Script security in the distributed environment

I won't write yet again that "once you copied something, you lost the control" - so obviourly the source of the scripts has to stay on the original sim (home/inventory sim). Now, how about if we make this even more extremist and keep the whatever binary is there as well (byte code or such) on the home sim ?

This creates a couple of interesting interactions:

1) script creator <-> home sim owner = someone has to pay for the CPU and bandwidth taken by the script execution
2) script creator <-> script owner = now the replication is actually a *constraining* factor for the close-sourced scripts, which means that may be close-sourced scripts might need a "subscription" based model of business to compensate for the (1).
3) script creator <-> script owner's sim owner = possibility to allow to run the script in the non-native environment. What determines whether to allow this or not - an open question.

The coolness of this approach is that it would stimulate the creation of open code, to an extent - since the closed code will accumulate on the home sim and eventually render it almost unusable. But, given the enough backchannel funding from the users (on a service-based model) - this could actually cause a creation of a lot of "closed overlay trees" on top of the grid - and might be a good and interesting thing for the metaverse economy.

Running under electric fence

In one of the previous posts I was promising to give a whirl to ElectricFence. Despite of the flurry of posts (which, as you can correctly infer, means I did not do anything meaningful at a large scale :) - I still did something... Two things. First - inclusion of the reference code for UUID operations from RFC4122, and also the RFC itself into "docs". There's a bunch of the code that I currently do not use - but given that it's still much smaller than the 500-something kilobytes library that I've found otherwise (what, WHAT is there for 500 kilobytes ?:) I am happy with it.

The second thing indeed incorporating the electric fence as part of the build - so the whole thing is now exploding with various memory diag and safety tools :)

ElectricFence allowed indeed to uncover one stupid lapse in the autogenerated serialization/deserialization code.

My assumption about the char[X] members of various structures was that they would hold the strings. Now, there is a "Color" member, which is declared as char[4] :-) So, when this array was set to 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, and I called printf("%s", Color) - obviously the printf walked past the array - which was excellently caught by the efence, so now the _to_s routine just prints the hex values. I should fix it to be smarter and print a more friendly hex dump with characters.

Thinking more about the object updates sent to the clients - they should not be hard-tied to the object updates made by agents (hence exhibiting "received objectAdd - processed - sent objectUpdate to all" pattern) - but rather be "soft" and happen as a modification of the local objects queue (addition of elements to the tail of it) - this will allow to avoid any duplicate code to handle also the "external updates" (not by any of the agents, but rather by the processes), and gives much more headroom in the packet QoS/shaping field.

Human's brain is an amazing device

An entertaining talk on TED about viewing the brain in real time, and an extremely emotional post of Neuroanatomist sharing the experiences of the own brain stroke.

The list of human phobias

Ugh. Those humans really have a problem. as list suggests, they tend to fear everything and anything. Very entertaining. Is there a list of things they are *not* afraid of ?

The dark post of the week

Melissa posts about "griefers" causing the epileptic seisures in the users after they defaced the website, and ask "what kind of useful purpose do griefers serve" - well, i guess it's hard to give the yes/no answer... I won't comment on any specific occasions, but instead invite you onto a video journey into the darker sides of the human nature.

As a followup to my previous dive into the darker depths of the human interactions, here's another couple of interesting - albeit quite depressing - pieces. Consume with some antidepressant and fresh air :-) Don't view if you are in a stress or are upset. Some of the photos may be NSFW.

The original Milgram experiment:



And if you thought that it was in the dark old age when the humans were just much less self-aware - well, here's the newer results:



And the prof. Philip Zimbardo talking at Google - depending on your local policies, some of the photo there might be NSFW.



And the series of the videos about the original Stanford Prison experiment.

avatar shape locked opensim

Another search-bait post after looking at analytics reports :)

I've indeed seen the folks being a bit confused by the inability to edit their shape in OpenSim upon the first time login.

The problem is very easily fixable - create a new shape and wear it - then you will be able to edit it. Similar goes to all the other bodyparts and wearables - you need to wear the respective parts in order to change them.

LSL Plus: the Eclipse plugin for LSL

A while ago Tiessa wrote up about the programming environment for LSL.

I've found today a possibly nice addition: LSL Plus, which is an Eclipse plugin. Dubbed as an alpha state (and since I myself do not really use the Eclipse, I did not test it out :) But if you do - give it a shot and see how it works.

On the interesting side - it actually enhances the language with a few interesting features, and cross-compiles into the "canonical LSL" when publishing the scripts to SL.

wireshark secondlife filters

Ok, this is another search-bait post - the "wireshark secondlife filters" is another frequently used search string that lands on my blog...

