Baba Sucks

 In the case that you don't check libsecondlife.org very often, and you actually read MY blog, check out the latest news I just posted.

Have you ever wondered what Second Life would look like rendered through an open source third party application?

I have, and now, thanks to libsecondlife developer John Hurliman, I know without a doubt that Second Life is a world of boxes flat shaded with random pastel colors! This renderer created for debug purposes is rendering a house using only a box primitive. Future updates will hopefully support more primitive types.

It's just the tip of the iceberg for 3D with libsecondlife. Also in the early stages of development is a 3D engine created by Adam Zaius that will be part of the first fully functional client using libsecondlife, codenamed Slight. Check out the Slight Roadmap to see what is planned for Slight and contribute your thoughts.

Babbage Linden recently attended the European Open Source Convention in Brussels. The Tech Conference Show caught up with him for an interview about open source in Second Life. 

He talks about the mono implementation and also mentions Linden Lab's future goal to open source all of Second Life. Licences and legal issues still stand in the way. Also, Second Life is not just a tool. It is a platform which people rely on. 

Babbage Linden's Interview at EuroOSCON

I was prompted to write this by Brace Coral, so check her out. 

So, who is Baba? That's hard….

Oldbie? Sure. Genius? That's a given. Totally Sucks? Yup. Why does anyone care? I dunno..

If you read back to the very beginning with my posting habits in the Second Life forums you would see it mostly started with stuff about open sourcing Second Life(login) … My discussions in world between friends(most of them SL super celebs cause I'm FIC )started way before that. I started asking what's wrong with Second Life(login), because we alreayd know what is right .

Why did it all stop suddenly? I didn't lose interest, that is for sure.. I joined libsecondlife . So, libsecondlife? What's that?! Oh, it's hawt h4x … You see we got this library that we are developing that is able to emulate the Second Life protocol. Yeah, so basicly we have the makings of our own Second Life client.

But Baba, isn't that against TOS? Sure, it would be if it wasn't all approved(FETED) and shit by the Lindends.

So, I got this thing going(libsecondlife) with Linden Lab where they are all like "Baba you so cool and sexy" and I've been going with that. Wait til we start emulating their servers.. Someone at Linden Lab might die over that one. You know, that guy nobody likes because he's a fucking idiot. I dunno his name because I never met anyone at Linden Lab like that.

Cool, this is the part where I run out of stuff to say becaus I've just been rambling like a moron for 10 min. I guess some people are better at that than others.

http://www.libsecondlife.org
http://www.URMYDREAMGIRL.com

So, Babbage wrote a bit about his time at Euro FOO and a silly little variation on the game petanque, only with pianos in Second Life.

Prokofy found this all quite disturbing enough to write one of her signature brain dead comments . Thank you Prokfoy! Please shut up.

Now follows the complete comment from Prokofy. Please prepare yourself.

I find petanque with pianos to be whimsical as a scene to watch like a movie or a ViewMaster; I find it disruptive and unsettling as a world *to live in* when they hurl by me and disrupt the world. I know I’m *supposed* to like it and say wow, art, kewl, but…I don’t.

I know that ‘disruptive technology’ is one of the favourite expressions of the neo technological elite; I realize all the connotations it has, good and bad, and I merely point out that disruptive is also…disruptive. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating the fine aesthetic of a piano in its place, Jim. Get one of Sue Stonebender’s pianos and enjoy its classical lines and songs, what can I tell you…

I find the difference between self-replicating party hats and spheres hurling around the world — the spam from griefers that these griefers would also like to call ‘art’ — and you deliberately playing petanque with pianos and couches to be…almost one of semantics. Not a distinguishable difference in kind? Except…one eventually crashes the grid, and the other merely crashes my expectations of a rational Second Life — a Second Life where the world qua world is valued for its worldness as much as the platform qua platform is valued for all the groovy stuff it can do.

It indicates a different mindset, a different aesthetic, a different view of the world, as bendable, breakable, expendable — because you make it. To you the opensource thrill of it all overlays the need for order and security in a virtual world that others of us with simpler and less technical pleasures and aspirations wish we could secure in Second Life.

I hope I’m making myself clear here.

Yes, alright… No, I don’t understand. Please explain to me why I should care about your world view. You see, that’s the thing about Second Life. I get to experience the world how I want to experience it.

Pianos to grid crashers, sure I follow that logic.. Semantics sure is powerful Prokofy, thanks for explaining. Groovy.

Jim Purbrick aka Babbage Linden is headed to Euro OSCON to talk about Open Source And Second Life. 

In his blog post he mentions he used libsecondlife to build a unit test framework for the Second Life message system. Also in the news, and Jim's post is qDot Bunnyhug's teledildonics system which is using libsecondlife as well.

mirror posting from libsecondlife.org for great justice 

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.

read more | digg story

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.

….