Bart in SL - Personal

Fix SL, damn it!

nospam@example.com (Bartholomew Gallacher) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:08:18 +0100

I've had enough! Since I joined SL back in 2006 the service only went down, down, down the hill... reliability is laughable, key components (asset server, transactions, teleports) are getting worse and worse from day to day, and they fail to work when you need them most!

I wonder if in my lifetime Lindenlab is going to be able to fix all those annoying bugs or if they are going to go bankrupt. Argh!

Happy rezday to me!

nospam@example.com (Bartholomew Gallacher) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:17:56 +0200

Finally! Today is my first rezday, meaning I entered Second Life exactly one year ago.

And boy, what a ride it has been. Considering that I am now somewhat of an SL oldie already and still don't have intentions to leave this platform at all.

World of SL

nospam@example.com (Bartholomew Gallacher) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 07:21:41 +0200

There's been a planet for SL based news around for some weeks already, I forgot the URL, but now again stumbled upon it, so without much further adago I present you World of SL. It belongs to Tao Takashi aka mrtopf.de.

Lame pickup lines

nospam@example.com (Bartholomew Gallacher) — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 13:06:34 +0200

Something that just happened to me at Phat Cat's:

[13:01] X: Are you a homo?
[13:01] Bartholomew Gallacher: Now what's that kind of a pickup line? That's lame.
[13:01] X: Jeez, apologies
[13:02] X: you just look like a raving woofter
[13:02] Bartholomew Gallacher: If you'd taken the short time to look at my profile you'd know that I'm partnered up with a lovely wife.
[13:03] X: Beared wedding if you ask me

The nerves of some people; such behaviour cries out for "mute me for a lifetime!"

How misunderstandings come to live

nospam@example.com (Bartholomew Gallacher) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:15:54 +0200

There's an article in the Information Week, citing Mitch Kapor:

But virtual worlds have a long way to go until they become mainstream, Kapor said. They need the equivalent of the Web application server -- building content in virtual worlds is still equivalent to hand-coding Web pages and code. They need an improved user interface; Second Life is dificult to use. They need to be decentralized, to permit creation of private spaces -- the equivalents of intranets and extranets.
Linden Lab is taking steps to decentralize. It open-sourced the client in January, and plans to allow people to put up their own servers and attach them to the main Second Life grid. They're moving to eliminate proprietary protocols. The company is driven to do this by the conviction that its biggest threat is not an existing company, but rather a future virtual world that runs on those principles.

So far nothing new, the server side is going to be opensourced sometimes, nothing new. The people of The Daily Galaxy wrote an own entry about SL, covering this theme, too, also linked back to Information Week and wrote this:

Linden Lab is currently moving towards decentralization. Since January, they have allowed people to put up their own servers and attach them to the main Second Life grid. They also want to eliminate proprietary protocols.

See the difference? Something not in the original article about already connected private servers to the grid, which is not stated at all in the original article. So - this information is false, plain and simple, as a comment states under this entry.

But guess what? This is now making its round in the blogosphere, another blog is now referring to the Daily Galaxy and stating:

Have I missed something? Do any of you know anything about personal servers attached to the Grid?

Nope, you just missed to validate at the source if this news is true or not. Of course, untrue, but this is how rumors come to birth.

What I hate: howling in clubs

nospam@example.com (Bartholomew Gallacher) — Thu, 31 May 2007 10:39:49 +0200

It happens at some places more or less, depending where you go to dance: howling of the guests. Some consider it fun. Well, it is - the first time. The second time you can live with it, but the more and more often you hear it, the more annoying it gets over the time. Why? Because it's ruining the atmosphere, it is rude behaviour and most people over the grid just use the same two or three sound clips that are around to do it.

Oh, and many don't only howl, no, when many howl the macro also makes big ASCII art of wolves and or other things in open chat, too, while howling. So that when you've disabled noise you still know that they're howling. Arg!

One of the best kept secrets: Philip Linden's office hours

nospam@example.com (Bartholomew Gallacher) — Mon, 21 May 2007 12:36:57 +0200

While most of the Lindens have office hours on a regular base and you can look them up on the web, it is of course some kind of different matter, when you want to meet the CEO of Lindenlabs, Philip Rosedale better known as Philip Linden in world.

Yes, he's got office hours, too, but normally on short notice. You won't find them on the schedule, you've got to lookup his profile and take a closer look at the tab "1st life" - that's the place to look for this information. Today there were indeed scheduled office hours at 9 AM SLT at his office in Waterhead.

