused this post to appear.

To illustrate what it does, I took a photo by Pathfinder Linden, "Immersive Archeology":



And this is how the picture looks like, after being *automatically* adjusted by the program:




Well, indeed in this case the tops of the columns on the front plane do look a bit unnatural, but still it looks quite cool, I think :-)

p.s. Kudos to the author, despite of being windows-only, the program runs just fine on linux under wine

There's no such thing as bad publicity

Seeing the article from Torley about the Time being unhappy, I could not help but google a bit :)

The first article dates as long ago as 2003, where they just mentioned it without much details.

The following article end of last year did publish a heartbreaking story of a guy trying out the virtual world (btw - was this violation of ToS in that article ever pursued by Linden :) ?)

But the best part is indeed is the so-called review. The biggest laugh I had when they did call secondlife a website. Hey, folks at Time - could someone enlighten the authors (anonymous authors ?) of this review, please, on what exactly constitutes a website, and what exactly constitutes secondlife ? They're making your venue look quite amusing.

Oh, well, I think I will summarize the quality of the review just by referencing to their own words (since their pages do mention that reproduction of whole or in part is prohibited, dare I provide the direct links - or I need to go through the top of the site with all the zillions of ads on there ?) - go here and search for the word "congratulations".

Maybe spending those $5 would have made the things look different, eh ? Who knows...

VNC2SL technology preview

Finally I got myself to get it to the state which might be good enough to show it.
What is it ? In short: A very way to export your desktop in-world for others to see.
Practically, for example this means presentations could be done just by exporting the desktop - no textures to upload.

On the picture: Dalien looking at Dalien looking at the Google video about secondlife.
(I must admit it was a bit of a trick, but I think having two nested worlds was more fun).
What's best - you can give this a shot *right now* and tell here in comments what do you think - and maybe would be interested in such a service for your SL business.

So, to try it out:

1. go to http://www.tightvnc.com/ and download the VNC server (for windows, that would be here).


2. Install the VNC server. It will ask you to pick the password - please do it, and use different than everything else and not very easy. (although we would not need it and will disable incoming connections subsequently)


3. start the VNC Server (NB: the important part is that you start the server on the PC from which you export the desktop - we will use it in reverse-connect mode). For the windows this will bring up a white icon with waves and a letter "V" in the right corner of the screen.


4. Right-click on that icon, and select "Properties". Uncheck the "Accept socket connections" - so that your computer would not be accessible for the incoming connections. (Note: this IS important). Hit "OK"


5. Start the Secondlife on the other PC (and go to the primskirtbuilder plot, the screen is for now located to the right of it). Check that there is noone fiddling around - and if yes, wait till they finish.


6. Right-click on "V" icon again, and select: "Add new client", then enter the following (without the quotes) in the editor string: "petitbe.be::8900" (note the double colon).


7. After a while, you (and those in-world near to you) will see the contents of your desktop on the in-world screen


8. The refresh happens every 60 seconds, or you can click on the blue ball to force the update (note that due to VNC protocol, the "rich" pictures may transfer slowly and at times the resulting screen will not be completely redrawn yet.

Have fun!

UPD: hmm seems the fiddling with the media texture might make the client more susceptible to crashes... Although, maybe it is just my voice firstlook that is misbehaving...

You asked for it: lsl follow avatar script

I noticed there were a few hits on my blog with "lsl follow avatar" search terms on google. Assuming that the people are looking for a "pet" script, I thought it would be a good idea to put a reference to it - especially since it is actually on lslwiki here, search for "follow (script)" inside the page, the script is just below.

While looking for it, I found that I can kill the "lsl basic" topic - it is all too well described by a series of the articles in Dr.Dobbs journal article on using the linden scripting language. Quite a nice tutorial.