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.

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 :-)

SLTalker - FAQ

SLTalker is a new personal project of mine. This blog post is my way of presenting it to the world, in the form of a FAQ. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

What is SLTalker?

"SLTalker" stands for "Second Life talker", and is a Second Life client that aims to give you the same interface and user experience as the one you have in a Talker.

What is a Talker?

A talker is one kind of MUD. You can try to know a more complete definition by reading what Wikipedia says about it, but I guess that the best way to know is simply visiting one. If you're a Portuguese speaker, I recommend Selva; if you prefer an english-speaking Talker you might want to try Enchantement Under the Sea.

What is SLTalker for?

SLTalker is basicly for those that want to go into Second Life but that, for any reason, prefer a text interface. Usual reasons for it are the fact that talkers are considered "work-safe", "blind-friendly", quicker interactivity, among others. My personal reasons as of why I prefer this kind of interfaces were written countless times here and there, but I guess that by reading my blog you will find a hand full of them.

Why are you doing this?

Because this is something I'll use. Because I know others that will also use it. And more.

Hey, I'm doing the same as you (or something simillar)!

Great! Please leave a comment in this blog post telling me about it!

Can I help you?

Sure. Please leave a comment and we'll talk about it.

What does that mean to you other related projects?

Well, I've talked about several things that might be considered "related projects".

Tints aims to be a talker protocol, but it's yet being developed, and in a phase where I can only contribute with ideas and thoughts, but not with code. I'm still on the mailing list, and waiting for the first release of code, but until then there's nothing more that I can do for it, I'm afraid. When it is in a state where I can help more, I intend to do it, and, by then, I'll probably rephrase this paragraph. Anyway, both concepts (that of TINTS and SLTalker) aren't really clashing - as a matter of fact I think that they can both be used toguether.

GNUnet-chat is another thing I've talked about a couple of times. I aim to do a talker based in the GNUnet network, but for that to happen, the next release of GNUnet have to be out there. GNUnet-chat will probably have, by then, much more attention by me than this project, since with GNUnet I can build the Virtual World I allways wanted to see, and I'm not even very keen of Second Life. But, until then, I wasn't really helping GNUnet until now, so it won't loose nothing with this, just probably win (since I think I'll learn a couple of things with this project)... Also, don't worry, I won't ditch this project to embrace fully GNUnet-chat without making myself sure that this project isn't going to die.

What about VOS? I've had the idea to do exactly this, but for VOS instead of for Second Life. I still believe that VOS is a much better project and will enable the creation of much better virtual worlds than Second Life. Yet, VOS is still in heavy development, so it's better to postpone the talker interface for VOS for one year or so, and until then I'm getting lot's of usefull experience for that specific project.

I'm not willing to let Mamnuts die, but unfortunately I don't have the patience to maintain it as once upon a time I had. If you're willing to help me out with Mamnuts, that's great. I'm looking for a developer to that particular project, and if you make me feel like you're taking Mamnuts to the direction I want to (a less buggy, more stable and more secure Mamnuts) I'll gladly give you the project.

Finaly, PyTalker, the project that will surely suffer. PyTalker isn't really in a usable state at the moment, even if I know of at least three talkers using it as a talker base. 0.1.* had good and awfull things, 0.2.* had good and awfull things, and the next version planned is 0.3.0, which I started some months ago, completely rewriting the damn thing, and using the good stuff from 0.1 (basicly the modularity and the sessions handling) and from 0.2 (characters handling, database). I've been stuck with some issues regarding external libraries, but I've fixed that today. But there's still a lot of code to be written before I can release 0.3, and I don't think I'll be into the mood of doing it until there isn't a more or less stable version og SLTalker. Sorry.

Where can I try SLTalker?

Hold down your horses mate, you still can't, so it's not about where but when. Yesterday I made my "0.0.0" version (a backup tarball basicly), that already works. With it, I was able to log in, teleport, peek my inventory, talk, shout and use Instant Messanging. For each one of those operations I hade to hand-write XML - not fun. Also, the experience didn't work as good as it should - IM'ing, for instance, broke what I said into several messages, some of them with whitespaces only. This basicly means that, while I'm on the right track, there's an awfull lot to do until there's something you can peek into. When it is, I'll set it up as a talker (with telnet and telnet-ssl interface, as an usual talker), and I'll let you know.

Will it be Open Source?

In the right time, yes. First, I have to write a working version. Then, going publicly about it, I'll surely stumble upon lot's of bugs and issues, stuff that needs to be fixed until I can call it a "proper version". Then, I'll have to clean it up, package it, find the right license for it, and yes - by that time it will be Open Source.

Where can I find more about it?

Now? Nowhere, really. I expect to create a website for SLTalker soon, where you can keep track of its development, and more. Until then, keep reading this blog and I'll keep you updated.

Monday

Yet another monday, I think I allways manage to do more or less 52 of these every year. Mondays have something special, but I'm not really into that "monday of hell" that seems to flood many workers around the world. No, mondays have something special, but also tuesdays, wednesdays and every other day in the week.

I guess that the thing that make mondays special is that mondays are usually full of happenings - lot's of non-brain activity, even if that activity involves using brains. Today I had a full monday - a monday in its plenitude, full of happenings, happenings of all kind. I got happy, sad, excited, tired, irated, peacefull, felt fulfilled, but at another time with a powerless feeling, I had good conversations and bad conversations, it was full, and I'm tired.

With all this things - as usually happens with me - I had a day full of stuff I would like to blog about but I'll probably never will. But there was a sentence that I chose to highlight from this day: while talking with Nuno at lunch time, he said to me something that got me surprised: something in the line of "the thing that is missing on Second Life is a text-based client". Thank you Nuno: you might not have made my day, but you surelly gave me more will to keep on some of my personal projects. So today I'll skip the reading I was intending to do and instead I'll hack some more on that messy libsecondlife code. I just wonder... why do you feel that way and yet you're not into Talkers? You know, mine has an open door and you just gave a good reason to make me push you to go there :-)

I'm in a weird mood - ine of those times where I feel like drinking a glass of Oporto's wine while doing brain-activity stuff, staying waked up late until the body can't resist anymore, and then finally fell on the bed, just to wake up in the middle of the following afternoon. I can't: I have no Oporto, and besides it's monday - and tomorrow's another day at work. But it's decided already - one of the first things to buy to my new flat when I finally move on is a good bottle of Oporto's wine.

Quickies

Remember that I vented yesterday about libsecondlife being in C#? Well, I found out that there's already a port to Java. I also don't like Java, but it's surely less painful to deal with. Still, I'm hoping to see a port to yet another language ;-)

In unrelated yet exciting news, I've just signed the pre-deal to buy a flat here in Lisbon. In August it should be officially mine. Yay!