Second Life

The Ordinal Amethyst Hatpin

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:34:25 GMT

I have been waffling on about this Hatpin on the PlurkThing over the weekend and really, it should now be released for Public Consumption; hence here it is. The Ordinal Amethyst Hatpin is a perfect accessory for anyone wishing to hold various parts of a hat together. As a minor extra function, it can also be used to stab people in eight different ways, with the usual custom animations, and also jab them to encourage their Rapid Movement.

There are all sorts of fascinating Historical Details existant regarding Hatpins; or, at least, slightly diverting ones. For instance, this particular Hatpin would have been illegal to wear in public (without a licence) in Arkansas or Illonois after 1908, due to it being slightly over Nine Inches in Length. Such laws do not exist in Caledon or in general upon the Grid, but I would advise Purchasers not to jab too many people in the Behind, as this may be Socially Unacceptable.

A free Hatpin, incidentally, to the first Commenter pointing out the hidden meaning in the design.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/trackback/274

RSS Management

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:43:44 GMT

Sponsored Links:

Diabetes Diet	Custom Wedding Bands		Green Interior Design
Executive Recruiter Consulting Toronto	Janitorial Services Fredericksburg	Static Electricity Control	Legal Information

** Follow Fwicki on Twitter

???????????

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 09:48:39 GMT

????????????????????????

??????????

???????????????????

4????????????????????

Notes From Second Life Views: Part 2

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:42:50 GMT

The first session of the day was led by Joe Miller, VP of Platform Development and Technology. Joe's team includes QA, release management and what we have been referring to as 'maintenance' -- the improvement of features within Second Life...

Notes From Second Life Views: Part I

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:42:50 GMT

The first Second Life Views meeting was a huge success. We had four discussions, attended by the Panel and various Linden Lab staff. I'm going to post the notes here over the next few days. Please feel free to comment,...

Kicking Off Second Life Views

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:42:50 GMT

Tomorrow is the first meeting of Second Life Views -- a series of bi-monthly meetings with SL Residents to discuss the design and implementation of new features for SL. Our first agenda ranges across several important areas -- improving the...

[UPDATE] Open Registration

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:42:50 GMT

Many SL Residents have asked why we opened registration to allow new accounts to be created without payment information, and now that we have, what we are doing to make sure that we enforce the Terms of Service. Especially, there...

The View from Boston

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:42:50 GMT

I'm sitting at Logan Airport, having spent the last two days at the Identity Mash-Up, sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The timing and focus on identity and trust building couldn't have been more perfect, given the...

Abuse Levees Holding

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:42:50 GMT

Though you may not believe it, everyone here in the Lab spent a lot of time considering the likely implications of changing the 'verification' stage of registration system before a single line of code was altered. We'd certainly see a...

Second Life Views Planning is Underway

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:42:50 GMT

We have a final list of Resident attendees for the first SL Views meeting. The eight Second Life Residents who will be attending are: Pham Neutra Oz Spade Nexus Nash Catherine Omega Salazar Jack Alliez Mysterio Kex Godel Stella Costello...

On the one hand, and on the other hand

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:21:49 GMT

On the one hand:

"Today we're introducing the beta version of a new dashboard on the Second Life website, and we want to know what you think! We fully believe that the immersive nature of Second Life is the way to go, but we're also excited about how the web can help you stay in touch with your Second Life community at times when you can't be inworld." SL Website Dashboard Beta

On the other hand:

Unable to send your message to the chat session with [RECIPIENT].

No. I am sick to the back teeth with this now. No more features. Nothing at all until basic damned functionality is fixed. Functionality which the Laboratory knows is appallingly broken. What on earth am I going to get out of a "dashboard" when I cannot even reply to people?

Perhaps we could have a redesigned Search, too, which enables us to find people with whom we cannot talk far more efficently. Perhaps a highly sophisticated listing of Groups, which lets us find organisations with common interests and then not be able to communicate with them. It could have all sorts of "AJAX" type arrangements and shaded buttons! All of which could tell us that regretfully the service did not work.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/trackback/281

Self-Examination; or, Not Protest But Preservation

Fri, 08 May 2009 21:44:22 GMT

A Thing has recently occurred to me - well, in fact, the Thing is not in itself that new, but more a confluence of Two Other Observations which I had thought Independent.

