Bygone Picks II: Corsair Peninsula

For the next expired Pick in my Picks, I have a number of vague memories of questionable accuracy. I remember hanging out in Warmouth Infohub (a place I hung out alot when new, back when it was still open for rezzing and gleefully chaotic), and a comparative oldbie appeared and offered a musical performance of some kind (playing some nice prim instrument, I think) up on the stage. Her (his?) home region was down, apparently, and she was going around giving random performances elsewhere.

I looked at her Picks, this memory continues, and in there I found Corsair Peninsula, in Dogfight Atoll.

The parcel text in this Pick says “The Crashed Hull of the Famed Battle Zepplin Pandora, As Well as Furrtune Hunter Nathan ZackFurry’s Fated Grave.”, to which I’ve added “(Awesome build in general.)”.

And it was. Again as I recall, I TPd in and walked around, down an airstrip and into some ruined retrotech structure, out again to find two Residents with one or more aircraft standing there talking, and I talked to them, complementing the build. The more striking one, as I remember, was an anthropomorphic cat, whose eyes were subtly shedding tears of blood.

(Nowadays a few clicks would have told me at least whether they were prim or particle; back then I was just amazed and baffled.)

I explored more of the sim, and ran into a King and Queen of Pirates (or something like that) up among some zeppelins and floating platforms. I came across the cat-person again, in a different fascinating build way up above the ground, and ended up seated at a table with the cat-person and various also-fascinating associates, talking about everything and nothing, and thinking (as I have frequently over the last few years in SL), oh wow, this is indeed the place.

Now my memory also says that the cat-person was Kriss Lehmann. The fact that that person, and the Kriss Lehmann that I interviewed for the VAA a few months later, and the Kriss Lehmann that is now the brains behind Straylight Botanical, are in some ways all very different from each other doesn’t mean that the memory is wrong. This is SL, after all! :)

The Pick, as it currently sits in my Picks, says “No Parcel, (Unknown Region) (192, 216, 28)”. The LM, acquired on 24 December 2006 (just a week after my first rezzing), says “Corsair Peninsula, Dogfight Atoll (240, 210, 616)”. I don’t know why one location name was lost and the other survived! But under either name it is now lost to the mists of time (unless someone can point me at it having moved somewhere else), replaced by all sortsa other fascinating stuff.

So what should I put in my Picks to replace it? Maybe Pteron. Assuming it’s still there… :)

Fast, easy, fun!

Thanks to Ahuva, I actually attended (most of) Philip’s talk today (via treet TV, I think, although I can’t find any record of it on the website). Mostly I attempted to cause amusing things to appear in the live Twitter scroll below and to the right of the video, while letting his soothing words wash subcognitively over me, but I did notice that he said that the new design goals for SL are “Fast, easy, fun!”.

Which, as I immediately recognized, belongs on a tee shirt.

So!

You can now get this shirt, the texture used to make it (so you can make your own variants), and two other classic Dale Innis “tee” shirts (“Light Sweet Crude” and “nice 2 meet u!! wanna cyber?”), all full-perm, for a mere 30L (i.e the texture upload fee), on xstreet SL (ha, I spelled it right!) here:

FAST, EASY, FUN!

Woo an’ woo! :)

Update: Impressively, it seems I was not the first. However, only mine is magenta!

LL customer survey designed by idiots

Okay, usually I avoid Lab-bashing, ’cause I know firsthand that what they are doing is real hard, and I adore the end-product.

But in this particular case…

I’ve submitted two tickets lately, one about the lag in Vallone where my Zindra land is, and one about the tons of abandoned land in Hughes Rise. On the first, I eventually got a belated note saying that the region had been restarted since I submitted my ticket, but if it happened again I should feel free to contact Live Help for faster service. On the second, as far as I can tell no human has looked at it in the five weeks since I opened it.

So today I get an email from the Lab asking me to fill out a survey about my recent use of support. I follow the link, and it’s a nice small one-page survey with some freeform input fields, so I check boxes and write significant stuff in the input fields, and press submit. And I get back the form again, with a nasty red error box saying helpfully:

Error:
  Satisfaction overall explanation: Value cannot exceed 255 characters

I mean, words fail, eh? It’s an absurdly small limit in the first place, and not telling the customer about it until after they’ve tried to give you more than 255 characters of information is just actively user-hostile.

So I curse, reduce the size of my longest input to under 255 characters (thus making it less valuable to the Lab), and press Submit again.

Error:
  Satisfaction overall explanation: Value cannot exceed 255 characters

I curse louder. Maybe the total length of all the input fields on the page can’t be more than 255 characters?

So I pare them down to the bare minimum, and press Submit again.

Error:
  Satisfaction overall explanation: Value cannot exceed 255 characters

Nope, apparently you get only one chance, and if you ever go over 255 characters, the page will just taunt you with the fact forever, and not let you submit.

Just because I am such a nice guy, I close the browser window, go back to the original email, click the link, and fill out the whole form again, carefully keeping my responses short.

This time, Submit works.

And I send off a peeved letter to support at secondlife dot com, and vent in my weblog.

Sheesh!

Bygone Picks I: Clanger’s inventions

A friend pointed out to me today that some of the interesting-sounding places in my Picks no longer exist, at least not at the same places. And that’s true!

In a way it’s sad, that so many lovely and fascinating places vanish from the world, from the Grid. On the other hand everything is ephemeral, and as long as new lovely and fascinating places keep appearing, there is really nothing to mourn, and letting go is a good skill.

So I told the friend that I would weblogify on some of the vanished ones, and replace them with new ones. And here we are!

I think the very first Pick I ever put into my Picks was for “Clanger’s inventions”. (Punctuation and capitalization not mine.) The landmark for it in my inventory was acquired 15 Dec 2006, just about three weeks after I rezzed.

It occupied the entire region called (wait for it) “Clangers Inventions”, which no longer seems to exist. The parcel text says “Clames Clanger, Clanger’s inventions, Clangers Inventions (134, 133, 41)”; Clames Clanger, who I believe was the owner and creator, no longer seems to be in search. How time flies! How everything changes!

I remember the region being a bold riot of color and motion and secret hidden things. There was a rotating central pillar with a secret elevator under it that led down to a subterranean sea. There was some sort of ride that would push you through a series of push-points, from which you would ultimately tumble out of the sky. There was a circle of seats that, if touched in the right place, would rise into the sky where there was… something or other. I think, if I’m remembering right, that I came upon RacerX Gullwing there, and that he had maybe built some of it also. My comment in the Pick is just “Way cool place.”

On 17 December 2006, I put this picture on flickr, of me dancing in the sky above the sim:

Seeing that picture and thinking of the place reminds me how it was in my first weeks in Second Life, still amazed and dumbfounded by the wonderfulness of it all.

Not that I’ve stopped being. :)

But now I am going to remove that Pick from my Picks, so that (as my friend pointed out) I can add more things that Pick-followers can actually visit.

I think maybe for this first one I’ll put in pointer to the Hughes Rise park…

Update: While looking for the LM for Clanger’s inventions, I came across a notecard in inventory that reminded me that I wrote up Clanger’s inventions for the VAA weblog, ‘way back when. Apparently I found it in the first place by following picks! How very appropriate.

I iz a merchant!

Brief self-plug (unlike all the other postings here hahahaha): having finally been sufficiently assured by various friends that the Thingmaker is a thing that could be sold, and that selling things on xlstreet slstreet xstreet SL is easy, and having in a burst of realization figured out how to set the perms so that the Thingmaker can be no-transfer but the Things that it Makes end up full-perm, I have put it up on there for the utterly random price of 175L.

And three people I don’t know have already bought it!

How cool is that?

Selling stuff is really easy (although I hear xslstreetlsx is soon going to be replaced by some entirely different thing, so who knows). What else should I sell?

I have some Amusing “Tee” shirts I made once…

:)

Synergy

If you’re reading this sufficiently close to (or distant from) the time I’m posting it, you’ll see that there’s a new header on the ol’ weblog here, involving two of my more common forms wearing some wild and rather npirl hairs, or hats, or headdresses, or something.

I’m very fond of this banner, first because it fits so cleanly into the rest of the weblog design and I just like the image, and second and vaster because of the story behind those headgears.

