Baba Sucks

From wired.com

Finally, qDot Bunnyhug, who is known outside of Second Life as robotics engineer and "intimate interfaces" blogger Kyle Machulis, presented the first open-source interface for controlling sex toys from within the virtual world. (Check out a demonstration of the interface here.)

"I created the first Second Life sex-toy interface in July of last year and had it running within three days of creating my account," qDot says. "Actually, it's why I started my Second Life account."

He describes that first attempt as "really bad," and says it limited you to changing the vibrator's speed just once per second, which resulted in a stuttering effect in the vibrations on the other end. "You could update the values once per second, and there were ways to smooth the transition between the power levels, but it still didn't feel quite right," he says.

Yet he had proven to himself (and to horny geeks around the world) that the concept was viable.

Integrating physical machines with virtual worlds has many more applications than sex, of course. QDot's next project was to connect an exercise bike so you could power your in-world vehicle while getting a good workout, thus ensuring your hotness if your Second Life romance migrated offline. (And why this is not standard equipment at every gym across America, I have no idea.)

But he couldn't quite stay away from the vibrator interface. He built a new version entirely with open-source code (from libsecondlife.org). It enables you to send 10 to 20 updates per second to the vibrator, resulting in much smoother speed transitions than the first release. It also offers anyone with time and coding ability the chance to customize their own teledildonics system.

This news excited not only the convention crowd, but the Second Life residents who were watching the panel through the live video stream online. Suddenly, the Rez Trance Vibrator shot to the top of everyone's wish list. ("I seem to have single-handedly doubled their price on eBay," qDot told me apologetically over the phone.)

 Your software is not mainstream until someone uses it for sex.

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Support everyone's favorite sexy CEO ;0 GO PHILIP! <3

Web 2.Ooh round 4: Chris MacAskill vs. Philip Rosedale

Drake Bacon of Second Life just created a  Linux live CD based off of Knoppix that installs Second Life right off the bat. It only has video drivers for nvidia cards so no workie for the ATI users out there. Maybe something can be done about that in the future.

So, if you have a nividia card and you want to try Second Life on Linux you can get it from http://www.libsecondlife.org/sl/  

Gwneth Llewelyn knows a lot about a lot of things, and I think it would be in your best interest to take the time to read her blog .

And now an excerpt from her latest entry. But, don't read it here. GO READ IT AT HER WEBSITE!

Crowdsourcing in Second Life

Crowdsourcing, a new buzzword introduced by Wired magazine's Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, is a new trend popularised by several modern companies, mostly associated to software houses and Internet-related businesses, although allegedly Procter & Gamble use it as well. It could be described as empowering amateurs — companies delegating tasks to their customers, sympathisers, and enthusiastic users of their technology, instead of hiring professional help.

The trick here is getting all this work for free — effectively trading-off the cost of getting a small, hired, well-paid team to do those tasks in-house (or outsourcing the job to other companies), by exchanging it with a host of enthusiasts who are willing to donate their free time and skills to solve problems without requiring payment.

Naturally enough, companies using this model have different corporate cultures. We moved from a model where everything was done in-house (like in the 1950s — the best example being the corporations in Japan), to an outsourcing model that became more and more predominant after the 1980s. This was the requirement for changing a mindset at the Board level: companies don't need all the know-how to be employed, it can only be managed and controlled, but it can be available outside the company.

Crowdsourcing goes another step, and is very likely the result of the end of the Internet bubble and the so-called "New Economy" and the boom of open-source solutions that popped up after the bubble burst, to replace the failing companies that brought good ideas into the market, but weren't able to capitalise on them (I'm still amazed at how so many people dismiss the "push technology" from the failed PointCast, when as a matter of fact it was seamlessly replaced by a currently wide-spread system — RSS feeds and syndication!).

At some point in time, some companies came to a dilemma: to grow, they need more human resources to develop their technology (or invest in more R&D). Since their customers outnumber their staff by as often as 100,000:1, why shouldn't the customers bear the burden of doing most of the work — for free? :) 

….

Opening up the protocol… not the application

Crowdsourcing the technology (the "eye candy") is something slightly different, and everything seems to point towards that. We seem to be at a point where LL is finally opening up the communication protocol, not shyly using the libsecondlife project, but by rewriting it in a way that it can be published. In a sense, Second Life, the platform for creating 3D content hosted in a persistent virtual world, will become Second Life, the open API for integration of applications within the grid.

Right now, the opposite approach is quite possible — calling external applications from Second Life. We have several ways to do that, and have had so for several years now.

The next step is a full integration: having your own applications "remotely control" things inside the virtual world. The first approaches are for the development of NPCs (Non-Playing Characters; "robots" interacting with users and other items, using increasingly complex Artificial Intelligences); integration of SL's IM chat into an universal chat system; and eventually, step by step, replacing the whole SL client interface with your own. Ultimately, this will lead to new and different SL clients, all integrating within the same grid. But you would be able to pick your own — not the one Linden Lab provides.

The beauty of all this is not that Linden Lab is developing all this. By opening up the protocol, Linden Lab is now able to provide the users with the ability of doing the work for them. So, instead of having people ranting and yelling for new features (the vast majority of those are client-side changes), users will be able to deploy them by themselves. They won't need an open source version of the client. All they need is a complete API to the Second Life communication protocol.