~*~

The first is that I have not been Upon The Grid an awful lot recently. This is something that does come to the Elderly - reduced Mobility - and I had thought it mostly a symptom of one of those periods of general Ennui that is known to afflict us all, and attempted to treat it with assorted Creative Linctuses. (Lincti? Lincta? Oh, Latin was never my strongest subject.) I have forced myself into Harsh Regimens of Strict Notebooking and a diet of Ink and Pencils, and Providence, or future Biographers, or more likely Puzzled Public Servants tasked with disposing of my Affairs, will be able to attest that my personal Notebooks are really quite full of all sorts of ideas; my Project List is bulging, my Tasks overflow.

Yet despite a million interesting things to do I have not actually done them. In contrast, in matters not related to Second Life I have found that I have had no issue. For instance, I have a toy project building what could be termed a "browser MMO". With this, I have had no motivational or practical issues at all, despite it being considerably less pretty and considerably shallower than many of my Second Life plans.

~*~

The second is that I despise Chat Lag. I have been through the usual phases here - firstly, Amusement:

Ha ha, my words are out of order and my sentences appear minutes after I have said them, making it impossible to communicate! Let me see if I can exploit this for Comic Effect, ho ho!

then Acceptance:

Oh well, my words are out of order and my sentences appear minutes after I have said them, making it impossible to communicate. I suppose that it is Friday*.

* please change day as appropriate

then Fruitless Anger:

Gah! My words are out of order and my sentences appear minutes after I have said them, making it impossible to communicate! This is driving me absolutely potty! It must be addressed immediately!

but really, these days it is more:

Oh. My words are out of order blah blah. So either I don't speak or I am unpredictably frustrated when I speak. (logs out)

Because of course

it is not funny;
waiting does not make it better; and
complaining does not make it better (though does not make it worse either); and
the only thing to do is react as appropriate. ~*~

"But why, Ordinal," you may well ask, "is Chat Lag enough to cause you to Log Out?" Because to be quite frank the practice of Building and Scripting and General Creation is a solitary one, and I am not by nature a particularly solitary Person. I am certainly not an astoundingly Social one, but I do both require and enjoy the company of my Peers. Simultaneously if I am to create anything I must stay pretty much in one place during the process.

Therefore, Chatter within particular Groups is essential. There is no proper substitute quite frankly; I can view Discussion Boards or IRC or Other Alternative Avenues but they take me outside of the world and distract me from my work. I would rather pick one or the other. I cannot pop across to an Inworld Area in order to chat Locally as that would take me out of my Workshop; I do not really believe that most Social Venues would be all that accommodating of many of the ridiculous things that I am known to rez.

By all means combine that with the incredible Frustration felt when one believes that one's message will be received, one spends some time and effort on it, only to have it swallowed, perhaps to be spat up again at an inappropriate moment.

~*~

The Thing that I mentioned that has Occurred to me is that actually these two matters are not entirely separate. Something makes me think "yes but I don't really want to" when I look at my Grid-related goals (I am very happy to do things on the subject which do not require me to log in - I must have some of the best-planned projects within Second Life, by now) which does not happen with other projects.

Basically, chat lag kills my Second Life, not to put too fine a point on it. Joking about it does not achieve anything. Attempting to wait it out does not achieve anything (in fact it is one thing that has gotten considerably worse as time has gone on). Complaining about it does not achieve anything either - there are JIRA issues going back to, well, the start of the Public JIRA, without action, and any complaints that I make are likely to be Intemperate and Unhelpful in any case due to my Frustration.

In a situation which one cannot affect, one must then deal with as best one can, and it appears that my instincts have decided amongst themselves that the "cons" frequently outweigh the "pros". So I do not log in because it is not an enjoyable experience. And that is that. There really is no other issue which affects my experience quite so much; prim snapback, asset failures and so on can be extremely annoying, but at least if I can speak to my peers we may share a joke on the matter. A failure of communication, and, well, I can shout at prims, but I really would consider scripting prims to share jokes about chat lag with me to be the actions of a Mentally Damaged Hermit.

~*~

At the end of all of the above, I am not convinced that stating it has advanced my situation particularly, but self-knowledge does make me feel slightly better.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/trackback/269

Kindly Do Not Carry On Camping

Sat, 23 May 2009 20:32:28 GMT

I wrote the following a while back in relation to Forthcoming Restrictions on Traffic-Related Perversions, regarding matter unaddressed in that specific Laboratory Announcement:

Camping, for instance: offering camping chairs, which are then occupied by bots belonging to somebody else, is a symbiotic relationship between landowner and bot operator. In fact, if said chairs are occupied by residents, said residents are effectively becoming trafficbot subcontractors - "crowdsourcing traffic distortion" if you will. Whether or not bots are being used is fairly unimportant, and a campsite owner could certainly claim that they were not using bots, in the knowledge that by putting out large numbers of chairs and paying money to those sitting on them, some bot operator would shortly be along.