Of course here I suppose the audience is talking about dissectors rather than filters (nb: filter is something that you use do show only some of the packets, while dissector is something that allows you to watch the logical structure of the packet instead of the hex bytes) - just that we get the terminology straight.

I found an article on how to do your own dissector and the article on the wireshark website about your own dissector, I've almost started doing this, but wanted to search a bit first.

Sure thing, the bicycle was already invented: there is already a dissector for SL.

Copy the files as instructed, and then find the UDP SL packets, and enter "Decode As..." and in the sea of protocols find the "slmsg".

For some reason the packets look as "malformed" to me (nothing beyond the message type decodes) - so I am not sure if it is the bug in the dissector or my wireshark playing tricks - drop your note about your experience with this dissector - if it does not work, the machine code generation from message template is not too difficult, I might as well implement my own version of bike :)

c-pluff: a smart C plugin framework

Here. With a MIT license, which is great. Looks very much interesting - the plugins can provide their own extension points, so one can build the "layered" functionality. From reading the docs it looks terribly interesting (although I dislike the XML, but well, it's a standard). I'll put this on the backburner and see if I can test it out one of these days with respect to the performance / etc. Or if you had any experience with it - leave a comment here.

Return codes or exceptions ?

As promised - no more pics or movies :) Rather, in preparation for your monday, yet another debate on the topic of return codes vs. exceptions. Somewhat like a vi vs. emacs or windows vs. linux :). Personally I am very biased towards vi, linux, and return codes, respectively - but the article (and the comments) gives a good thinking material nonetheless.

The last visual for today: the geekiest lolcat

see more crazy cat pics

And now that we're on the art/visual wave...

The commercial youtubes

If you are tired of watching the deltalina, and want something new, here's one. Refreshing.



Whatever the product is, kudos to the creator of this one :)

Update: the product is even umm... more interesting :-)))

Don't show this one to your kids...

... unless you want to get them stuck to the screen :)



This is so... fun and surreal :-)

You can read more and download the game (windows only, unfortunately..) here.

Again, don't show it to the kids who did not finish the homework - otherwise the homework will never be done I think :)

Walking over a large list. Slowly and safely.

In my timer code I've deliberately avoided having to deal with the problem of the possibility of the concurrent list traversal - since it is basically an array of lists, and each list I walk exactly in one shot (under the assumption that I would not have the 200000 timers to shooting at the same time) - so the problem does not exist.

However, it is more of a corner case than the rule - I'll need to walk potentially large lists of stuff (not 200K, but 64K quite easily) - and send their contents very slowly and carefully (a blast of 64K of the packets even on the fastest link is a guarantee that you clog the pipe somewhere inbetween and lose the packets - so the list will need to be walked slowly.

There are a couple of interesting articles around the subject - iterators on pine wiki, and continuations.

Continuations are basically a way to reimplement the threads (which I do not want), so I will probably just use the iterator functions, which will take the saved state as one of the parameters - and lock the list items as I hold on to them - to prevent the annoying bugs which come when the two pointers point to the same location, and one piece of code suddenly decides to free it. I've had this kind of bug this weekend - almost a day of a lot of fun to track down, since it is hard to consistently reproduce, and caused more or less random areas of memory to get smashed - depending on what was the sequence of events. Luckily at least I knew the new code that started all of this - but the presence of a second bug of a similar kind did not make the things better :-) That one got smashed with the help of valgrind. Although I also long wanted a chance to play with ElectricFence - so this weekend I'll probably give it a shot - I think I did not yet exhaust my bugs-per-KLOC ratio for the past weekend's code spurt :-)

libsecondlife callback twice

I've found that quite a decent amount of folks arrive on this blog with the search terms "libsecondlife callback twice" - I assume that in libsl there is a condition where the chat callback gets called twice during the chat...

I'll describe what I see on the network with the "classic" client and then you can go and debug the libsl, if it has a bug or not :-)

When the user starts to type, the viewer sends the packet "ChatFromViewer" with the type equal to 4 and empty message - this is a sign that the user has started typing, and I'd suppose that this also starts various typing animations and typing sounds.

When the user finishes typing the message, then this message is sent within the packet of the same kind, but with the type 1.

Afterwards, always, there is a packet with the type 5 - which, it seems, signifies the "end of the typing business" from this user - if I start typing and then backspace out the characters - then I get the type 5 packet.

What is interesting is that depending on the network (or on the client itself?) I've seen the type 5 arrive before type 1.
I do not yet properly deal with the resequencing of the packets and seen this only once - so do not know whether it is a bug on the client, in my code, or on the loopback interface (even though the second is the most probable).