So, since I still remembered the masses of avatars attending the technical town hall meeting, I was one hour before there. Well, nothing happened at all, I just sat there and talked with my friend via messages. I wondered if he really is going to show up or not, but around perhaps 9:03 AM SLT he showed up and sat down, rezzed some chairs for other guests to sit down, if they come by, and was ready to talk.

I talked a little bit with him for over 5 minutes, no other guest showed up at all, so he put his office hours in the motto of the day of the Second Life login and other avatars began to show up, too. Well, the office hour lastet about one hour, it was nice to chat with him and in the end there were perhaps 10 avatars at all. You should expect really more when the CEO of Lindenlabs moves in world and is at his office, but what the heck, it was far nicer that way.

So here's a little picture from the first minutes of the office hours, when I was still alone with him (just click on the thumbnail):

The talk was nice, he wanted to know different things, for example where Lindenlabs does right, where it does wrong, which features we'd like to see in upcoming versions and so on, but the whole bunch of us talked not only about Second Life.

Some points being discussed and insights were:

Philip Linden likes putting his office hours in that kind of manner like described to get a random set of people,
he tries to become an in world art collector,
he's been happy so far from the technology perspective with what they've been able to achieve, though he did not really knew when exactly this would all take off and he's happy that at least now people get why the virtual world is so important,
when comparing his company with a baby, he considers himself a very proud father,
another attendee raised the point that when accounts are cancelled or deactivated that the group membership of the avatar should cease, too, he considered that a good point,
he asked how our Second Life experience was this weekend in terms of lag and other potential problems,
he thinks that Lindenlabs needs a better survey tool to know when lag and stuff is getting better or worse,
he's unable to reverse gravity in a sim,
I asked him if he feels that there's now a shift toward more companies entering Second Life, he answered that he doesn't know, he thinks the majority of signups by a long shot are normal people, but there are a lot of new biz apps in SL and they don't really know since they don't have any sort of relationship with companies in SL,
he thinks it's great to have creative energy, people trying to find new stuff and that in any case marketing and advertising in SL will be more interesting than in RL,
he stated that it is hard to find the right balance between fixing and developing - true,
I mentioned to him as a possible new feature the group IM muting, he said he is going to consider that

and much more things. It was really interesting to get in touch with him and discuss Second Life with the founder of the whole show, and it seems he really wants to know the unfiltered opinion of the community and what is going well and what they should make better. That's a good policy to run a company in my opinion.

About virtual rape

nospam@example.com (Bartholomew Gallacher) — Wed, 16 May 2007 04:20:02 +0200

Wired.com asks: "Virtual Rape is traumatic, but is it a a crime?" Well, it is written behind the background of such a thing happening in Second Life and the Belgian police investigating it right now. The author of the article disagress that it is a crime, to quote her:

Rape is the ultimate perversion of sexual intimacy. Like sex, rape has mental and emotional elements that go beyond the body and the damage to the mind and spirit generally takes much longer to heal than the body.
But that doesn't make the psychological upheaval of virtual rape anywhere near the trauma of real rape. And I can't see us making virtual rape a matter for the real-life police.
It's a shitty thing to do to someone. But it's not a crime.

What myself always strikes is, of course: why the heck don't the people just logout or turn their computer off? But ok, just a thought, either way, it's not happening in real, it is still affecting the psyche of the raped person strongly.

Well, the first documented virtual rape ever happened back then in 1993 in a MUD (multi user dungeon), a text based form of online games, very popular back then and still available today. They were considered hightech back then and hip, today they are lowtech but still have their fanbase.

Here is a paper from about the implications of such things by Richard MacKinnon.

A feature I'd like to see: +V

nospam@example.com (Bartholomew Gallacher) — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 02:29:57 +0200

I've attended last week a panel discussion with some politicians and around 60 attendees. A feature I'd really like to see for such kind of events in Second Life to handle such events better is available in IRC for over a decade and more already: +V, meaning giving voice.

What's "voice" meaning in IRC? Simple. IRC is a channel based way of online text communication. Some channels tend to be rather large and for many open source projects e.g. it's still a very important way to discuss stuff and things. The channel could be compared to open chat in Second Life.

All men are created equal, but not all are equal in IRC. Every channel has its owner. The owner can per default put all other channel members on mute. This means, they can type what they want, but it's not going to show up in the channel at all. This does not hinder them from sending private messages to others, but the channel is muted first.

If someone should be allowed to speak to the channel, the owner sets the voice flag, +V. This allows then the voiced member to speak to the channel.

