Telegram

There are many many things I want to say, and not that much time. My mental list of "things to blog", each promising an huge post, makes me think that maybe -- just maybe -- most of those blog posts are never going to be written. So, for now, I'm writing you a little telegram, telling only some things, and quickly.

The first, and obvious, is to tell you I'm going to marry soon. That's right: we knew we would going to do it for a long time, but it was only while celebrating her birthday that I did the actual move of asking her. As my friendfeed followers noticed, or her blog readers, she said "Yes". I'm really happy, but there are lots of things to do now: people still don't get married over the Internet, at least in Portugal ;-) Thanks a lot to those who gave us "congratulations" messages, I know I didn't replied to most of you... bear with me.

After a quick talk on Friendfeed between me and Melo, he decided to write Rasputine. Rasputine (or Ras, as Corto Maltese called him) is a generic Moo/MUD/Talker-to-XMPP gateway. You add a buddy to your roster and then you can use it to connect to that world. That means that now, a couple of days later, you can use Jabber to connect to several services, including Selva (add selva@rasputine.simplicidade.org, Second Life (via SLTalker, add sltalker@rasputine.simplicidade.org), Portugal Virtual (add pv@rasputine.simplicidade.org) or MOOsaico (add moosaico@rasputine.simplicidade.org). This also means that I'm now feeling back the urge to make SLTalker a lot more useful (and less buggy) than it is at the moment. It is being completely rewritten, using now libsecondlife 0.5.0.

I'm returning to have a good reading rhythm. So, I've been reading Cory Doctorow's books (he's also now freshly married, congratulations!), finaly got into the mood of getting and reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (you know when you know that you will read and like a book, and you're so certain of it that you just keep postponing it? I've been doing that with this book for years...), Satrapi's Embroideries, some more SciFi, some Fantasy, some Manga, some essays... Well, a lot of stuff, but still not as much as I wanted to. Regarding to Cory's books, I have a funny thing to tell: despite all his books being freely available to download on his website, with a Creative Commons license, I've been buying and reading them in the physical book format (and reading a lot of his not-in-books essays in my mobile phone). Well, with "Overclocked" I stumbled into a problem: the book had 16 pages missing!. Frustrating, huh? Well, not that much: thanks to Creative Commons, I just picked up my cellphone and in less than two minutes I was reading what was supposed to be in those 16 pages. See one more case on which Creative Commons is a good idea? ;-)

Oh, speaking of Creative Commons: to celebrate their fund-raising campaign, Creative Commons has released "A Shared Culture", a cool short video by renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan, explaining very well why Creative Commons is important. Since it is in English, without translations, and I wanted to write about Creative Commons in one of my twice-a-week column at "Programas Livres", a Portuguese web publication, I ended up doing a free translation and adaptation, in both text and audio formats.

And... well, I told you, I have lot's of stuff to talk about, but for now, this is it. If you want to keep more updated than this, consider following my Friendfeed.

Installing Second Life on an EEE PC

I've been playing with an EEE PC lately. This 299€ (in Portugal) GNU/Linux ASUS laptop is awsome, and I'm really happy that ASUS did it. They did some mistakes, like using Xandros Server 2.0 as base for their distro, making me think, for instance, that if I had one of these I would replace their Operating System with something like Debian Eee PC, eeexubuntu or even eeedora. I might write about my thoughts on EEE PC later, but for now, a quick HOWTO (because I think this isn't documented nowhere) on installing Second Life on EEE PC.

HOWTO Install Second Life on an EEE PC:

1. edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change DefaultColorDepth 16 to DefaultColorDepth 24
2. restart your X (press control+alt+backspace, for instance)
3. edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file and add this lines:

   
   deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/pub/debian testing main contrib non-free
   deb http://apt.byteme.org.uk/apt/ unstable main
   

4. in a terminal (CTRL+ALT+t) write sudo aptitude update && aptitude install slviewer
5. Remove the added lines on /etc/apt/sources.list and in the terminal run aptitude update to go back to the state you were
6. Your Second Life is now installed. To run it write slviewer in a terminal.

Regarding to using Second Life itself, you'll notice that the windowed view assumes a bigger resolution than the one you have, so I recommend you to start by going to the options, changing the ratio scale and remove the windowed mode. Et voilá, you're on Second Life!

