bits

Yup, I'm still pretty much alive. There are so many things to do, and so many things I want to do, that I really don't find any time to write on this blog, and after finding Friendfeed as a way to let my thoughts escape, I really don't think I'll ever return to use my blog as I used to. But I still like having a blog, and for so many times I've found myself thinking I want to write here again. So, this is what to expect: sometimes, rarely I suppose, I'll just write something, rant a little bit, and say almost nothing. Personal blog, okay?, it's fine to do just that :-)

I've been quite busy in a number of fronts. Work, Merankorii, Noori Records, I'm also now officialy a member of ANSOL... And there are lot's of things that urge to get people to act, specially if you take into account the whole craziness of lately regarding digital rights, copyright, freedom, privacy and so on both in an European level (specially with the Telecoms Package, then the event of the Pirate Bay trial and everything that "floated" around it, and then the three-strikes-like things, or the internet censorship like what's possibly going to happen in UK or Germany) and in Portugal (and things are really muddy on those fields too, but I'll probably reserve some time to talk properly about that later).

One thing that has been keeping me excited for a couple of months now are the "20th's": Cabinet Pin is a micro-label that organizes a monthly compilation where artists can participate by following the rules: they have to do a complete track in one day only - the 20th of each month - and then submit it. I've been doing it (almost) each month, and I really like the concept and the results. I'm really fun and an artistic challenge, and I've been trying to convince a couple of other musicians to also participate... Maybe you want to give it a try? Anyway, tomorrow is the 20th and is a saturday, so it will be the first time that - I hope - I won't be in such a hurry and with such an high-constraint as usual... Let's see what will come from that, having an actual entire day instead of - like what happened once - having less than one hour till midnight to get finaly started...

And now, AvatarCamp is running (today and tomorrow) and I'm "there" via Selva (my Portuguese text-based virtual world). So, excuse me, but I have a virtual barcamp to attend to :-)

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.

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...

AllOfMp3 and DRM

I was feeling quite depressed and started venting on Selva, a Portuguese talker. Since that, after this, I didn't feel like writing an article about it... Here's the log (with permission, of course) of the conversation (unfortunately in Portuguese).

BTW, just for reference, here are the latest news on AllOfMp3, to be dead at the 1st of June, and the Portuguese anti-DRM action I also talked about.

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MindBoosterNoori says: estou deveras aborrecido
MindBoosterNoori says: Nao consigo entender como e' que ha' pessoas que nao acham nada de mal neste mundo
MindBoosterNoori says: num mundo em que as corporacoes mandam mais que a lei, fazem as leis
Hellraiser asks: hum?
Hellraiser says: ja' ouvi falar...
MindBoosterNoori says: Um site na Russia, completamente legal, que vendia musica muuuuuuuito barata porque as leis na Russia de copyright sao diferentes das dos USA
MindBoosterNoori says: entao eles pagavam directamente aos artistas e nao 'as labels
MindBoosterNoori says: houve obviamente pressao das big co's para fechar aquilo, comprar para depois fechar... de tudo.
MindBoosterNoori says: nao conseguiram
Hellraiser says: ena
Hellraiser says: nao sabia que isso era assim
MindBoosterNoori says: entao fizeram pressao junto a varios governos, e os USA, a Alemanha, o Reino Unido e a Dinamarca forcaram os ISP's a bloquear o site
Hellraiser says: curto a filosofia
MindBoosterNoori says: depois fizeram pressao contra a Visa, Mastercard e Paypal para deixarem de aceitar pagamentos para aquilo
MindBoosterNoori says: conclusao, o site ficou a funcionar um esquema de vouchers
MindBoosterNoori says: entao
MindBoosterNoori says: no reino unido agora e' proibido vender ou ajudar 'a venda desses vouchers
MindBoosterNoori says: 1 gajo foi preso e tudo
MindBoosterNoori says: mas achas que isso chega? naaaaaaaaaao...
MindBoosterNoori says: entao, fizeram um ultimato 'a Russia
Hellraiser says: isso ta' a ir um bocado longe demais... :-/
Hellraiser asks: houve artistas a queixarem-se?
MindBoosterNoori says: se quiserem pertencer 'a World Trade Organization (o organismo que, em ultima instancia, define quem e' pais do 1o mundo e quem nao e')
MindBoosterNoori says: teem de mudar a lei
MindBoosterNoori says: e entao a Russia vai mudar a lei dia 1
MindBoosterNoori says: para tornar o AllOfMP3 ilegal.
MindBoosterNoori says: makes me sick.
Hellraiser says: yah
MindBoosterNoori says: artistas a queixar-se? claro que nao... os artistas ficam mais contentes
MindBoosterNoori says: recebem 'a mesma, mas a musica deles e' tao barata que as pessoas compram muito mais musica
MindBoosterNoori says: tipo, em vez de comprares uma faixa, compras logo a discografia toda :-P
Hellraiser says: pensava que os artistas ganhavam mais por "venda directa"
MindBoosterNoori says: 1.30 centimos por faixa? nah, no allofmp3 1.30 paga-te cerca de 130 Mb de musica
MindBoosterNoori says: (la' a musica e' paga ao Mb)
MindBoosterNoori says: os artistas ganham mais se nao tiverem intermediarios
MindBoosterNoori says: como no caso do all of mp3
MindBoosterNoori says: ou seja
MindBoosterNoori says: eles estavam contentes
MindBoosterNoori says: quem nao gostou da coisa nao foram os artistas, foram as editoras
Hellraiser says: sim, sim. eu percebi
Hellraiser says: mas quem pode fazer forca, sao os artistas e os consumidores
Hellraiser says: o "negocio" das editoras ja' eu conheco...
MindBoosterNoori says: bem, a nao ser boicotar as major labels em forma de protesto, mas isso ja' eu faco :-P
MindBoosterNoori says: quem podia fazer era o povo Russo
MindBoosterNoori asks: mas achas que eles foram "avisados" de que se ia tomar esta decisao?
MindBoosterNoori says: BAH.
Hellraiser says: pois
MindBoosterNoori feels depressed
Hellraiser says: melhores dias virao...
MindBoosterNoori says: right.
MindBoosterNoori says: Aqui ha' uns meses consegui finalmente criar o DRM-PT.info
MindBoosterNoori says: criar buzz em volta do tema do DRM
MindBoosterNoori says: comecei a ver jornais, revistas, proteste, bloggers por todo lado, em Portugal, a interessar-se pelo tema, a mostrarem-se indignados
MindBoosterNoori says: e' organizado um protesto
MindBoosterNoori says: quantas pessoas inscritas menos de 48 horas antes? 4.
Hellraiser :-/
MindBoosterNoori says: e' um protesto dificil de fazer? nao, e' ir 'a porta de um cinema e distribuir panfletos.
MindBoosterNoori says: olha
MindBoosterNoori says: importas-te que ponha esta conversa no meu blog? :-P
Hellraiser says: nao
Hellraiser says: na boa
MindBoosterNoori says: vai mesmo assim em Portugues, nem me apetece escrever mais sobre o assunto...