Baba Sucks

Crazy trip. So tired.      Who was at the Open Source panel on Sunday?  I want to find the audio.

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.

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 Hopefully it will herald the end to outdated links because somebody(me) was too lazy or forgetful to update the static pages.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.

THis is from a blog comment I made to Robin Linden’s blog post on Copyrights and Content Creation in Second Life(still in moderation 11:30 pst)
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CopyBot is not a product that we sell or distribute. It’s a debugging tool and silly demo with a [now] obviously bad choice of name. Hopefully you won’t be seeing copy bot on SLex any time soon..

The issue at hand with copy bot seems HUGE!

“Oh my god why would they do something like that?!”

But our reason for showing this application around was partly we were proud of or achievement, and then on the other hand, if it’s this easy, we should tell people that relying on the Second Life systems to protect content is not feasible any longer.

For a while now we’ve had this project on the back burner that has been asked for so many times by content developers, an ability to back up content to your hard drive and restore it in Second Life. Basically import and export functions.

That’s the basis of CopyBot as well excepting the permission check. The problem is the difference between CopyBot and and import export tool is little more than 1 line of code that is easily commented out by even novice programmers.

What you see in CopyBot is the same capabilities that any import/export tool would have.

It’s not something easy to deal with, and we’re struggling ourselves with the issues that CopyBot has brought. It’s caused many personal conflicts as well between developers and their friends who do not see the merit in what we do.

sceneviewer created by John Hurliman. This video shows IBM’s Almaden island. He just implemented a nice new camera that allowed me to zip around the sim for this video ;0  You will have to pardon the somewhat choppy framerate. John’s video came out a bit smoother.

I was fiddling with the libsecondlife sources earlier today and got sceneviwer all nice and workie workie. Check out this comparison shot of Second Life from both clients.

Yeah I know it’s Super teh hotness! The 3D engine is written using Microsoft XNA, which sadly means it’s not cross platform ;0 OH NOES!

But wait! Here is the good news,

Mono.Xna

Description

An open-source implementation of XNA using The Tao Framework for cross-platform rendering through OpenGL and Mono. The Mono.Xna discussion forum is available here.

Status
Mono.Xna is in early stages right now, but the end goal is to allow XNA projects to be compiled and run on platforms other then Windows, without having to change any code.

Mono.Xna, was initiated by libsecondlife’s very own “That guy who does stuff on the mono project,” and aims to make all your cross platform 3D rendering woes a thing of the past.

^{GhettoTags: CLI, XNA, Mono, .Net, sexy, open-standards, open-source, your-mom}

Great work from Tao Takashi for getting this set up.

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PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 19, 2006

Plone Foundation Announces Broadcasting of the Plone Conference into Second Life

Seattle, WA - The Plone Foundation announced today the broadcasting of the Plone Conference 2006into the virtual world Second Life. It is the first big open source conference being colocated inside a virtual world. The event will be held from Oct 25-27

"We'll broadcast selected talks and tutorials each day into a virtual conference building inside Second Life. Residents who could not make it to the by-now sold-out conference can participate in virtual form. A back channel for their questions to the actual speaker will be provided, too"

The location within Second Life is Theta(154,194) and video from the conference will be streamed via Quicktime software to this location.

"We are very excited to bring Plone Conference to Second Life, and we believe we are the first open-source community to broadcast a conference here."

Read more

The Reuters news, about Reuters the news agency, continues to cause waves. Yahoo has a story on their main page covering the event, as do several other major newspapers and online news sites. The barrage of press(mostly Yahoo) has hit the Second Life web-server like a sledgehammer. 

Meanwhile, the techies seem a bit more apathetic to it all if not downright dismissive, "What's next Third Life? lawl." 

Perhaps they're not aware of libsecondlife ( http://www.libsecondlife.org ) just yet.