Connecting to SLTalker via SSL

I've missed the opportunity to see Wong Kar Wai's latest movie this evening, so instead, I kept the ride of "coding for talkers" from this morning, when I made a Twitter reader for Selva, and decided to finaly implement SSL for SLTalker. For those that do not know, SLTalker is a personal project of mine of implementing a talker-like interface for Second Life.

So, how to connect via telnet over SSL? Easy: the host is portugal-virtual.org and the port is 123. If you're in GNU/Linux or any *nix-like environment you can try

telnet -z ssl portugal-virtual.org 123

If you get an error saying that the -z option isn't available is because you don't have netkit's telnet-ssl package installed. Another option (bad choice in terms of usability, but this one works also on Windows) is to use OpenSSL and try:

openssl s_client -host portugal-virtual.org -port 123

Now, if you want a decent client, I recommend you to try out the popular TinyFugue (best known as tf), that already has SSL support in it's 5.0 version (still in beta). This is the only alternative I know to OpenSSL for Windows.

If you try this and have some feedback. please leave a comment. And yes, I know you're waiting for new features, bugs fixed and more usability: I'm working on that, but I'm yet far from ready to a new (and quite different) release. Bare with me...

Second Life and Mono

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mono_beta_FAQ: finally there's a date for us to replace LSL with Mono: 30 January 2008.

Social 3D Worlds

I'm now attending to "Social 3D Worlds" conference, where I'll see two workshops about Second Life, then do a presentation about "Virtual Worlds: pass, present and future", and finally see Paula's presentation about Education in Virtual Worlds. I hope it will be nice, but considering what I've seen for now, it will be.

For those not here, the organization told me they'll try to capture the presentations and workshops as video and then put them at their website: http://student.dei.uc.pt/~pgms/sites/social3dworlds/.

BTW, Alcides, your cellphone has bluetooth enabled and open O:-)

About SLTalker

For those wondering why there's no signs of evolution on SLTalker [1], basicly I intend to make it extremely flexible and modular, and for that purpose I reached into the conclusion yesterday that SLTalker must be rewritten - more news about that soon.

BTW, if you know IronPython and you're interested in helping me out, drop me a line. I'm studying the chance of using it, 'cause coding in C# just pisses me off.

[1] - http://noori.abismo.org/sltalker

Second Life in Debian

What you want to know is here now. In the future, hopefully, there will be official debian packages for snowglobe2.

HOWTO: Install OpenSim in Debian

For future reference:

• go to http://dist.opensimulator.org/ and get the latest .tgz
• aptitude install:


• mono


• libmono-corlib2.0-cil


• libmono-sqlite2.0-cil


• libmono-system-web2.0-cil


• libmono-microsoft8.0-cil


• libmono-system-runtime2.0-cil




• unpack the .tgz, cd opensim and nant

Now you're ready to go :-)

(More extensive info at http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page)

One more round of links

• I was going to write about this since monday, but since I didn't find the time to, where's a link [1] to someone who did: Google Translate (which few people use, but still) has an awsome new feature: user generated translations. I see lots of potential in this, which I might explore later...
• The Portuguese mashup Twitternotes won the title of mashup of the day [2].
• Using OPIE - One Time Passwords [3]...
• asql - Query Apache logfiles via SQL [4]
• Music delivered to mobile phones will hit $11 billion and account for 30% of music sales by 2011 [5] according to a new report. Mobile is currently 14% of revenue for labels.
• Second Life's residents age verification is now up [6], in beta. Until it is a beta feature it will be optional, but what is going to happen after that? It's not that hard to guess...

[1] - http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015537.html
[2] - http://alcides.ideias3.com/blog/204
[3] - http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/568
[4] - http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/asql/
[5] - http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20071205/tc_cmp/204700372
[6] - http://smallr.net/SL-age-verification

Links for today

Another round of links...

http://www.worldsinmotion.biz/2007/09/agdc_biowares_gordon_walton_gi.php
Lessons we can take from the WoW success

http://mashable.com/2007/11/21/holiday-facebook-functionality-updates/
More facebook privacy issues

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_moveon_beacon_privacy.php
More facebook privacy issues, part II

http://lmms.sourceforge.net/home.php
Yet another open source tool to produce music. It looks cool, and I installed it, so I expect to give it a try this weekend or so...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/21/chris-collins-from-linden-lab-stability-is-the-key/
Interview to Linden Labs about the future of Second Life. Hot points: they aim to open up everything; they'll introduce more registration requirements; they're working on the best way of implementing verification that is inclusive of all legitimate signups no matter where users live (forget anonymity :-( )

http://secondliferesearch.blogspot.com/2007/11/second-lifes-virtual-potential-is-real.html
The second life potencial is real... Now let's see people using it, shall we?