Possibly the sim sends similar kinds of packets, and the libsl does not fully handle them (or does not handle the out-of-order scenario - which obviously might be symmetric. I'd suggest to do the packet debugging on the libsl with the slproxy and capture which packets trigger the condition - then you might be closer to finding the cause of the problem.

If there are "genuine" duplicates - well, that might be a problem... Of course, one can keep a queue of the "recently seen packets" and throw away the repetitions, but then you will not be able to handle some corner cases (a user very frequently typing the same stuff - could be needed for whatever odd scenario).


That's what I have to say about this topic - maybe you find it useful, maybe not - but without a better problem description it's hard to say - so feel free to write up something in the comments on whether I guessed the problem correctly, and if you find some solution in libsl for it :) good luck!

How does your first cube feel ?

To me - it feels awesome :-) Even though it only exists in the viewer only - because this is just the dummy packet sent to the viewer, and even though it is fully gray... But it's the first one :-)



(Also, note that the nameplate above the avatar includes "| example.com" - that's my take on how it should look. "Firstname Lastname | home_sim_domain" - and this automagically solves the problem of the name duplication... well, sort of - at least on the visual side :-)

How to fix the problem of "free accounts"

...says the free account himself :-) (and after all, I wonder if there is really a problem or such...)

Anyway. Rather than using "payment info on file", introduce a status "beginner" and "full". Quite simply - paying L$1000 or such achieves the "full" status.

If there are no-build., etc. restrictions based on this status - then the folks would be interested to get it.

And since there is no requirement to pull in the real bucks - this could be a good motivation for some to do some more activities inworld...

Trademarks, trademarks...

Ok, I supposed they don't want me to go back and reedit all the posts... The header I've fixed. "A virtual world" looks even nicer, FWIW.

What I call a productive weekend...

It's been a long weekend, and I also took the tuesday off.

I think I like the results:

Date:Sun Mar 23 03:10:08 CET 2008
3261 total

Date:Wed Mar 26 00:22:59 CET 2008
4674 total

4674 lines of C code, headers and comments, that is :-)
So, net 500 lines a day. Well, actually more - as I spent a good 1.5 days debugging a couple of memory corruptions - one caused by a bug in the newly done timer library, the other because the image download code was trying to expand the buffer by a negative amount (not a good idea.) :-)

What it can do so far - not much at all - in a half-prototype way:

- connect :)
- tell the client that the moon, sun and cloud textures are not found (although it persists). If I try to send those, then the client crashes - maybe I need to try a newer version as well.
- move the sun and moon around. This was the easiest one and I shamelessly borrowed the code from the respective module in OpenSim (as well as much of the other code).
- get the dead L$1000 of balance.
- chat with yourself - and you can see yourself chatting in the SL viewer.
- upload a picture - via the caps mechanism. Very simple :)

Now a few days of break to have some "RL work", and then back to the fun :-)

Beware of armchair critics...

dandellion posts the rebuttal to the armchair architecture rant about the upcoming changes to decentralize the asset server infra.

I won't comment on the validity of the rant - as I do not know the details of how the internals are done, I do not know whether it is true or false. However, if the content (the stuff that is present only on that sim) is brought closer to the sim itself, it can only benefit the things. Why ?

Because the sim needs to deliver the content to those connected anyway. (that is, until there is a usage of caps for it - which seems to be underway) - so the traffic anyway will pass through the sim server. So, moving the content closer to it can only improve the things. Ok, maybe it will add some load on the sim itself (uhm - it needs to read the files!), but then let's look at the way the sims are used currently:

There's an interesting sentence about updating 3 racks of servers, approximately 500 regions, which led me to do some math...

The biggest rack that I know of, is around 44U. "U" is a standard rack unit.

Assuming a simplistic 1U servers, this means approximately that one server currently hosts around 4 regions. (44*3 = 132, which when multiplied by 4 gives 528 - which is close enough to 500 regions).

So, moving one region off the server, and putting an asset server "piece" on it would give a huge net win in performance.

Of course, you do not have to put the asset server piece on *every* server - so one can quite easily get just a net performance improvement, despite of what the critics say :-)

Of course, the 1U servers is a bit of an assumption - there are bladeservers that should allow a better density - I'd be interested to see some samples, as I am a bit lazy to search now.

The magic of a timer wheel

I was looking for a decent C library, which would implement a simple timer callback functionality - i.e. I want to start a callback in 100 milliseconds from now... Apparently even allmighty glib does not have anything like this... I guess this is mostly because it goes with the threading model.