I posted the other week about an amazing outfit that I’d gotten at alpha.tribe, and about the alpha.tribe line itself and how refreshingly different it is from the run of the SL mill. I also linked to the alpha.tribe weblog.

Well, I’m guessing that Alpha Auer followed the referer links back to here, and looked around and came upon various posts about the Thingmaker, ’cause I got a very nice communication wondering if a copy might be available. Being utterly flattered, I said sure and sent one along.

Well! While I’ve never seen much of anything but sometimes-diverting abstract shapes in what the Thingmaker makes, the content creators at alpha.tribe apparently looked at the same things and saw… content!

That’s me, in the alpha.tribe store, wearing a new alpha.tribe headpiece that uses a bunch of Thingmaker-arranged prims! How cool is that?

That one above is “Array”. Here is “Magnolia”:

And here is (probably my favorite) “Pillow”:

(I don’t have it positioned quite right on my head; when positioned right, the forehead is even awesomer.)

All of them come in like four different colors; here’s the opposite color of Pillow:

I am bouncing up and down and squeeing constantly since I first saw them. :)

Here’s the Alpha Tribe post about them (which says very generous things about the Thingmaker), and here’s the Alpha Tribe store where you yourself can buy some. (Disclaimer: if you do so, I will probably get some of the money, because they are wonderfully generous.)

Now ppl are encouraging me to sell Thingmakers on xstreet SL or whatever that thing is. And I might do that! If I can figure out how to get the permissions right. And if I don’t get distracted by something shiny!

Random collisions and ad hoc collaborations like this are one of the big things I love about SL…

Body of a Woman

Pleased to announce the opening of another show by Callipygian Christensen, SL photographer and DJ and generally whip-smart and wonderfully creative person.

As you can see in the comely picture there, the show is called “Body of a Woman”. As you probably can’t quite read, it will run from July 26th (that’s tomorrow! or actually today! depending!) to August 22nd, in the Palais Orleans Photography Studio, located in Tasogare.

I haven’t yet seen the images that will be presented in this show, but Calli has not disappointed her fans so far. :) So I plan to be there, and I recommend that you do the same…

Why all those profile-image display things broke

Here is a fact about LSL, the Linden Scripting Language that drives so many clever and wonderful (and also boring and annoying) things in second Life:

There is no LSL function to allow a script to get or display the profile picture associated with a random Resident’s profile.

But, but, I hear you say, what about all those profile-pic boards in stores and clubs and things that display the profile pics of random vistors (sometimes after asking you for your permission, sometimes not). What about them?

Ah, I reply, those work by some clever hacks, using LSL’s ability to read web pages in order to read some stuff from pages off the web and, in a way that usually happens to work, infer from that the ID of the texture that is the profile pic of a given Resident, which can then be displayed on the face of a prim.

And note the “usually happens to work” in the above. As is clear from a recent JIRA entry, it doesn’t always work, and in fact it has recently stopped working, mostly or somewhat, in various ways.

The Hack

First, I will natter on a bit about the clever trick that’s used to display profile images. I was amazed when I first saw one, because I knew very well there was no direct LSL “get me the profile image for resident XYZ” function (although it’d be nice if there were).

On the other hand, there is an afaik little-known Web copy of Resident profiles and various other things, on the host world.secondlife.com. I don’t know how you get to them via the Web normally, from say the main SL website, but I do know that if you stick the ID of any Resident who hasn’t turned off “show in search” on their profile, after the URL stem “http://world.secondlife.com/resident/”, you’ll find the Web copy of their profile.

For instance, my SL ID is 8a123731-b0cb-47e7-90c0-6ed49aeaff58, and so if you follow this link you will find the Web copy of my profile.

On that Web copy of my profile there is a Web copy of my profile pic (aren’t I attractive?). If you look at the HTML for the page, or otherwise ask your browser nicely, it will reveal that the URL of the image is something like:

http://secondlife.com/app/image/48cc0f84-7f35-3013-c05d-eb05237942f7/1

Now that “48cc” thing there looks like an ID itself, and in fact it is, and if you stick a script into a prim that says:

llSetTexture(“48cc0f84-7f35-3013-c05d-eb05237942f7”,ALL_SIDES);

that fortunate prim will be covered by my profile pic.

