Baba Sucks

The Second Life 4th Birthday event is coming up soon. The event is schedualed for June 23rd-June 30th. Check out the SL4B Portal on the Second Life wiki for more information on the planning of this event.

I’ve volunteered to take up the open source display at the event. The open source display will show how open source has influenced Second Life and how Second Life has influenced and inspired open source projects. So far the display will include libsecondlife, OpenSL [2], OpenSim, and other information about Linden Lab’s use of open source software(eg. Mono, Mozilla Gecko, Squid, Linux, MySQL)

Anyone interested in helping out with the open source display is encouraged to contact me at baba@libsecondlife.org or IM Baba Yamamoto in Second Life.

If you want to help out with other aspects of the SL4B Event contact SignpostMarv Martin in Second Life.

Trying out Trac for the first time this week on some new projects.

The trac website says,

Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission is to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team’s established development process and policies.

All that is very true. I commend the Trac team on their accomplishment. If only it were not coded in Python. EUGH whitespace syntax.

It’s all right. As long as I pretend it’s not there and it always works as expected it will never matter.

If all goes well with Trac maybe libsecondlife and Open Metaverse can start using it soon too. It looks to be more put together than our current mash.

Gwyneth Llewellyn once again stands on top of the Internet to claim WIN.

You may have heard the latest wag from the valley, purporting that Second Life is some sort of Pyramid scheme. This all came from a blog post by Capitalism 2.0 author Randolph Harrison entitled, “SecondLife: Revolutionary Virtual Market or Ponzi Scheme?”

Excerpt from Gwyn’s winning comment,

It would be rather obvious for me (and I do well know that sometimes common sense does not apply to economics, but…) that if you’re willing to enter a small exchange which only has, oh, perhaps, 5 million L$ to offer, an offer of a “few million L$” (you mention US$10k, or about 3 million L$) would certainly make the market collapse… and give you an awful rate of exchange in return.

I fail to understand the point. This is the expected behaviour on an open exchange — or at least it was, when I had my economics classes. Where exactly am I missing the point?

To recap:

Linden Lab is operating a “rigged” exchange, since it’s “an open auction”, and “doesn’t work well for big trades”. To make “big trades”, you tend to suggest to go to the tiny private exchanges instead, but then complain that the market collapses due to your flooding of L$ there… and, as a conclusion:

it suddenly dawned upon me.

This game was just a pyramid scheme.

I’m baffled on how you start adding apples to oranges and suddenly the result comes out in onions. However, I blame my own ignorance. Probably, this makes sense to an economist. For the layperson, however, your experiences in trading on the LindeX and on the small, private exchanges, do only reflect how a market behaves, and the conclusion that “Second Life is a pyramid scheme” doesn’t follow. At all.

It’s finally happened folks.  Second Life’s client is open source under the terms of the GPL v2.

Some people have questioned whether or not libsecondlife will continue now that Linden Lab has open sourced the client. The answer is an emphatic –YES!

While the client is now open source, libsecondlife has a few advantages over the more complete client from Linden Lab.

libsecondlife is…

1. BSD licensed as compared to the GPL.
2. libsecondlife is has less baggage(we only do networking).
3. libsecondlife is easily cross platform in C# or java.

That’s right. The libsecondlife website is now pretty. We’ve traded in the old CMS front page for a clean wiki. It took a bit of hacking on MediaWiki to get it to play nice with us, but in the end it’s a better platform for our needs. Less frontage and more substance.

Some nice functionality with the new layout is the ability to scale down to profile tab size as well as making the site more open to the rest of the community. Hopefully it will herald the end to outdated links because somebody(me) was too lazy or forgetful to update the static pages.

Please send any issues you my have with the new layout to me at baba@libsecondlife.org.

The end times are near! Just one look at the Shirky mess will make it clear that this hype bubble has popped. Time to jump ship everyone… right? Come on! AMIRITE?

Well, no maybe not. Some others have done the job of debating this one. Read Wagner James Au over at GigaOM and Tateru Nino at the Second Life Insider.

I was prompted to write this after reading Giff’s posting Second Life skeptics — you’re right! (and wrong). Mostly the first paragraph,

We continue to see the inevitable anti-SL pendulum swing from all the hype of the last few months. Frankly, I don’t blame the detractors, and I think the skepticism is really healthy. I know lots of people who “just don’t get it” and my response is “all in good time.” I don’t expect everyone to have a need that fits the current environment, or to see the promise through some of the current limitations.

What is Second Life?

All the big hype about Second Life, but what is it really? The simplest answer someone might give you is that Second Life is some kind of game. Unless they think Second Life is the coolest game ever, it was probably said dismissively.

Oh, it’s just another online game. WOW Is way better.

Isn’t it a game though? It’s got all the components of a game. It’s used on a computer, it’s got little 3D people you can control. You can even shoot people and blow stuff up. It’s a game! But not.

It looks like a game. What makes it not a game?

It’s not a game, because without hundreds of thousands of hours of effort by the users of Second Life, there would be nothing at all In Second Life except flat ground and little avatars. A giant 3D chat room. Second Life doesn’t come pre-packed with all the planned scenarios and bells and whistles of a game. No rules of play or objectives. It’s a collections of tools and and a place to make use of them. It’s (shitty)3D modeling software, a (shitty)Software development platform, a couple thousand servers, and magic. Read more

Take a gander at this pretty sight. That’s right, the Nintendo Wii connected to Second Live(via IRC). It’s too pretty. It uses the libsecondlife IRC gateway and CGI IRC on EFnet. That’s the best we got til WiiLi releases their juice. Enjoy Pix

Using libsecondlife irc gateway to get chat to IRC where it is relayed to an IRC connected Nintendo Wii.. sexy

The Opera browser pointed at a web based CGI IRC client which relayes chat to #libsl on EFNet and then into Second Life. RAD

How?

Go ahead and try it for yourself. Join the channel #libsl, and chat! Your words will carry on the internet tubes to the libsecondlife HQ in Hooper (no longer, but it was fun while it lasted. The Wii in IRC is still cool.)

posting from the wii. mother said not to play with it too much or…

need to get SL running on this thing, at least irc.