I might be biased - but my experience with the threads has been that they are much harder to debug than the code with "explicit multitasking" (i.e. the non-blocking IO loop) - I'll see if I am wrong with this assumption, but so far it was the case.

So, I went ahead and written a simple implementation of the timer wheel in its simplest form - just having an array of the next ticks, and list of timers to fire within that tick.

As I'm not doing all this in kernel space, I can take a reasonably wasteful size of the wheel - I took it to be 10000, which at a 100 ticks per second gives reasonable precision and reasonable maximum time - 100 seconds.

Since using the timer structures as pointers in memory is prone to the same errors as double-free (except that the double-stop is something that is definitely more possible), I've taken a decision to avoid using the pointers as much as I can - and using a growable array instead. And to combat a bit the reusal of the stale timers, I've taken an approach of having a "generation number" assigned to the timer - so it takes 256 reuses of the same timer index before the erroneous operation for the error to get unnoticed.

The result - on an Intel Core Duo 1.8 Ghz - I get around 10% CPU being used during the execution of the test with 200000 timers firing in at the same time. I think this can be optimized a bit, but for now I am pretty happy with the result - I will try to not need so many timers :)

The overhead (besides the static 40K of the timer wheel structure), is around 96 bytes per timer.

By far not very economical, but has the features I need - and the code is only 400 lines, including the volumious comments.

A story of Lovebot and Hoebot

Now this is a hell of a funny story - some folks made web-bots, one of them was hooking up the guys and gals who had their profiles marked as "single" :-)

Another one was poking people around. Amusing part is "Hoebot got a couple hundred reactions of „real“ hot chicks inviting him to partys" (also amusing part that the girls were reacting negatively to the Lovebot, and the guys apparently did not mind the "service" :-)

Of course, laughs aside, this is quite a bit lame of a joke (especially the part where they put the names of the 'couples' made by the lovebot) - but I still could not resist to post it here.

This teaches a valuable lesson about the privacy on the internet - there's pretty much none. Especially when you voluntarily publish your personal stuff.

Again on the topic of e-currency..

I've been wandering around on the web and reading up about LETS, and other funny nontraditional ways of trade, and found this pretty interesting page, which has a lot of information on various projects.

One of those, which has some interesting ideas, is the epoints. Quite funny how they tackle the issue of "copying" of the notes by using the one time challenge-response scheme - maybe this could be usable in the future as a base for something...

A picture worth remembering

I stand on a train station, and the train arrives. I am amazed - it is much cleaner and nicer than any other trains that I've seen today or before even. The passengers are unusually friendly and smiling. The attendant is calmly talking to them and making them the tea. More amazingly - this is the train to my destination, and I see a familiar face in there - and I give my shoes and other stuff through the window, because I already want to be served this wonderful tea - and this tiny station I am standing in, is tremendously short - and start to run to another carriage - because in this carriage the attendant is busy serving the tea.. But all the doors are hopelessly closed, and I keep running. My friend who was with me, is already far ahead - near the first carriage, whose doors are always open, and is already paying the fee to get on. The train slowly starts to move, and I realise I am going to stay on this platform, unless I do something. I see the nearest carriage door and start to force it open. It opens up a little bit, but since the train is already moving it is hard. I walk, without shoes, together with the train, while trying to force the door open, and the train gains more speed - but the door is still way too far from being open enough for me to squeeze myself in. I realize that I indeed will be probably left behind here - without the shoes and papers, or anyone I know. This gives a rise to the panic fear, and I scramble more - but still there's no realistic chance of getting on. Suddenly I notice there is someone on the other side of the door - there's an attendant from this carriage, who by some virtue have seen me trying to get in, and, against all rules and the regulations of safety, also forces the door open - and it starts to submiss to our joined efforts... She puts her foot in the way of the door so it does not close, and frees up her hand to give it to me. I almost hang on it, throw myself into the whatever little space the door has for me. I miss, and fall on my knee and my point of balance is still outside the carriage - now I have a prospect of staying at this station forever, in the form of molecules on the rails - if I fall, it's going to be the end... We are both granted with the understanding of the immediate possibility of this. She seems to be almost angry for this stupid mistake I made - and I do not know what my face looks like as I do not see it, and don't have the cycles to think about it - everything is concentrated on the one and only goal of getting into the train.. The few seconds seem to be eternity - and eventually, somehow, I get in. I stand in the exit compartment, stupidly shoeless, and now see her supervisor, who is shouting at her. She's speechless. Our hands still holding each other, I can feel hers tightening the grip, with her nails starting to bite my skin. This lasts. And suddenly I can hear the people bursting in applauds. I stand there, and do not know what to say - the stress of the situation made everything of feeling go away - I'm like a big pile of meat, or, pixels, for that matter, and I am just mentally not fully here yet. But we've made it - I'm on the train which moves faster and faster. And soon there will be the warm tea in the company of the people I know. But the painful sensation of these nails in my skin will still stay there in the corner of the mind - there's all too much in it for me to forget...

The everyday evil...

a very dramatic and interesting read on the "roots of evil".

Human beings will always betray you

Ciaral Laval posts an interesting question/news: apparently the stuff created by "Cory Linden" is now seen as created by "Cory Ondrejka", and there is a discussion of "Is using your real life name for your avatar name good or what ?"

I can understand the possible reasoning on LL side for musing with this idea - the attempt to avoid the burden of regulating the world by attaching this burden to possibly "spoiling" one's RL identity by "wrong" inworld actions in SL, and as well to assist in RL legislation over the activities of SL.

To me, quite frankly, this would mean the end of the "our world, our imagination" thing, and it's one of the worst moves that LL could make - unless they want just to become a kind of "virtual 3D communications platform for real world".

I've been always saying that one thing SL did not do what it could - to become a field for trying out the possible completely and crazily new economic and society ideas, at a relatively small expense - compared to trying them out in the real world. Ok, well, maybe replacing the centrally-issued currency with some other form of interaction is too much - so the crazily new economic ideas are out. But still there is/was the interesting social experiment - how will the world organize if left unregulated.

The absence of the bind of RL name to avatar name inworld, means that the people are able to act genuinely, with much less constraints put on them - hence allowing for a better exposure of the true human nature, as opposed to the "human nature altered by the society, economics, and current morale".

But as soon as you bind the RL name to SL name - you push the actions under the microscope of their interaction with the real world.

There's quite an interesting video documentary series. I do nt agree with at least some parts of it, yet it makes one think and wonder - which is, although painful, is always a good thing.

It makes me draw some parallels, and argue that if there is a RL name exposed by inworld, this means the end of SL.



SL is unique in comparison to many other environments is that there is no explicit purpose in playing it. So, it is an extreme experiment in "negative liberty" as defined by Isaiah Berlin - see the third movie of the documentary series for an indepth discussion on this.

I'd argue that the low concurrency numbers of SL and declining growth are the consequence of the absence of purpose. The exponential growth was the hype that has arised there - you can make millions while not standing up from your chair!. While not necessarily the most sophisticated (there might be some things in the world that are better than money), it is certainly a purpose. And this has attracted new millions to SL.

And together with that there was a discovery of wildly deviant behaviours for someone with "augmentist" view on SL and strong conservative view on RL - so there were vocal few who said "Pheww... Beurk!", and the chanting crowd that always follows the leaders went into the same spin - and the same folks who a few months before were blindly singing hallelujah, were now throwing the stones. Couple this with some attempts to regulate the scammers or the biz that was not legal according to the US legislation - and you get what we have now.

Cory pushed out or simply left, Philip steps down, and everyone seems to understand and welcome the move. I can understand both. It gets boring - it gets exactly the same like any other business. Noone would argue that the toilet paper is extremely important, yet it's not something worldchanging - and it's worldchanging possibility that I like SL for, not just being an "3d business platform".

Nobody Fugazi argues that it would be hard to introduce this in a way that hurts the community. I would argue the opposite - it is hard to introduce this in a way that does *not* hurt the community.

As a pure "3d business platform", SL is years before being mature. Besides, if i am in for a serious business, like buying the car, I'll still prefer to go to the dealer and try out the real thing. It's this magic smell of "you can be anything and anyone and do almost anything without bringing the baggage of your RL reputation and without risking much" that makes SL so special.

Do not take it that SL reputation is not important - I hope "Dalien Talbot" has some reputation and some image, which I value. It's maybe even not so different from the one of the meatball behind the keyboard, but I prefer to keep the two - to be able to clearly separate where I try things and dream about things - here, and where I do the things "as I am supposed to".

If that little invisible and shaky wall of different identities disappears - there will be much less room for experiment - and, remember, as they say, human beings will always betray you, so think twice before you fully trust your avatar life fully to them...

A story of copy-competition in RL

Quite interestingly, I've stumbled across the relevant article on Vindy.

This shows interesting view that what we want to call "copycat" is not necessarily a copycat - and even does not technically violate the patents submitted - and you can bite your nails as much as you want - and even if you have a strong feeling they "stole" your idea - alas, they did not do anything wrong.

So, indeed coming up with the new stuff all the time will allow to stay ahead of the curve with the copy-competition.