The LindenFolk, who despite my occasional disagreements with some of their decisions are none of them Fools, quite the opposite, are clearly aware of the relation too; thus we read the following penned by Mr Jack Linden:

The policy we announced is about Traffic, how that relates to Search, and how a deliberate attempt to falsely drive up the traffic score will no longer be allowed. We know from your comments that you want Search to be fair and relevant, and we want that too. Whether a landowner uses Bots or Camping Chairs, or Camping Chairs with Bots in them, the effect is the same - the traffic score for that parcel is inflated unfairly.

Are there other uses for so called Camping Chairs other than for Traffic? If you know of some please let us know in the comments below! However, the feedback and data tells us that by far the main reason for large numbers of Camping Chairs at a location is to unfairly gain a Search advantage.

So the policy statement is that where we see a Resident unfairly increasing their Search ranking, regardless of how that is achieved, it will be considered as 'gaming'. We will give a first warning to begin with and direct people to the policy. However continued gaming can result in suspension or removal from Search listings altogether.

The part that I have Bolded is absolutely the sort of attitude that should be taken and I applaud it (though it seems peculiar that a rule based on Preventing an Activity - unfairly increasing Search ranking - should need to have it explained that yes, it does mean "whenever this is done" rather than "in a small number of circumstances that one might avoid yet carry on the same activities". I suppose this is the world within which we live, where many expect that everything must have exact criteria at the outset, rather than this sort of open-ended definition relating to intent - cornerstones of all working Systems of Justice, of course, without which there would be little point to Judge or Jury.)

If one wishes to experience a brief moment of amusement followed by increasing waves of nausea and the eventual desire to kill, I would advise reading the Comments that have been left on the linked Article, wherein many attempt to answer Cpt. Jack's request "Are there other uses for so called Camping Chairs other than for Traffic? If you know of some please let us know in the comments below!" Reading these one might be led to believe that Camping Chairs were the major contributor to the fortunes of New Residents and that Campsite Operators were Dedicated Philanthropes, donating fortunes every day to the New and Poorly-Skinned with only the minor return of distorting search results as reward.

This is Utter Bunk of course; for one thing the rates themselves are pitiful. I do recall a time when some Return could be made from sitting on the Damnable Chairs, but the rewards have declined to practically nothing with the advent of Traffic- and Camp-Bots. Ms Tateru Nino says "The most common camping rates I'm seeing at the moment are L$1/80 minutes" which conforms to the results of my amateur investigations; perhaps one might buy two frocks per month of non-stop camping with that.

And quite apart from the rewards, paying people to perform an unethical activity does not make that activity any more ethical. I have attempted to argue this very point with my brother Cardinal, in reference to his Kitten Factory, which is not, I must shamefully say, a place which constructs kittens at all; more, items involving kittens in their manufacture; kittens as Input rather than Output.

"Silly girl," he routinely replies, "my Factory provides gainful employment to literally dozens of people. Would you deny them the four shillings and sixpence (a very competitive wage in the current climate I might add) that they receive? I thought you Socialist sorts were concerned for the Workers! This is the Failure of the Left, you know, that they care more about kittens than people." And then he laughs in that annoying way that he has. However I do not consider his argument at all valid, and neither do I consider that the arguments for Camping Chairs pass muster.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/trackback/271

A Warning regarding Alpha and Release Candidates

Sun, 10 May 2009 14:33:56 GMT

I was most Helpfully Informed by a Perspicacious Resident recently that the Galvanic Swordstick appeared to be behaving in a somewhat unusual manner when viewed with the latest "Release Candidate" - in that parts of it were not Appearing and Disappearing as would otherwise be expected, so that upon drawing and sheathing and such, one appeared to be holding two Swordsticks at once.

On closer examination this is indeed the case - and what is more, the same issue will undoubtedly affect, well, to be quite frank pretty much every Item that I Sell, as most of them have parts which do Appear and Disappear according to the item's current Use.

I make this Entry as a warning to those who choose to view the Grid with the Release Candidate "1.23.1", as there is nothing that I can or am inclined to do about the situation. It seems that this Candidate is not appropriately Updating as to the current Alpha State Of Things. There are JIRA issues on the subject (for example, VWR-13097), the Linden Types are Aware of it and no doubt making all efforts to Do Something About It before this Candidate is Anointed as the next Official Viewer. Clearly it cannot be released in such a state! I am sure that a fix will be forthcoming post-haste and mean no LindenCriticism here - it is a Release Candidate after all.

