I’ve just added a permanent page to this site, featuring a link to my “room” in Google’s new Lively virtual world. Please link to my Lively room and let me know what you think. Oh, sorry, but so far only MS Windows XP/Vista users can actually do that for now, but Google promises Mac software soon, and presumably will also have something for Linux, too.
The ability to put a 3D world in a webpage has some intriguing potential.
When I signed off last night, the 2.0 software update was still downloading. It took quite some time, and then updating the phone took another interminable period, but finally it finished. I had a bit of a scare when it told me it had to authenticate (or whatever the word was), but that didn’t take too long, thank goodness. I had nightmares of three or four days, like it took when I first bought the original phone last year on its introduction, but apparently Apple has learned from the past experience and it only took a few moments.
While I’d been waiting for the new version, I’d looked at the new Apps Store in iTunes, and had a handful of applications picked out to try once the update completed. Sure enough, I filled up over a page on the home screen with icons for freebies, and even paid small fees for a couple of apps that looked particularly useful. One, called iTimeZone, may just finally be the solution to my habitual confusion over time zone differences for meetings in Second Life, which are based on Pacific Time but which are attended by people from about 5 or 6 other time zones. This widget lets me enter a target time, and shows what time that is in whatever other time zones I choose. So there are no calculations to get confused. It remains to be seen whether I actually use it, but for US$1.99, even if I forget about it it’s no great loss.
So, roughly 24 hours after getting into the iTunes update, everything is working as advertised with my upgrade. I hope others have had similarly positive outcomes.
Ok, so for once I’m eschewing the early adopter frenzy and only updating my original-version iPhone instead of running out and buying the new one on the first day it’s available. It hasn’t been easy, either from a psychological or temporal standpoint. Right now it’s 9:30 p.m. on launch day, but I’ve only now been able to finally download the 2.0 update, and I’m still waiting for the phone to synch with my restored backup.
While chomping at the bit, waiting for Apple’s servers to catch up with the buggy first release then demand from those customers who are not as patient as I am, I’ve browsed most of the new App Store’s offerings, and even bought a song from the iTunes store from my iPhone — something that’s been possible since the last version 1.x update but that I hadn’t actually tried till now. I will probably start out with a few freebies, but there are a few little apps that I may pay for as well. It hasn’t been easy to be cool about waiting for the upgrade so I can spend my money on little apps, but the end of the tunnel is in sight now. The software and firmware are installed now, and I’m just waiting for my data to be restored. If I’d thought about it, I’d have emptied all the music and video content that is, after all, also on my computer, to speed up the process, but it should only take a few more moments now.
I was just talking to Henrik Bennetsen at Stanford Humanities Lab about his project, Preserving Virtual Worlds. So much has been happening in the homebrew virtual worlds space that it’s hard to cover it all, but we exchanged some info about various sites we’ve each visited, and talked about the possible future of these exciting developments. Henrik said he’s going to post some “bullet points” on the project wiki based on our conversation, so I won’t try to duplicate what we discussed here. We decided to save for a later discussion how all this ties in to the archiving project, but we did briefly touch on that, too. In particular, Henrik was interested in my opinion of how Second Inventory software can be used to back up content from Second Life and related open source grids.
As it happens, I left a MICA meeting to talk to Henrik, and we had just been discussing many of the same things there, although on a more concrete basis. While Henrik was interested in general concepts, the MICA group is actively working on establishing one or more servers using different VW platforms, to use for developing their astrophysics simulations in 3D. One simulation that has already been done using OpenSim software is documented in this YouTube video:
The developers of this Newtonian n-body simulation, a group in Japan called Genkii, are now working with MICA. Adam Johnson and Jeff Ames are members of the Tokyo Genkii group, and are also OpenSim developers.
Tonight yet another group I’m involved with, the ISM planning group in Second Life, will be discussing yet more aspects of the same things, how to expand our virtual museum into the growing (someday to be) interconnected metaverse.
So, all the research I’ve been documenting in this blog is starting to have some results in the real world … uh, I mean, virtual world. (It’s more and more difficult to tell the difference between them these days.)
Friday was a red-letter day. I attended an event in Second Life for an education group, hosted by Sun Microsystems, which was intended to introduce the group members to Project Wonderland. Especially exciting was the fact that Sun and its partners (which include NMC) are exploring the possibility of allowing avatars to navigate from the Education Grid running on Wonderland servers.