The end of the free primskirtbuilder.

I've written about a supposed clone of my primskirtbuilder.

Well, subsequent discussion, where phloughi tizzy helped me understand my mistake with accusing the item without testing, I think the following is the best way to do:

1) Herewith, I bring the public apology to coral giha for apparently accusing the item to be a copycat without the proper study of it.

2) I would like to thank phloughi tizzy for helping me understand my mistake

3) I am now ceasing the distribution of the free full-permissions version of the primskirtbuilder - the item will be sold at L$1500. I think it is a reasonable price to still allow a wide range of folks to use it.

You can find the item inworld, and also at SL Exchange, and OnRez.

Feel free to write up your review if you like.

Indeed, if you still have the "free" version - feel free to give it to the friends, and they can still use the "tips-based" compensation model.

Look at your website in different browser

browsershots allow to see how your design looks in various browsers.

Of course, this is static screenshots, but still could do you a good service if you are designing a website.

Inflation-free money

I've stumbled across a page with a bunch of interesting money-related links - this one.

Quite interesting book there is about inflation-free money. Unfortunately, it's not available on amazon, so I could not get a paper copy, so will have to continue reading online. There are a few interesting thoughts about avoiding inflation, and community money. I'll include one interesting quote here:


Between 1932 and 1933, the small Austrian town of
Wörgl started an experiment which has been an
inspiration to all who have been concerned with the issue
of monetary reform up to this day. The town's mayor
convinced the business people and administrators that
they had a lot to gain and nothing to lose if they
conducted a monetary experiment in the way suggested
in Silvio Gesell's book "The Natural Economic Order".


People agreed and so the town council issued 32,000
"Work Certificates" or "Free Schillings" (i.e.,
interest-free Schillings), covered by the same amount of
ordinary Austrian Schillings in the bank. They built
bridges, improved roads and public services, and paid
salaries and materials with this money, which was
accepted by the butcher, the shoemaker, the baker.
The fee on the use of the money was 1% per month
or 12% per year. This fee had to be paid by the person
who had the banknote at the end of the month, in the
form of a stamp worth 1 % of the note and glued to its back.
Otherwise, the note was invalid. This small fee caused
everyone who got paid in Free Schillings to spend them
before they used their ordinary money. People even paid
their taxes in advance in order to avoid paying the small
fee. Within one year, the 32,000 Free Schillings
circulated 463 times, thus creating goods and services
worth over 14,816,000 Schillings. The ordinary
Schilling by contrast circulated only 21 times. (8)
At a time when most countries in Europe had severe
problems with decreasing numbers of jobs, Wörgl
reduced its unemployment rate by 25 % within this one
year. The fees collected by the town government which
caused the money to change hands so quickly amounted
to a total of 12% of 32,000 Free Schillings = 3,840
Schillings. This was used for public purposes.


So it looks like "decaying money" were very much stimulated to circulate - so they were a much more effective instrument of enabling the trade.

In my mental experiments I came to concepts that were similar, better yet, they did not require the any centralized authority to govern them - which is pretty cool, I think.

I'll write some more about that in a separate post, when I can crystallize it more.

How to do business in SL: find a freebie, reduce permissions, resell.

update: the continuation of the story is here.


One of the SL residents has kindly mentioned to me that apparently there's a clone of the primskirtbuilder for sale on the SL Exchange.

In case you prefer to pay L$3500 for a clone, when you can get the original for free, you can visit the seller's page here.

Now, looking at the whole range of products offered by this seller, I suspect that I'm not the only one from whom this undoubtedly entrepreneurial person have "borrowed".

I do not feel like pursuing any legal actions for this person - it's boring.

But I hope you might help me by just exposing this.. err... arguable commercial practice by dropping this person ("coral giha", as it is written) an IM with your opinion about his actions.

I suggest that if you have purchased this item, you grab the original *full permissions* item for free from me, and claim your money back. (hey, and you can drop a fraction of that L$3500 into my tip jar, I would not mind :)

HTML on the parcel media in the new RC viewer

this is pretty neat.

Even though no clicks, I guess a lot of cool stuff could be already possible - if the browser does support something with AJAX (aka XMLHttpRequest) and indeed JavaScript.

Which version of git to use ?

We've spent a bit of time putting up the git to push the svn updates into an "official" git mirror - but appears the version that is in the debian package is 1.4.something - whereas I have 1.5.something on my box. The difference between the two is quite dramatic - especially with the observed behaviour of the git-svn - when I used it, the end result was some stale files and directories in the git repository - which I do not observe on my git clone.