I am however aware that some folk are using the Release Candidate on a Day To Day basis, for reasons best known to themselves, and those bold explorers should be notified of the situation, and perhaps it might be suggested that they Vote for the issue as being one of importance. Such a thing can never hurt.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/trackback/270

Slight Return; thoughts on a Lightweight Interface to Drupal

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:55:29 GMT

I wrote previously that I had done some reasonably considerable work integrating Drupal with Second Life, which of course means integrating the Drupal System with the Linden Scripting Language.

LSL has the llHTTPRequest function, of course, by which one can send information to Drupal (or indeed any other system on the Wider Aethernet). The main issues that I have encountered, though, are:

The sum of data to be sent and received. A typical Drupal page is really quite enormous and unsuitable for the standard LSL limit of 4096 characters. Furthermore, many existing interfaces to web services, involving the XML or JSON formats, are unsuitable for use with LSL, which really takes an age to do any sort of String Processing. Both request and response need to be of very short formats.
The problem of authenticating who, indeed, the person sending the request is. Sending the registered Drupal username and password hash is quite a simple thing to do, but in most cases, this is unsuitable for use with LSL. People do not wish to have to enter usernames and passwords into scripts or notecards unless they absolutely cannot help it.

In the past, with Rezzable's "Avatar Linking" system, I solved this by giving the resident concerned the ability to create a Drupal user account for themselves if they did not already have one, automatically from the grid, with the entry of a few details such as their Email Address; the name and key of the resident was passed along with this, and stored in Drupal. Other Scripted Gadgets which they might use in future then authenticate themselves with some sort of Master Password, and pass the key of the operating avatar along with other data. The Drupal system looks the appropriate user account up by matching the key to stored and confirmed ones, and carries out operations for that user - for instance, leaving comments on the node for a particular Artwork.

Both of these are common issues across all sorts of Systems for which one would wish to use Drupal, and it occurs to me that a Common Framework would be useful in this instance. I am moved to create such a framework for my personal and professional use, and also the use of anyone else who might be interested.

The most important features of this framework (which I have been calling "Slight" - SecondLife Lightweight) as I seem them are

that it can receive data easily, pass them on to other modules for use, receive responses from those modules, and return the responses to an LSL script in a format that can be quickly processed and understood;
that it has the ability to authenticate users and pass the details of the authenticated user on to sundry other Drupal systems. This authentication could be performed by the main module itself as well as other, optional ones which folk might choose to write.

Those familiar with the Drupal Beast will be aware of the concept of a "hook". Invoking a hook allows other modules which are aware of it to perform actions on data passed along with that hook. I am thinking along the lines of having two hook invocations here - firstly, one for authentication, which passes along the data sent and allows other modules to modify a user object. Then, one for the action to be performed, which allows modules to perform actions on the basis of those data and the authenticated user, and add responses, which will be passed back to the LSL script to be delivered to the resident.

Perhaps an example might be of use here. Say one wishes to have a system which allows the creation of "blog" entries via LSL. The LSL script would take the key of the avatar (this is unforgeable) and combine it with a hardcoded password to produce a hash. It would send this to the Slight interface - which possesses a specific URL, say http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/interface/slight/ - along with the avatar's key in plain text, and the actual text of the blog entry. Our Drupal administrator here has three relevant modules installed - the Slight framework module, a Slight Second Life authentication module, and a Slight blog entry module.

Slight would initially believe this entry to be unauthenticated, as there would be no information as to the Drupal username and password. It would, however, invoke a hook for authentication with a missing user object, giving other modules the opportunity to authenticate whoever it was. "Aha!" the Slight Second Life authentication module says, "this person has sent a hash of key and master password which I recognise - I will modify the user object to correspond to the user whose avatar has this key". And it proceeds to do so.

Upon receiving the results of the invocation of the authentication hook, Slight then sends out another, "action" hook, with the user object that has resulted from the authentication process. The Slight blog entry module at this point says "aha! I see that there is an authenticated user here" (this user having been provided by the Slight Second Life authentication module) "and that the command is to add a blog entry. I will do such a thing, and, if it works, send them back a message saying that it has been posted, and giving them the URL of the new entry".