And now, since LSL does contain a function for reading web pages (well, to be strictly accurate, for reading the first 2048 characters of web pages), it seems that once a script has a Resident’s key (which is easy to get if the Resident is anywhere nearby), it can fetch the Resident’s Web profile page, read that to find the image URL of their profile pic, extract just the key part, and stick it on one or more faces of a prim for display. (Assuming that the image key is always in a recognizable place, and always in the first 2048 characters of the page.)

And that is in fact exactly how they work!

And that “assuming” there is exactly why they recently stopped working. :)

The Breakage

There were actually two reasons these scripts stopped working: first the Lindens did something wrong in their firewall rules or something, and scripts couldn’t get to world.secondlife.com at all to load the profile pages. That seems to have been mostly fixed now, although it’s still happening here and there.

But more fatally, the Lindens also added lotsa juicy shiny fancy eyecandy HTML to the Web profile pages, and that pushed the image URLs out past the 2048 limit, so that scripts couldn’t get them anymore. Whoever made the change seems to have realized that it might cause problems, or just generally got an attack of neatness, because they also added a brand-new line, near the top of the HTML, explicitly giving the key for the Resident’s profile pic, as in:

<meta name=”imageid” content=”48cc0f84-7f35-3013-c05d-eb05237942f7″ />

This is easier to find and read than the messier HTML down where the image is actually loaded, but still it is different, and while it’s easy to change a profile-pic script to read the new one instead of the old one if you happen to be a scripter with some HTML knowledge and the ability to change the script, there are still dozens upon thousands of already-purchased and already-deployed devices out there whose scripts are now broken.

Is this a Horrible Linden Crime? I don’t think so, really. Anyone who wrote a script that depended on this trick would have known they were using an unsupported interface, and that it might fail at any time. As I wrote on the Jira:

For the people who are complaining that they bought things that have stopped working, you should probably complain to the people you bought them from, rather than to the Lindens. And to the people who are complaining that they sold something that then broke, you knew that could happen when you coded to a completely undocumented and unsupported interface.

It’s nice of the Lab to be working on fixing it, but you know very well that they don’t have to.

If you write a script that only works as long as there’s a “q” in column 17 of line 147 of http://www.secondlife.com/, you have only yourself to blame when someday that q changes…

I do hope and expect that the Lab will fix this, and it’s certainly good customer service for them to do so. On the other hand, people who are getting all angry at the lab and acting as though some actually supported interface was needlessly broken… Well, get a grip. :)

And if that seems a little snooty, I also posted a code snippet showing how to fix at least one popular script, and suggested to the Lindens a way that they could extend that “meta” tag a bit to restore at least many of the existing scripts that look for the full image URL to working order again.

’cause I am awesome that way. :)

So that is the current inneresting little story of the broken profile-pic displayers. And if you happen to have a broken profile-pic script (that you can see and edit the code inside of!), and you are one of the first N people to ask me (where N is the point at which I become overwhelmed and run away), I’d be glad to suggest how you might fix it. Just drop me an IM!

Update: According to a previous JIRA, the Lab did do pretty much exactly my backward-compatibility suggestion (before I’d even made it!), back in December. But apparently someone undid it recently. So, hem hem, I’m sure it’ll be fixed any minute now…

Giant Ghost Robot Captured On Film!

News Flash: the mysterious fleeting rushing-about giant robot mentioned here recently has been captured in a snapshot by a vigilant Resident (me).

The exciting detail:

Although I’ve seen it only fleetingly, my impression is that it looks just like the robot that joey is riding in, but it shows up on the minimap as a small clump of prims with no associated AV (a few dark pixels moving, with no green dot), and (most bizarrely of all) it seems to originate from roughly where joey is, rush rapidly outward, and go out of sight in under a second.

Spooky, eh?

Dale goes to Boston

I am apparently going to SLCC! (That’s the annual Second Life Community Convention, where for some reason a bunch of Residents all meet in the “RL” virtual world and do unspecified things.)