That's a feature I'd really like to see in Second Life, parcel based, of course. It would make discussion events much easier to handle. How? Well...

The moderator of the discussion has voice. The discussion members on the panel have voice. The audience after the event started? Has no voice. So they need to direct their questions to the moderator in the room. He decides then, which questions should be asked and either asks them on behalf of the avatar or gives the avatar voice for the time to ask. If then it gets to open discussion the moderator could either give voice to all (bad idea) or make a list of speakers and give them voice one after the other.

This sounds perhaps a little bit on the harsh side, but would really help to handle open discussion events, where not all people are on the civilised side, quite more efficiently and squashes spamming in open chat very well.

My experiences with the voice beta

nospam@example.com (Bartholomew Gallacher) — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 01:28:24 +0200

There was yesterday the announcement about the public availibility of the voice beta version of Second Life. Since I had spare time and a new, shiney headset, I downloaded the special beta client and gave it a try.

The first thing you're going to notice is that you are not seeing much difference to the normal beta clients at all. Voice capability is disabled by default, so you have to enable it by yourself in the preferences. The second thing I experienced is - it's much better to enable voice in the so called push-to-talk mode - meaning, that you're only transmitting audio into the game world when you're pressing down some key. Otherwise all people around you can be hearning echos if your soundcard is not configured correctly, many computers tend to transmit much noise, well, let's just say it's a waste of bandwidth and computing power.

I know how voice is being handled by services like Skype. Skype automatically adjusts the microfon volume while you speak, so that the microfon level is always nice mannered and not too loud. In the Second Life beta you've got to adjust the microfon volume on your own, so you should better now how to setup the volume mixer under Windows or Macintosh. Yup, there's no beta for this available at the moment under Linux.

Well, if you've got your settings then right you can enjoy the voice capabilites of the beta - or not. First you need to get to a region, though, that is voice enabled in the beta grid. There are not many available and you can see a list of enabled regions in the release notes of the beta client. According to Lindenlabs there are these voice enabled regions at the moment on the beta grid: Abbotts, Lusk, Pulveria, Spaceport Alpha, Morris, Da Boom, Tehama and Balance. BTW, it's not advisable under Windows to use the Shift-Key for enable the push-to-talk mode, since this is per default enabled by Windows to enable some advanced features for people with disabilities after pressing it fives times. Better use another key or turn those features of in the system settings of Windows.

Continue reading "My experiences with the voice beta"

Fun with crashes

nospam@example.com (admin) — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 16:48:35 +0100

It's nowadays not funny anymore to do business or events in Second Life. The rule of the thumb is: the more people are online the same time, the more instable and slower the grid becomes. We had an event yesterday in the garden, the sim is able to hold 40-42 people at the same time. The owner even requested a reset of the sim one hour before the whole thing started. And what happened: About 30 minutes after the event started, the sim was full, the whole sim crashed. We were lucky it crashed only one time, though, other sims have been reported to crash several times on Saturday while being full, e.g. for a wedding. So, what are the consequences you should make? Well, it's obvious, though SL is an excellent platform, that it has got major scaling problems at the moment. So, if you really want to do events in it or make serious business or teaching, better find dates where not so much people are online, to get a better experience of the grid. It's probable that when there are many people online that the grid is going to behave strange and has hiccups, again, and this is getting worse day by day at the moment.

I wonder...

nospam@example.com (admin) — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 19:23:57 +0100

...since Plastic Duck's real life identity seems to be revealed by himself, if now Prokofy Neva is going to sue him for stalking. Well, we're going to see...

About Twitter, the newest hype in town

nospam@example.com (admin) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 02:03:38 +0100

There's a new hype in the town called "Web 2.0" hype - it's being called Twitter. What it is about? To cite themself:

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!

So it's basically about you telling the rest of the world what you're doing right now in your pitiful life. Not more or less, period. Frankly said: why should I care about that rubbish at all? I value my privacy and for sure I am not going to tell the whole Internet what I am doing right now, where it still can be found after years and forever! For an example, how this might look like, just follow this link. So it's basically a very stripped down form of a diary with some community features around it. Period. Boooring...