After a small bit of googling I've found this page on gnome project - which basically dooms the 1.4, even though the reasons are a bit more religious than I'd like them to be :-)

In short - it seems like the git users would need to always run the latest version of git in order for the thing to be usable.

Now, the cool thing is that of course, as usual, in the usual "let the million worlds bloom" motto, there's already a mercurial repository :-)

My conclusion for the git repo on opensim so far is: go for the latest git and install it from source (errgh. this is not too cool, but is there any other choice ?)

Opinions ?

The wonders of search...

I find it amusing to look on the analytics how the folks arrive to this blog.

Some of them arrive due to a mischievous title - while seeking for information on color blindness - I should at least do some research on that topic to a bit rehabilitate myself on that.

A lot of folks arrive to look for git and opensim - which is understandable. Apparently the celebrity lookalikes for some terribly stupid reason generates some traffic.

But the most amusing thing I've found was the search query "who got shot in history". I felt terribly puzzled when I saw this, but appears I am a first (!) hit with my photoshoot post from a while ago.

Go figure. I assume the smartness of the search engine has figured that when someone is asking "who [verb-phrase]", the terms "I [verb-phrase]" are the good candidate answers.

I wonder how far are we from the concept-based search. Last time I read on this topic, the opinion from google folks their only love and religion is the statistics. So I'd think that they don't have much feeling towards all this toying with opencycs and link grammars. (Ok, I have to say it was more within the context of some announcement of the newfangled search engine that was promising to change the world - and as it appeared later - i think was just burning the VC capital - so maybe they *do* believe in link grammar parsing in the end - especially given that there're some works about the statistical parsers based on the link grammars - I won't spoil the fun of finding and reading those for you - they're near one of the links above.

Even yet better than free: paid! :-)

Ok, this one I have to link to - as even with the diagonal reading this is an excellent post. Prok's reply to the "better than free", which I bookmarked a few days ago.

Minus the classic Prok's rant that "all you morons tekkies imagine the information *has* to be copied" (which is a misunderstanding of at least my point of view anyway, so I do not hold any anger) - it is an excellent read.

Especially the great notion is the truck driver. While in the hypothetical matrix, the job is done by the machines who keep the meat they need to function (or for whatever the reason they kept the people in the half-asleep state - maybe as randomness generators?), the real-world is much simpler and much more complex.

Thanks for this post. When the credit is due - it's due. I'll need to reread both later when I have more time to think without interruptions.

30 pieces of silver...

I've been reading up so much on the SL content piracy in the blogs, that it is not much fun anymore.

Some of the folks it's an easy problem that should "just be fixed", and it is not fixed yet merely because of the stupidity and ignorance of the punk libertarian tekkies.

Some of the folks realise it's a damn hard thing, entangled with psychology, economy, philosophy, one's notion of integrity, and somewhat a little bit technical (I applaud Ordinal for the well balanced analysis of the situation - but call up for the benevolent dictator to appear out of the box and fix everything.

Personally, I believe in the openness.
However, one thing I question is if we'd take a random sample of 1000 avatars from the crowd - how many of them would knowingly go and save 30 silver pieces in exchange of their integrity ?

I've mentioned the experiment the other day - but today I thought - there's already quite a few places live, where this kind of experiment might take places - it's just a matter of exposing them.

For this purpose I've created a new blog Second Thefts: the alleged thefts in SL revealed and openly discussed.

The rest is written there, and I will be looking forward for any posts there, and we will see how the experiment turns out.

Better than free

A very interesting article about the money making in the case of freely copyable content.

A very interesting article - I suspect the conclusions from that are not only valid for the digital world - if you look around you, the RL is increasingly more and more about "Freebies", so the similar principles could apply.

Found it via Virtually Blind.

Let the thousand worlds bloom: the response to Gwyn's article about IBM, datacentre, and OpenSim.

Gwyn's mention of IBM putting the datacentre in OpenSim is by far more colourful than my dry hyperlink. And I'd figure it might be fun to write up a followup post. Disclaimer: all of the below is my personal views, and does not necessarily reflect any of the official positions of the "OpenSim".

First and foremost, it is a bit wrong to compare the OpenSim with Linux - the former is BSD licensed, the latter is GPL licensed. GPL does impose some "policy/political" views which BSD does not.

BSD licensing terms is a deliberate permission of the results to be used for any purpose, including commercial, by anyone.
If they do not feel like contributing back the results - so be it - but yet, with metaverse, I suppose it's in everyone's interest to have as much compatibility as possible, and the current events seem to prove this.

So, yes, you can take the code, put all the features you need, run your own stuff, and noone will feel unhappy (as soon as you do not refer to your code as "The OpenSim" - that irresponsible action would be indeed frowned upon).