I can tell I am going because I have now spent Quite A Bit Of Money for the right and ability to attend. If it weren’t for that it would seem pretty unlikely, since I’ve never gone before, nor felt any strong inclination to. But Boston is relatively easy to get to from here, and my threshold for being tempted into new odd things seems rather low these days…

The convention is held in RL rather than SL, I gather, both for a change of pace and because in RL you can get a really huge number of AVs into the same region, and it’s all high-res and multi-sensory and all (although due to some glitch in my viewer I haven’t been able to get “smell” working for a long time). Still, the disadvantages are also considerable, and I’m not looking forward to two days of interacting only in voice (!), having no TPs or profiles, and being unable to fly or rez stuff. I mean, sheesh…

But anyway! I’m hoping it will be fun. There are various businessy tracks that I currently intend to ignore, and some music and art and social tracks that I will investigate. Or maybe I will just hang out with the geeks and talk about interop for hours. :)

Hughes Rise Haunted By Giant (Spinning) Robot!

The other day there was this giant robot in the Rise, just (ummmmm) west of the Park, with the front of it sort of embedded in some banlines, and I thought “Poor robot, I bet it is stuck in those banlines!’.

But, quite a few days later, it is still there!

And, stranger still, there is a person inside! A person named joey!

(joey is indicated by the red arrow in the picture above, in which we have turned off prim rendering in order to see him.)

Here is joey seen close-up:

Grey, isn’t he? Is he a prisoner? A passenger? Might he be the actual operator of the robot?

We sent him an IM, asking if he was there on purpose. Oddly, we got the “User is offline” message, even though he was right there at the time. Later, we got an offline reply from him, helpfully saying “who are you?”.

Here is a robot-centric view of the Rise, with helpful labels:

(1) is the new roadside extension of the Park, with Welcome sign.

(2) is some of the Park proper, visible over the ugly-built arcane-stuff store. (Just beyond the park and the Dreamliner is visible the ugly-built costume shop.)

(3) is the giant (spinning) robot, with joey inside.

(The robot wasn’t originally spinning, it was just hovering there. Then Violet an’ Michele an’ me went over and sat on it for awhile out of curiosity, and when we stood up it began spinning around. It’s been spinning ever since.)

But that’s not the weird thing! The weird thing is that, when just sitting around in the Rise, every once in awhile I see, out of the corner of my eye, a giant robot zoom past! I don’t know if it’s joey, or a ghost of joey, or perhaps some other giant robots, maybe relatives of joey, looking for him. (Although if they were looking for him you’d think they would have found him by now, him being rather hard to miss.)

And that’s very strange. So far I have not been able to snap any pictures of these zooming phantom giant robots, but I may someday! The Truth Is Out There!

In the meantime joey makes a scenic (if somewhat dizzying, with the spinning) place to watch the sunset…

Alpha Tribe, Green Chaos

A couple of different friends had mentioned Alpha Tribe to me lately, so I just had to go.

They have the most amazing stuff!

(Yeah, that’s me! Click for larger lightboxed version.)

A fantastic (hehe see what I did there?) reminder of what SL can be, after too many long days of tall tan 90210-style humans…

(Also not cheap. :) Now I gotta buy Lindens again!)

Weblog: alphatribe.wordpress.com/
Main store: slurl.com/secondlife/Klein/55/116/63

“Democracy” you say…

There’s been this meme going around the weblogs lately, on the notion that Second Life should (or shouldn’t, or could, or couldn’t) be, or contain, or support, or be structured as, a democracy.

I think this is a fun idea :) and will play with it here a little. This isn’t intended as a direct response to, or agreement or disagreement with, anything that anyone else has written. Well, except where it is.

Some folks have said that it’s really impossible, because you couldn’t have direct democracy because you couldn’t get all the Residents in one place to vote or whatever, and you couldn’t have representative democracy because who would decide which groups would get represented (furries? Goreans? dragons?), and anyway however you did it people would just cheat by creating additional accounts and additional Residents to get extra votes.

I think alot of that would really be not all that hard to get around. You could have direct democracy by just putting voting into the client or a web-page or whatever; no need to get all the Residents in one place inworld. Whatever question was up for vote could be voted on from wherever you happened to be when you felt like voting, and voting could be left open for a week or whatever.

You could have representative democracy, too, without having to establish an official set of interest groups, by doing it just like in the Atomic World. Representatives don’t represent Bowlers, or Married People, or Camera Buffs; they represent everyone who lives in a certain area. The idea being, presumably, that people who live near each other tend, as a general rule with countless exceptions, to have similar interests. In SL, this could be done by setting up election districts according to where people’s homes are set, say.

