Baba Sucks

The 3pointD meetup is planned for today at 5PM PST(SL Time). The idea is to get a buch of people who are interested in the metaverse and virtual worlds together all at once and share their thoughts on metaverse sustainability, mash it all up and come up with some good ideas for the future of this emerging medium.

If you plan to attend, be sure to RSVP with Walker Spaight in-world or leave a comment on the 3pointD post about the meetup.

Read on for the tenative schedual from 3pointD

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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.

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

Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM met with several colleagues from around the world recently in Second Life. They met for a press briefing to discuss what effects MMOGs and other platforms such as Second Life will have on business.

About two years ago, a study conducted by the IBM Academy of Technology concluded that technologies and capabilities from the gaming world would have a very strong impact on all aspects of IT, and made a number of recommendations for follow-on activities, which we have proceeded to implement. 

To learn what is required in a practical way, we have been using the Second Life platform to conduct a series of experiments, such as holding virtual meetings on a variety of subjects with groups of various sizes.  The meeting participants are represented visually by their individual avatars or personalized icons in the virtual world.  We are very interested in understanding how best to conduct such virtual meetings.  We have learned that many of the visual clues from the physical world should be embraced in the virtual world.  For example, meeting participants should be seated facing each other, as they would normally do in a meeting, and whoever is currently speaking should gesture with his or her arms. 

More at eightbar, which is run by several IBM employees who use Second Life.

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.

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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/  

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.