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=3898293
Making Second Life more like real life

Links for today

http://advice.cio.com/why-cios-dont-care-about-open-source
Why CIO's don't care about Open Source?

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1bec8a08-96cd-11dc-b2da-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
DRM causes sales losses

http://remix.nin.com/
Major Labels still making copyright claims that hurts artists

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Ejure/blogs/blogs-uc-pa.html
If you had to choose 100 blogs which ones should you choose to be best informed?

http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/en/h_ip01456e.html
File sharing boosts CD sales, not the inverse

http://www.ananke.com.pt/
New Portuguese music venue... on Second Life

The wonders of Open Source

Saturday I met some friends, and one of them was saying that she bought a new laptop but she couldn't run Second Life in it because it had an Intel graphics card. First I went into "WTF mode": after all I have an Intel graphics card and I run Second Life in my laptop without any problem. But then I remembered: I'm using Second Life's open source client in GNU/Linux, while she was running the Linden Labs' binary for Windows... Which made me write this just to make three quick remarks:

• Open Source is great. Linden Labs open sourced its "Second Life viewer" and in a snap of fingers the Open Source community made it work with Intel graphic cards.
• Linden Labs isn't using the fact that they Open Sourced its client as they could/should. Since that the limitation isn't there in the Open Source client, why is it still there in the "official" one?
• If you have an Intel card you can use Second Life. Either run it on GNU/Linux, or - if you really want to use it on Windows (blergh!), you can try to compile the Open Source client yourself...

My take on "User Acceptance of Virtual Worlds"

This isn't from Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, I wrote this offline...

In last June M. Fetscherin and C. Lattemann did an article called "User Acceptance of Virtual Worlds - An Explorative Study about Second Life". This is my thoughts about that article.

The first graphic represented in the report tells us, among other things, that the Web 3D started in 2005. While that's highly arguable, the graphic looked so unbelievable that I decided to fire up The GIMP and extend some lines. Conclusions taken: according to it in 2006 "web 1.0 sites" had as many users as "web 2.0 sites", and in the beginning of 2008 the "Web 3D" had 50% as much users as Web 1.0. I call this kind of beautiful graphics "bullshit".

They also state that in Virtual Worlds "there are no levels, no scores and there is no ``game over''". Not only Virtual Worlds can be games, but in fact in some Virtual Worlds have levels, scores and even "game over". While you get no "game over" in WoW, for instance, you have levels and scores. The authors here want to talk about "social virtual worlds" (a term which definition is being highly debated lately), not Virtual Worlds in general... Also, it seems that the authors don't understand in full extent the concept of Avatar: they state that "the behaviours of the users is very similar to real world behaviour", which is quite untrue: users have avatars, and most avatars behave differently than IRL: there are even study fields for those that try to emulate in a Virtual World their real life (sometimes seen in Virtual Worlds like Second Life) since they are few...

Also, sentences like "We also asked respondents if they use other social networks than Second Life" or "Second Life is a social network and hence it enables also to search and meet people and places" or even "the emergence of social networks such as Skype" tell me that the authors don't really know much about what they're talking about: for starts a Virtual World is not a social network, and I wander if they know what that is... But still, they got some numbers I found pretty interesting: like the fact that 39% of the interviewed Second Life residents used LinkedIn. If having almost the same number of FaceBook'ers (39%) and MySpace'rs (40%) tells us that people interested in Second Life are also interested in new trends (FaceBook popularity is recent), their use of LinkedIn might give you a glimpse of the profile of who's going there... I would risk to say that stuff like in-world advertising (if not in context) might fail to a lot of SL residents.

About user acceptance? Well, it's hard not to see that Virtual Worlds are here to stay. With the growth of Internet Virtual Worlds are growing too. As some other studies say, there are really not many mainstream social virtual worlds, and they success, while good for their aim, is far for enough to start talking about a Web 3D. But we saw in the last couple of years a boom in Virtual Worlds for kids, and those kids in a couple of years are eligible to be users of Virtual Worlds for grown-ups. The future of Virtual Worlds is smiling, and users are slowly accepting them. The urge here is to make them better quick enough so that when the general population is ready to massively adopt virtual worlds, virtual worlds are ready to, at least, not disappoint them.