I wasn’t actually able to attend the presentations because the sim was full. In fact, while I was lurking on the border of the next sim, hoping to break in at some point, I ran into Larry Pixel of NMC, who also was locked out by the avatar cap, and as he told me, he was a presenter! Finally I did make it into the sim, said hello to Claudia Linden and then promptly crashed. By the time I got back, the presentations were over, but dozens of avatars were still standing around trying to figure out how to get to the Education Grid. There were IMs flying around, some of them in the hosted group’s chat window, with instructions as they were developing, and between those and the websites that we were referred to, and later messages posted to the group’s mailing list, I eventually managed to get my avatar authorized to access the grid, downloaded the necessary software, and finally logged in.
Part of my problem was that I had an out of date installation of the Java SDK on my Mac, so I had to update that, but then it still didn’t seem to work, probably because I’m using MacOS X 10.5 “Leopard” which Sun isn’t supporting yet. So, I tried running Wonderland in WindowsXP/Home in a Parallels virtual machine. Finally, it worked! I was able to move around in a few rooms in the now-familiar Wonderland server. Sadly, at that point my Mac crashed with a kernel panic, and I had to do a cold boot (probably because I was running so much stuff I ran out of RAM). But it was great while it lasted, and I’ll try it again soon.
While I was updating software, I also downloaded Sun’s OpenSolaris (open source operating system) and xVM VirtualBox (open source virtual machine software). I’ll install and report on those later.
Since my last post here, a lot has been accomplished.
Last time I wrote, I was downloading the OpenSim server software to my external hard disk via SVN. That went well, but I have to admit that the instructions for compiling and running it on MacOS 1.5 were so daunting that I deferred that until after I’d tried out the binary under WindowsXP.
It worked! I installed and ran the binary version of the open source server on WinXP, which was installed on a virtual machine running in Parallels Desktop for Mac on my early 2006 20″ Intel Core Duo iMac, and while I couldn’t do much except look around with the camera tools (since I had not configured any of the other servers — asset, inventory and avatar databases), it was quite a thrill to know that I could have my own little world running on even a laptop unconnected to the internet if I wished. (The reason I use an external disk for my virtual machines is so I can access them using my husband’s 17″ MacBook Pro or any other Mac with Parallels Desktop installed.) I logged in using a copy of the SecondLife viewer, just editing the target definition in the shortcut’s general properties window, and using the default login ID and password of “Test User” and “Password”. The target I specified in Properties, of course, was the localhost URI, http://127.0.0.1 plus the designated port, in this case “:9000″.
In an already-running OpenSim grid (OpenLife), a week or two ago I met the person who started that system, Sakai OpenLife (OL name). It was interesting chatting with him, and he gave me a tip I’ve followed up on for porting content among VWs. He said many people have had good luck with Second Inventory, an application that creates a backup on your own hard disk of objects, textures, bodyparts, etc. as long as you have full permissions for those assets. I discovered that there is a multi-avatar version available, so while it’s a bit pricey (29 Euros, vs 14 Euros for the single-avatar version), I went ahead and bought it. It does indeed work as promised, although it is a bit slow to copy a large inventory since the “folder copy” function isn’t yet enabled and items must be backed up and restored one at a time. Folder actions are promised for the next version, though.
I ran a few tests, and I was able to back up and “restore” copies of simple and linked objects from both my primary and alt accounts in SecondLife to accounts in Open Life and OS Grid. It isn’t perfect; embedded scripts don’t always make it, and when they do they must be recompiled since not all LSL functions are available in the OpenSim VWs yet, and animations also don’t seem to come across when embedded in an object. Presumably those might be uploaded and added to objects if one has the .bvh files for them, though. My coffee mugs came through with their handles and “coffee” intact and didn’t require relinking, but the “drink” animation and script aren’t there, and the little “ring” piece used for the rim of the cup wasn’t linked. I just threw away the rings since they aren’t critical, and copied the particle steam script I used in SL, recompiled it and added it to the “steam” prim, but I haven’t done anything about the animation yet.
Interestingly, once I had the backups made, I could restore inventory items from my SL alt account as well as my main account to either SecondLife or another VW with impunity. The owner’s name didn’t make any difference to the software. When an asset is “restored” to an inventory, whether it came from that account or not, the owners name becomes that of the account that it’s being restored to, not the source inventory owner’s. There is certainly some potential for mischief here, especially since I was also able to “back up” some full-permission assets that I did not create, and when they were restored my avatar’s name showed up as the creator.