The comment about the apache is not totally correct - there's a plethora of web servers designed for various purposes, in particular, the lighttpd is another very popular server, and there are tons of others. And I would not be surprised to see more than one server of the SL flavour emerging in the future.

I am not sure whether the central grid is "The" interconnection point - as there is still an issue of trust in the distributed environment, and at a certain point in time they will hit the wall, hard and solid, in case they do not pay the attention to this.

OpenSim is an extremely interesting beast with respect to its dynamics - everyone in the team is there for their own reasons, yet the end result that there is something evolving - which is quite an amazing thing to me, and I think this is not in the last order attributable to the BSD licensing which we very much want to preserve - primarily because it gives everyone so much freedom.

As for the comments by Jo, etc, let's go over them, they are amusing :)

"Open Sim's technical direction is to remove "stupid" limitations and in crease the power of the scripting language. This so increases the ability to grief within a world that essentially for any sort of stable environment user created content would have to be locked down solid."

This is soooo limited of a view that I am afraid to comment about this. The issues with the content, like I wrote just a short while ago are not technical, they are within the heads of the population who is always hungry for el cheapo content regardless of its origin. While there's a demand for the stolen content, there will be always a supply. And tackling this is a very hard problem - so given that for the time being we have mostly "good" users, this did not seem to be the biggest problem - there're a lot of far more low-level things that need to be addressed. So, first things first. Besides, "locked down solid" is a bit of an outdated concept. The information that is intended for the public viewing (which is what happens with all the content - since it essentially gets sent to all the viewers observing it) is hard to be made "locked down".

And yes - given the nature of the opensim, the flexibility and modularity is one of the key items. Right now, there are engines for LSL, C#, VB, JavaScript scripting engines. Of course, everything is a bit raw, but it's there. Go pick your favourite and hack on it. Besides this, some of the uses of OpenSim do not imply it being used as the worldwide open metaverse platform - hence the extra flexibility.


"LSL compatibility and asset sharing are not priorities for Open Sim. Even client compatibility is up for grabs. Therefore those will not be easily be leveraged."

LSL functions are being implemented by those folks who are interested to see it. While it's true that OpenSim is not intended as a clone for SL, noone prohibits anyone from having it done. Up for some coding, Jo ? :)
True that the client compatibility is mostly for pragmatic reasons - there is no reason to stick to that forever, as well as no reason to reinvent the wheel too much at this stage,and again, the compatibility is something useful to have.

"At some point, probably soon, it will very soon no longer be "too early" to license LL's server code. Then you have the choice between hiring programmers to patch OpenSim or programmers to actually create content for you in stable, enterprise proven, code."

Hiring the programmers to create the content is one of the worst decisions a hiring manager can make, really :-)

Sports car and me...

Found this on Looker's blog and figured I'd check it just for fun.

So, the end result is:

I'm a Ferrari 360 Modena!

"You've got it all. Power, passion, precision, and style. You're sensuous, exotic, and temperamental. Sure, you're expensive and high-maintenance, but you're worth it."

Dang, what can be better than a good ego boosting exercise ? I figure another 7 million participants think the same :-)

"Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

Content IP rights, again...

It's been a while since we last chatted with the folks about the content rigts and associated issues.. Yet, reading Vint's post, I figured I'd react.

Despite of what some people say, the content protection is much less of a technical problem rather than the problem of changing a mentality. Second Life, face it, is all about the economics. And while there is demand, there will always be a suppply.

Now, I'd be terribly interested if any of the content creators would be interested to run an experiment - to offer the "genuine skin" at L$1000, and then somewhere else offer the "stolen skin" at L$100, with the explicit mention that this skin has been stolen and the mention of the place where to buy the genuine skin (and of course to have the genuine skin place have a link to the "stolen skin" place). It might be a very enlightening experiment. I, from my side, can sacrifice a little bit of my reputation and offer the place to distribute the "stolen skin" (I think I still have some place to put the prims on), if anyone comes up with an offer for the content. Obviously, the cash (1/10th of the original price) from the event would be to the author, and the results should be jointly published.

Anyone up for a challenge ? That might be an interesting experience.

I'm tagging this as well as "primskirtbuilder" in case any of the creators using it feel like giving this experiment a shot.

Even though I'm pretty confident that the "pirate" version will certainly outweigh the "genuine" one - there's still a potential economic benefit for the creator due to a possibly bigger volume.

If there're no takers - then let's leave this just as a mental experiment for the readers - think of the above situation, and what choice would you have made, and drop something in the comments - it's interesting to know your opinion :-)