Or, acknowledging that people whose homes are set close to each other don’t necessarily have common interests even as a general rule, representatives could be by last name; since everyone with the same last name joined SL at about the same time (roughly, and with exceptions), they will have had about the same amount of SL experience and be at roughly the same stage of the enthusiasm / burnout / maturity cycle, and therefore be about as reasonable a group to be represented together as the people who happen to live in a particular suburb are in RL. (This idea makes me smile, although I’m not sure why; I realize it’s a bit oddball.)

Or, for that matter, we could not divide people up at all, but elect all representatives “At Large”. There are all sorts of clever voting schemes that lend themselves to this; cumulative voting, preferential voting, rank voting, instant-runoff voting… (See the Wikipedia article on voting systems for a variety.) Many of these have odd little quirks that have made people reluctant to actually try them out widely for electing actual governments; might be fun to see what happened if they were tried in a virtual world where people actually do care about the outcome, but no one was actually going to be shot or starved or imprisoned.

Who would actually get to vote? Well, that’s slightly tricky. Obviously you have to keep people from generating tons of anonymous alts just to vote. Sad to say, there might therefore have to be some sort of tie to RL identity; one vote per Premium account would at least make it expensive to generate lots of little fake voters, and one vote per instance of age-verification would solve things to the extent that that actually works (while at the same time disenfranchising people who can’t or don’t want to age-verify because of national or identity issues or not having a credit card or whatever I forget, which would be bad). One vote per 256m2 of land owned could work, but so blatantly giving power in rough proportion to wealth would probably not be popular.

And what would people and/or representatives be voting about? Whatever the Lindens decided to put up for vote! Or decided to allow other people to put up for vote. As many other people have said, SL is a private enterprise, and the owners can do what they like. So if they decide to institute some sort of democracy, they also get to decide which issues are democratically decided. All sorts of possibilities suggest themselves! We could vote on changes to the ToS, on the naming of new continents, on whether to have SL9B on PG or Adult land, on what color to pave Route 12. We could elect members of the G-team!

Probably we shouldn’t be allowed to vote on the banning or not-banning of particular people. :)

Whatever voting system was set up could also be used by sim (and even parcel?) owners, to hold local elections about local issues. Someone who owns a bunch of contiguous sims with a bunch of tenants could use it to hold an election about allowing the brothel to expand, or whether to change the blood in the fountain to water (or wine). The Blake Sea folks could hold an election (picking the eligible voters I’m not sure how) about expanding the tiny rezzing zones to be less tiny. (People who own land in Zindra could vote on whether to use the sim called “Zindra” for something actually useful in terms of helping people who come to it looking for information about Adult mainland in general, or to just plop down a generic Mole build there and forget about it. But that’s a whole nother can of worms…)

Anyway, could be fun! Chaotic! Full of unintended consequences and delightful surprises!

The stickiest thing, I think, would be preventing voter fraud without disenfranchising too many people. In fact at the moment I can’t think of a solution to the problem that would actually work. But maybe we will come up with something…

Explosions of Color!

Happy Fourth of July!

Perpetual fireworks, trunks, sparkler, glowing white hair, Uncle Sam Hat, let’s see. Hat-rocket test in 3, 2, 1…

Hat-rocket functional!

A little rest…

… and off to fireworks at the beach!

Foom! Whoosh!

Ooooooh, ahhhhhhh!

Quite satisfying all around. :)

ColeMarie Soleil

I’ve thought of ColeMarie Soleil as an artist and machinima-maker, and now it turns out she also sings an’ plays the guitar an’ writes songs an’ stuff.

Some people! :)

Here’s the first performance I ever heard her at:

That’s her perched on the edge of the stage as a scantily-clad faerie. :) She doesn’t like stages, she says.

Here’s the crowd; it’s a fun fantasy venue (click through to flickr for SLURL an’ all):

I heard her again at tHe sHeD later that same night; that time she didn’t get onto the stage at all, just sat down among us, singing and playing in her amazing direct captivating voice.

And she is really nice, too. :)