Paulo Barros @ Second Life

As far as I know, Paulo Barros is the first Portuguese artist risking the stages of Second Life. According to his MySpace, Paulo Barros is going to present some themes of his new album K:arma 6 in Second Life Portugal: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Portugal%20Lisboa/113/18/27 at 22:00 GMT.

Check more about this event at http://tinyurl.com/2ca9zu.

OpenAvatarID

When I heard about Raph Koster [1] creating Areae I got excited. When I heard him talking about it I got more excited. Then, when I heard him talking about his more deep insights about the future of Virtual Worlds I got... scaried. No way a guy with such a vision would make such, in my point of view, mistakes. But he did: in the middle of awsome texts he would drop here and there something I wasn't liking. So, when I knew that Areae was announcing its product, I was extremely curious and yet afraid that it would come something I would not like. He announced Metaplace, and I got the feeling that, after all, he was doing well - heck - I badly want to try it. It was exactly I was looking for! Since it is in a closed beta stage, I can only but read everything I find about Metaplace, but today I got... disappointed. I'm not going to dig into that issue this time, since this isn't a post about Metaplace (I'll leave that to a later time), but some things he said that was just shocking to me. For instance, Metaverse's default client (the one they provide) communicates using telnet [2]. Hello? Communicating credentials and conversations via telnet from a Flash app (client side, you know?) to your servers? Have you never heard about encryption? Anyway, in the same day I posted about "one avatar to rule them all" [2], where I talked about companies like Linden Lab and IBM that believe that virtual worlds should be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars, if they owners want, I read this interview to Raph Koster where he says that, among other companies, folks at Areae think that virtual worlds shouldn't be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars.

Since there are so many arguments from one side and another, I just want to have a clue (tho' the data retrieved will not have revelance...) of how many people think one way or another...

So there's a poll: do you think that virtual worlds should be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars if they choose so?

Please vote by following this link: http://www.polldaddy.com/p.asp?p=118953.


[1] - http://www.raphkoster.com

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telnet

[3] - http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com/2007/10/one-avatar-to-rule-them-all.html

One Avatar to rule them all

Once upon a time I was thinking in replacing both Mamnuts' and Pytalker's auth scheme with OpenID (and subsequently, change the auth scheme in Selva and maybe in Portugal Virtual). One of the reasons I didn't do it was that I thought that something way bigger was going to happen soon: and all was sort of confirmed when HiPiHi aimed to establish standards for 3D Virtual Worlds, about what they said they're going to talk about in the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo.

Yesterday news came of yet another announcement to be made, in paralel, in the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo: IBM and Linden Lab joined together [1] to help defining a “a truly interoperable 3D Internet” by the means of creating a way for avatars to migrate from one world to another.

The thing is, lot's of news sources talked about one effort and then other, but when you take all the hype and buzzwords out of what's being said you just see one thing: both of them want to make one sort of "OpenID for Avatars" (which must have more info than just an username and a password, we're not talking here of using the same credencials to access your avatar in any VW, but using the same avatar in every VW), and maybe something else.

In conclusion, this is, allways, good news. Even if it's only a "OpenVirtualID", it is great. But let's first wait until the real news come out from those lucky attending to the Expo, and then we'll talk particularities... I'm quite afraid of having already two groups not working together while both aiming the same thing... Caos might arise.

[1] - http://tinyurl.com/2mdp2y

SLTalker is out now!

One thing I've decided to this weekend was that I wouldn't have "dead times", so everytime when the presentations were not that interesting, or if I thought I could listen to it and do something at the same time I was with my laptop managing some stuff or coding on SLTalker, my project that aimed to create a talker interface for Second Life. When I realized that there were so many talks to be done that there would be no time to do the Hack Hour activity I was hoping to see there, and since, unfortunately, the rooms where presentations were given were really hot, I also skipped some presentations, giving me the time to finish SLTalker's "first release", meaning that nowadays you can actually connect into SLTalker.

So, that's it - enjoy, and remember you can allways chat with me there (.tell Noori Foss hi there!), and please report any bug that you find.