The SLLA is pointless

nospam@example.com (admin) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:57:08 +0100

I've included the RSS-feed of the SLLA blog some days ago to my RSS aggregator, just because I'm curious and wanted to know this group a little better beside the media coverage they got last week. Well, I read the article about "army rally and protest." They're claiming that they want to install a government in SL made by the people. Sounds like a nice idea at first, but I've read that about 2-3 years ago the Lindens already asked the people if they want such a thing - the answer was a big NO back then. Two quotes from the article are:

Our demand is clear: we want a debate between SLLA and Governor Linden. Where was the openness for dialogue when First Land was taken away, or when Linden Labs started selling chunks of our world to IBM, Sony and Warner Brothers?

Why should Lindenlabs care at all? They are a business company, not the welfare, they need to make money, they even more need to make profit. They gain profit when people enter the world, or companies, it doesn't matter. Profit is necessary to continue the development of this platform. Well, and to the first land issue - better such a reaction than no at all, I guess. The original intention of first land was being perverted by land bots and such.

From our actions at American Apparel last year to our resistance to corporate control of our AV lives, we are building a movement together! We will strike again very soon, count on it.

Why am I reminded of Monty Python right now and must think of the People's Front of Judea? Whatever. The one who owns the technology makes the rules, plain and simple. If you are not satisfied by the rules you are free to leave the platform. I mean, why should Lindenlabs care at all about these people? It's nice in the form that they're making free media coverage for the game, makes even more nice PR when they're willing to meet with them, but the truth is - they're usefuls idiots at the moment. Not more, not less. Disposable pawns for the Lindens, so to speak. If they really would like to get rid of them they can do it anytime without much effort at all. Exactly to the point of the participation of the people Prokofy Neva (...) wrote an article some time ago in his blog called "The adventure capitalists". To cite the main passage of it:

Dear Philip, All of us who pay tier, collectively, pay Linden Lab something like $9.5-$10 million a year (I'm not sure how many total hidden/non-hidden sims there are with tier and island billing). It's as much as a venture capitalist. We're the adventure capitalists. Could we as a group get a seat on your board? We could run elections among the 42,000 mainland landowners and the thousands of island owners (about 50,000 total perhaps?) The person who was acclaimed by assembly or voted for by direct ballot could serve on your board. At least you could consider having that seat in an advisory, non-voting capacity --though the stake is real. It's 70 percent of your revenue, correct?

The first comment on this blog entry was made by Allana Dion in that way:

Dear Wallmart CEO, All of us who shop in your store, collectively, pay your company something like $9.5-$10 million a year (I'm not sure of the exact figures). It's as much as a venture capitalist. We're the adventure capitalists. Could we as a group get a seat on your board? We could run elections among the 42,000 daily shoppers and the thousands of weekly shoppers (about 50,000 total perhaps?) The person who was acclaimed by assembly or voted for by direct ballot could serve on your board. At least you could consider having that seat in an advisory, non-voting capacity --though the stake is real. It's 70 percent of your revenue, correct?

She's right there. What Prokofy Neva and the SLLA want is something like this: when you're going to a bar/pub/restaurant, it is run by an innkeeper in one way or another. But they want to make rules for the innkeeper how to run it and this is not going to work. Well, they've got no right to make these rules or any kind of claim to do so. And that's why the SLLA is pointless.

I'm an ESAK

nospam@example.com (admin) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 15:35:13 +0100

I've taken the good, old Bartle-test to see what kind of player in MMORPGs I am. Ok, some of the questions don't apply to SL, of course - like killing dragons, gaining experience points - but when you carefully answer the questions, you got a real good picture about what kind of player you are. So I am an ESAK. This means:

Based on your answers, you are ESAK. Breakdown: Achiever 33.33%, Explorer 86.67%, Killer 13.33%, Socializer 66.67% ESAK players often see the game world as a great stage, full of things to see and people to meet. They love teaming up with people to get to the hard-to-see places, and they relish unique experiences.

Some further explanations show the four categories. The categories mean:

People with high Achiever scores tend to prefer collecting points, levels, treasure and accomplishments that set them apart from other players--or simply present challenges.

People with high Explorer scores tend to enjoy finding all of the unique areas of the world, often enjoying the immersion of the experience. Finding a place with unique monsters and seeing what those monsters do is usually more fun for an Explorer than defeating the monsters themselves.

People with high Killer scores prefer the player-versus-player aspect of any game more than anything offered by the environment. They often relish the adrenaline and challenge of pitting themselves against real players.

People with high Socializer scores enjoy interacting with other people, forming organizations, and finding cooperative solutions to the challenges within the virtual world.

Although the test is now somewhat old, the results are still a very good match. If you want to try it on your own go to this page and just answer the 30 questions. That's all, done in under 5 minutes and it's fun.