The ability to “rebrand” items that I owned full permission copies of, but had not created, made me wonder what the attitude of some of the content creators in SecondLife were toward these brave new virtual worlds. Would I be able to legally use copies of fulll-perms textures I’d bought in SecondLife in other worlds? I sent that question to one of the texture store owners I’ve patronized extensively, LilyBeth Filth, owner of Textures-R-Us. Predictably, she said, “No.” Here’s a direct quote from her IM, which I think explains her reasoning and the problem very well:
Hi, Our User License does not allow customers to use them in any other virtual world including SL open source clients. The reason for this is because they would be uploaded in your name and not that of the creator. In time people will share these textures with friends (as they always have) and before we know it people are selling work created by the original artist but uploaded by other people and it creates a nightmare of a DMCA issue. We create & sell textures for SL only. Sorry. LillyBeth 2008/5/17
So, it sounds like there could well be a whole new round of rights issues to hash out, even when the dream of a mostly seamless metaverse becomes a reality. The technology is not the only thing that needs to be mastered.
While I did get Wonderland’s client to load and run finally, I was not able to run the server software because of an undefined error, and when I logged into the server being run temporarily for this test at Drexel University, I was unable to see anything except text chat, and the other people online couldn’t even see my text, although they could see my avatar. Apparently trying to run the client on a virtual machine with poor graphics support is just not going to cut it. I was using OpenSUSE Linux on a Parallels VM on my Intel iMac.
That was discouraging. The Wonderland software is available for Mac OS, but only up to version 10.4, and I’m running 10.5. Maybe I can compile the source code for 10.5, since Apple claims “Leopard can compile and run all your existing UNIX code”, but I’m not quite ready to do that just now.
However, a day or two after the Wonderland test I was reading the documentation for OpenSim when I saw that they offer a Subversion (SVN) download for MacOS X, and mentioned that OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has SVN pre-installed. So, what the heck, I pulled up a Terminal window to verify that yes, SVN is there, and keyed in the command to download OpenSim. It worked like a charm, although I should probably have done it on my external hard disk so I can play with it on Phil’s laptop while we’re driving tomorrow. Maybe I’ll do that anyway. It’s about 68 MB, which is smaller than I expected. It would certainly be fun to have my own region available to play in while we’re traveling and not online!
I finally got the Project Wonderland client to work!!
The last problem I had to surmount was the result of my rustiness on the Linux platform, not a problem with the Wonderland software. I had to rewrite the $PATH variable in my .bashrc file to make the system look for Java first in /use/local/bin instead of /use/bin, since this Linux distro (OpenSUSE) has a Gnu version of Java installed in /usr/bin (gij).
So as soon as I can get online I ought to be able to connect to Stephen’s server. All this latest troubleshooting happened as we were driving from Carlsbad, New Mexico to Big Spring, Texas where we will spend the night. The RV park there advertises WiFi, so we are only hours away from finally fulfilling this goal. Woo hoo!!
I’ve just added a link in my ‘blogroll’ (in the left sidebar) to justincc’s opensim blog. Thanks to Troy McConaghy for a pointer to that, specifically to an article in which Justin discusses distributed asset systems and open grids. Since I’m hoping to implement a server to connect to one of the grids he mentions, OSGrid, what he has to say is very interesting to me.
My own efforts toward implementing a home VW server have been progressing, but slowly. Wonderland is installed on my OpenSUSE VM after finally getting Java6 JDK to work properly, but I haven’t been able to get them to talk to each other yet. I suspect I need to roll back Java to the earlier release (update 5 instead of 6), since some dependencies seem to have fallen off the edge with the later one. I remember seeing a note about that in the Wonderland site a few weeks ago, but had forgotten in the excitement of finally finding the link to the JDK software. Sun does not make it easy to find things on their website, mainly because they offer so much that deciding exactly what it is you need can be very confusing for the uninitiated. I do have the older release downloaded, so I’ll try installing and running with that next.
It’s required a lot of midnight oil and not a few grey hairs, but I finally got Java6 JDK, JRE and browser plugin installed. They’re not on Debian Linux, as I’d planned, but on a new installation of OpenSUSE Linux. That’s the distro Sun supports for Wonderland, so I finally gave in and reinstalled it after massive agony trying to translate all the cryptic-enough instructions for SUSE to Debian. It works now, and maybe I’ll go back and apply my new-found knowledge to install it on Debian, but that will have to wait at least a day or two. First I want to get Wonderland client to work, so I can use it to login to the machine some of our MICA members have set up to play with, and change my password there. I may be able to run an iteration of the server on Phil’s laptop while we’re driving this afternoon, unless I simply sleep after staying up ‘way too late to get this done. But done it is!! Yay!