Next step, besides fixing SLTalker bugs, is trying to close these bugs on Debian, which will greatly help me to enhance SLTalker.

Oh, and please go easy on the server, SLTalker uses lots of resources and the server where I'm running this is quite slow for the job... Of course you can allways offer me a better place to host SLTalker, but I would need to have root access to it and it must be a Debian box, so I don't really think that there's someone willing to provide me a better host than this one :-)

Virtal Worlds usage stats

Yesterday on Terra Nova there was a discussion about what was the average "play time" per week in a virtual world, namedly on Second Life. Some measurement issues were discussed, but I still think that there is preety good information you can take from a Virtual World if you do the measures server-side. Thus, and more as an exercise than anything else, I decided to do some stats about the Portuguese Virtual World Jungle. Since this was only an exercice, and because nothing of this is automated, I did the stats using only the information of 11.7% of this Virtual World users, but it would preety trivial to use 100% of the data. On the other hand, the raw data isn't that much important than what do you do with it, so...

First, I did what I called "full stats", that, although more accurate, is revelant in less cases. Full stats means that I used the data from every user that entered in the system, including those who never spent one full minute on it, or those that came only once and did nothing before leaving. Everything's here, and the result is that users are here for an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes per week. BTW, this is the only kind of stats you can also take from Linden Labs data, getting as result an average of 4 hours and 11 minutes per month.

Then, I inserted some intelligence on the stats, and decided that those records that the system doesn't even consider as "users" wouldn't count. The result is that real users are here for an average of 6 hours and 24 minutes per week.

I wasn't happy, and decided that you should ignore those users that came a few times and never came back: after all they're probably not users at all, and are messing with the stats. I discarded all those users that stayed on the system less than a total than 24 hours. The result is that returning users are here for an average of 9 hours and 9 minutes per week.

This data still seems way lower than it feels when I'm there, so I think I might do this exercice another time, counting only with adult animals (users that spent at least 8 hours in world), and with all of them.

Now, this is real data. Polls? Mailing Lists? Nah... The problem is that you can't really trust Linden Labs figures, can you? You know they'll allways want to make them look nice...

More Portugal on Second Life

After the Portuguese Mediation Center in Second Life, now it is going to be "Banco Espírito Santo" (known as BES), a Portuguese bank, to create its presence on Second Life. Today, 19:00 Portuguese time, the inauguration party starts on a virtual representation of Cascais' Marina.

Read the full news here.

What to expect from SLTalker

Some people started to ask me about what should they expect from SLTalker's first public release. Here are some hints:

• SLTalker will release soon. Soon means that it will have lot's of bugs, and few functionality: both implemented stuff needs to get better and there's a lot left to implement. Soon also means that I want to get this thing done because I'm lacking time in the next couple of weeks, and that I'm going to stop coding so much on it in the next month or so.


• SLTalker is a talker, but it might not seem like one. This means that if you're willing to try out SLTalker, maybe you should start by knowing your way in a regular talker. If you're Portuguese I recommend Selva, if you're nor I recommend EUTS. You might even end up realizing that talkers are funnier then Second Life O;-)


• SLTalker is a service, which means that, while I intend to Open Source the client (and I know you're willing to fiddle with it to create your money-making bots, right?), the first "public release" is not going to be a "code release" but a "service release". You'll be able to log on into Second Life by telnet'ing a server somewhere.


• SLTalker needs some care, you know? There are four urgent things to do with it that I only expect to do after the release:
  
  • nowadays if you get a teleport request you automagicly accept it
  
  
  • If you .tell something to someone who's not online, the message is going to be queued for delivery, but you'll think that the avatar is online and read your message
  
  
  • I have some urgent interface changes to make
  
  
• SLTalker is beta, so I take no responsability for what happens to your stuff. I'm going to take off for now all "dangerous commands" to stop you from giving away all your possessions of giving away your money while using SLTalker, but you'll never now


• SLTalker is not secure, since that you have to trust me your credentials (I'm not logging them, really, but I could...) and for now the only log in interface is going to be via telnet (unencrypted)


• SLTalker needs you to test and leave your comments. I really hope you'll enjoy it.


• SLTalker is lacking functionality, and I might talk a little about what will you be able to do with it even before the release, but yet keep in mind that you'll be able to chat with others, but I doubt that you'll manage to have avatars sex with it :-P