…. 

John Hurliman blogs about Patterns in the LindeX and some kind of thing with a thing.. I don't know what it means, but it has graphs so it must be true.

 The six top sell offers on the LindeX market right now. A linear regression shows a T-value of -18.889, well outside the significance test at 99.9%. An R-squared value of 98.9%; I wonder if this is temporary or a reoccurring pattern of sell volume in the market? Could it be Linden Labs using the new sell option in the terms of service? I’ll have to keep my eye open for this more often.

A lot of cool people were at Lang.NET 2006. The most notable of them to me were Miguel de Icaza and Jim Purbrick. Miguel is notable for being the founder of the Mono and GNOME projects. Jim Purbrick is everyone's favorite Mono hacker at Linden Lab. It appears that Second Life caught the eye of attendees at Lang.Net. After the symposium John Lam posted to his blog an entry titled Why Second Life is Important.

Jim Purbrick writes to the Second Life blog,

…Cory and I presented Second Life and our work integrating Mono at the start of day three. Cory’s introduction to SL did a great job of convincing people who had heard of Second Life that they should take a closer look. John Lam, who is doing really interesting work with RubyCLR is now looking in to running RubyConf as a mixed reality event in Second Life. John was also great fun to hang out with and did a great job as resident photo journalist.

I was initially concerned that the collection of hacks I presented for embedding Mono in SL might appall people, but the consensus seemed to be that they were neat hacks and they generated a lot of discussion about potential future enhancements to the CLR. A lot of discussion at the conference was about supporting dynamic languages like Ruby which, like Second Life, would benefit immensely from support for continuations in the CLI. Hopefully we’ll see them in the future.

The talk went down so well that Thottram Sriram asked me to repeat it on Friday for the CLR team at Microsoft, which was also well received and generated another collection of tips for integrating the CLR based on their recent experiences with the CLR integration with SQL server…

Miguel sums up Linden Lab's presentation this way,

Cory and Jim talked about Second Life, the current scripting system used in Second Life and their efforts to embed the Mono VM inside Second Life. The first part of the presentation was done by Cory and he presented an overview of Second Life and the audience was hooked on the virtual world that they have created. They had to stop answering social questions about Second Life so we move could into the actual technical details.

Jim, who is a blast, introduced the technical challenges that Second Life has on scripts. They need to be able to load and unload thousands of scripts in a continuously running process, and they also need to stop scripts at any point to either suspend them or to move to another computer.

Second Life maps computers to areas of land, so a computer is in charge of running all the simulations, physics and scripts for a given portion of virtual land. When a person crosses the boundaries the scripts have to migrate from one machine to the next machine.

Today the scripts running on Second Life are a bit slow, so they are looking at Mono and the CLI as a way of providing more speed to their users and hopefully allow developers to write in other languages other than their Linden Labs Scripting Language.

They have a compiler that translates their scripting language into CIL bytecodes, and the preliminary results give a performance increase between 50x and 150x faster execution with Mono.

The challenge is to stop and save a running script. This is something that is relatively easy done with their scripting language, but it becomes trickier with the CLI.

Their implementation instruments the generated CIL assembly to allow any script to suspend itself and resume execution on demand. This is a bit like continuations, the main difference is that the script does not control when it is suspended, the runtime does. The instrumentation basically checks on every back-branch and on every call site whether the script should stop (in Jim's words, "eventually, you run out of method, or you run out of stack") and if it must stop, it jumps to the end of the method where a little stub has been injected that saves the state in a helper class and returns.

A very clever idea. Hopefully the slides for the presentation will be posted soon.

Following my attorney's advise I have obtained a Second Life account.

Update: Catherine Omega blogs about  Miguel and Lang.Net here and Tao Takashi here. Tao's post harkens back to a blog post by Robert Scoble's On not getting Second Life. My own follow up to Scoble and his commenters was Don’t get it? You don’t have to… Yet. It's people like Miguel de Icaza and John Lam who need to "get" Second Life. 

The blogosphere is sitting on the edge of their seats right now, waiting for Catherine Omega to make that first post to her newly created blog. Already the comments have started to stack up in the queue of wordpress's default "Hello World" post. One can only imagine the things that will appear there in the next few minutes.

 About Catherine Omega

Catherine Omega, having joined in closed Beta, is one of the oldest remaining Second Life users who has maintained a constant presence throughout the years. As a proficient builder and scripter, she became a member of Tyrell Corporation, the group who created Nexus Prime and Gibson.

She co-founded and currently edits the LSL Wiki (http://secondlife.com/badgeo) - the wiki where people can collaboratively document Second Life's built-in scripting language, LSL. Her profile there mentions that "Catherine Omega is (apparently) the most dangerous woman alive. She is probably standing behind you this very moment." - this was originally said of her by Philip Linden.

It is thought that she was the original inspiration behind the fictional Echo Omega character, due to the incredible coincidence of Echo having an Omega surname, and a "real" name of Kat.

_{From the Second Life History Wiki}

Update:

Cat Omega has posted her first entry titled state_entry(). I am in awe of her unmatched greatness in all things. Go check it out!