Slight takes the results of what has happened after the action hook invocation, and passes anything appropriate back to the requester. This might be highly technical data for use by a script, or it might (in this case) be a simple message to be sent to the owner via llOwnerSay or some such. Whatever it is, it sends it back. The LSL blogging widget script takes this response and, here, sends the confirmation to the resident, who no doubt proceeds directly to the page concerned to see which words they have misspelled.

This sounds like a rather involved process but in practice, the time required would be tiny fractions of a second for all.

As a note, Slight would not be simply of use for Second Life. Since it would be simply receiving GET parameters and sending a plain text response, it could be used by any system.

One significant use that I believe would be very handy is for use in Opensim, which currently (as far as I am aware) has no particular permission system set up. Upon login, the Opensim server itself could request the current role of an account linked to an avatar from a Drupal system, for use in determining whether that avatar could enter parcels or regions or change settings or whatnot. Changing an avatar's access would then be as simple as ticking a few boxes in a form that was produced by the appropriate module. This is in fact something which I hope to implement in practice, and as soon as such as thing is ready, I shall mention it on the appropriate site. (To be fair, if I have been working on things in Company Time, details of them really should appear on Company Blogs, though Slight as I envisage it will certainly be open source and so on.)

I would be interested to read any Comments or Criticisms that anyone might have regarding this Proposed Framework, so please, if you have any, by all means leave them here. I shall post here once I have the actual Code for the system in any Working State, which should not take very long to do.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/trackback/268

Rampant Traffic Bottery to be Eliminated? Perhaps, a Little.

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:07:08 GMT

The figure in the foreground is a notorious and exploitative Bot, and requires Immediate Removal from Everything. Do not trust it!

Almost everyone agrees that using Bots to manipulate traffic (and therefore Search rankings) is unfair. Not only with respect to Search itself but also due to the load on Mainland Region resources and how that can impact other Residents in the area.

Therefore we are setting policy that attempting to gain an unfair Search advantage, by the use of Bots to inflate the Traffic for a parcel, will be considered a violation. This policy applies to both Mainland and Private Estates as both are represented in Search. (Conclusion to the Blog Post on Bots)

And few would argue with that. (Although the few, pretty much exclusively those selling bots and using bots, do sometimes seem to be attempting to make up for their fewness by repetition.) I would say that this was an extremely Welcome Move; I am having great difficulty in constructing credible arguments opposing my "Trafficbots Are A Bad Thing" position that I might address in the form of Dialogue. Traffic is meant to be an indication of popularity. Populating an area by artificial means makes this statistic, one of the few we have access to, meaningless.

In general I certainly approve of the attitude - previously displayed in the context of Advertisement Farms - that it is the behaviour that matters, not some breach of arbitrary technical rules. Are you attempting to distort traffic statistics by the use of automated facilities? Then you should be prevented from doing so. No, there will not (one would hope) be a series of technical Rules, the Letter of which will be obeyed and which can thus be ingeniously bypassed - Motivation is the key.

I can, though, see that this particular Announcement is not really complete. Certainly it should eliminate those dismal boxes of twenty or thirty homonculi, locked up in a cube at four thousand metres in height. However, the continued presence of Traffic as a statistic will lead to other methods of Gaming becoming more popular, if unchallenged.

Camping, for instance: offering camping chairs, which are then occupied by bots belonging to somebody else, is a symbiotic relationship between landowner and bot operator. In fact, if said chairs are occupied by residents, said residents are effectively becoming trafficbot subcontractors - "crowdsourcing traffic distortion" if you will. Whether or not bots are being used is fairly unimportant, and a campsite owner could certainly claim that they were not using bots, in the knowledge that by putting out large numbers of chairs and paying money to those sitting on them, some bot operator would shortly be along.

Still, there are other hopeful signs:

Going forward we are going to look at ways to allow you to voluntarily identify to us that an account is a Bot, so that we can remove it from Traffic completely.

Superb!

We will continue to strive toward providing more statistical data to land owners, including the number of visitors they receive.

Excellent! And extremely overdue! "Yesterday" would be a good time for this to happen, I would say.

However, the way these statistics relate to Search ranking will be changing. In the next few months, we will be making both technical and policy changes to the way relevance and ranking works in Search. The "traffic" score will be only one aspect of the ranking logic, and it will be scrubbed and weighted to account for gaming vectors.

Potentially a Good Show depending on the details! Although I thought that this was supposed to already have happened.

In any case, now I believe I shall return to the company of my new-found friends Ngr, Eops and Sfdjk. There is after all the chance of winning a Linden Dollar every four minutes, you know.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/trackback/267