As I patiently sit at home while waiting for one of my servers to complete its tribulations (long story!), I was briefly scanning some of the ‘old’ places in the SLogosphere (do people still call it these days?) where I used to hang around for inspiration about what would be the Next Best Thing coming to Second Life and/or OpenSimulator. And, not surprisingly at this time, the issue about Project Sansar (which is actively inviting content developers to participate in a slightly-more-open-almost-beta-phase) robbing Linden Lab of all resources so that Second Life will crumble to dust comes up — like it does every time the Lab announces a further step towards completing Project Sansar and opening it to the public.
Ancient clothes templates
Because these are not always easy to find online, here is a zip file for these ancient templates, done by people like Damien Fate and Chip Midnight, eons ago:
all_fashion_design_templates-folder (click to download all of them and many more)
Robots and AIs replacing humans?
Once in a while, I like to pop over to the Singularity freaks at Singularity HUB; they are the sort of crazy that I often enjoy — trying to figure out where we’re going, based on the trends of current technology advancement. They will get most things wrong, of course, but it’s also great to see so much optimism packed in a single site 🙂
Recently they have been discussing the end of millions of jobs thanks to advances in robotization and artificial intelligence, showing how things might not be as bad as they seem; a topic, btw, that Extropia DaSilva is being addressing since past May on her own blog, on a huge eight-part essay.
I’m personally a skeptic and think that there will be a trade-off at some point. Jobs will be lost by the dozens of millions until there simply will not be enough consumers to consume dozens of millions of products at ultra-cheap prices manufactured by robots. So at some point, something has to be done. On my comment on Peter Diamandis’ article on the costs of products and services plummeting eventually to zero, therefore creating a society where work is (barely) unnecessary, I unfortunately (as always) reached the internal size limits when commenting, so I reproduce it here:
Server moving woes, but for a good cause
So I’m slowly — very slowly! — trying to catch up with things. Bear with me for a while longer. I cannot promise to go back to the routine of ‘several blog posts per day’ (like I did in, uh, was it 2005?…) not even ‘once a week’. It takes time to ‘come back’. Little baby steps, as I tend to playfully tell my psychologist. Things are getting better, that’s definitely true, and I can clearly see my way out of this stupid depression… which is encouraging, of course… but I’m not there yet. Not yet. But almost.
I feel well enough, however, to slowly tackle some tasks, that would be utterly impossible even to dream about two years ago — or even a year ago. And one of those things was to try to figure out if I could even continue doing things in my line of work at all.
The answer was ‘yes’ but it took me two years to arrive at that answer.
What Future for Virtual Reality?
The battle for the future virtual world environment is on!
I’ve tried to write a comment on the latest article on High Fidelity posted on Technology Review. But I’m long-winded and their system didn’t accept my comment. So here it is:
Rosedale’s latest attempt at designing a virtual world from scratch shows that he has learned a lot of lessons in the past 15 years. The article neglects to explain Rosedale’s background in physics; Linden Lab actually started by being a VR gear company, doing the hardware first, and designing a virtual world in order to test their gear, simply known as ‘The Rig‘, and which is allegedly still stored somewhere at Linden Lab’s premises. It was never commercially sold. Read More
Registering users on a website
Dawsey Chatterbox, posting a comment on the page for my SL User Create WordPress plugin, asked for a simpler version of the code which would merely register an avatar name to a MySQL database. He has been patient, having been waiting for almost a year 🙂 Here goes the code for the three components: the in-world script (to be placed inside an item that you can touch), a very simple schema for a MySQL table, and a PHP script to be placed at the backend of your server. I’m assuming PHP 5.X with the PDO libraries active (you should have them on by default, since it’s what PHP is now supposed to be supporting in exclusivity).
This merely registers an avatar name and its key to an external database. To illustrate a point, the location of the object is also extracted from the headers sent by the SL object. And to see that it is really updating the database if you touch on the same object repeatedly, a timestamp gets updated each time by the MySQL engine. There is no functionality to actually view the database; you can use phpMyAdmin for that.
I hope this might be useful for some.
Revisiting the Beginners’ Guide to Second Life®
A decade ago, information about Second Life® was scarce. Newbies would drop into a Brave New World and get completely confused. There were in-world volunteers — and the Linden Liaisons — to help you out, but often it was hard to assemble a lot of information to get you going. There were already the LL forums, of course, but newcomers might not know where to find them.
Revisiting the Colourising Script
In late 2004, I’ve joined a few groups that did a lot of discussion events. Often people could not attend them, so transcripts were kept and posted on the Linden Lab forums.
Reading a transcript ‘after-the-fact’ is not the same thing as participating in a discussion in real time. For me, the major difficulty is keeping track on who said what. After a while it’s hard to remember who is actually speaking. Read More
NeXT Life
Unless you have been hiding in a warp hole somewhere (like I am!) you might have missed the latest announcement from Linden Lab: Second Life: The Next Generation, or SL2, or — as I prefer to call it — NeXT Life, is currently being developed, and the first beta will probably appear sometime in late 2015/early 2016 or thereabouts.
Yes, yes, it was a prank!
You should have looked at the date first before complaining that the links didn’t work! 🙂
Obviously it was another of my (in)famous April Fool’s pranks, which I try to do (almost) every year. Some years are better than others, because the best pranks are those that are 90% based on reality — which has clearly been the case.
Facebook ‘likes’ Second Life, High Fidelity and buys both
Of course this was a prank; happy April Fool’s Day, and my apologies to everybody! 🙂 — Gwyn
Understanding Second Life’s Culture
I’m currently under a lot of pressure to do my work, and every time I post anything on my blog, I get a lot of complaints that I should be working instead of blogging 🙂 The complainers are right, of course… but every once in a while, I also need to rest my mind, and do that by focusing on completely different and unrelated issues. Just to prove that I’m alive and well, and will resume my analysis of Second Life and virtual worlds in general, as soon as my current work is completed (alas, it should take another year…), here are a few thoughts about a recent discussion that captured my attention on the SL Universe forums. My comments make more sense if you take your time reading that discussion first. I tried to post an answer there, but unfortunately I’m too long-winded for common forums; I had to resort to a blog post to overcome the character limitations 🙂
Thanks to the very intelligent community that regularly discusses at SL Universe. You guys are truly an inspiration for me!
The more time passes, the more I tend to believe a few basic assumptions about SL, some of which, as you will see, are contradictory: