Cafe Bucky

I recently marked 3 years in SecondLife, and have also been spending time using OpenSim.  I think OpenSim is the virtual world equivalent of Apache, and I think it’s going to catch on in a big way …

Backing up a bit …

So, OpenSim could be seen as an Open Source implementation of SecondLife.  But It’s more than that.  It is a platform for creating your own virtual worlds.  It’s a 3D environment where the users create content, can meet each other, and interact in real time from anywhere in the world.

Oh oh .. blank stares …  Some from tech people in the audience who think they are all done learning ;)

I recently had three encounters with a couple of friends and a recruiter, and each had the same sort of skeptical look or response to the idea of SecondLife and Virtual Worlds.  Pretty much 3 in 24 hours …

If SecondLife is off the radar for many in the tech world, OpenSim is farther still.

So let’s meander along.  I’ll explain.  I’m good at this.  I’ve been on the web since 1993, and in Virtual Worlds (VW) for three years.  Relax, this will be fun. Get your popcorn.  Keep your frikken butter off my sofa! Sheesh… some people …

In 1993 and 1994, the web was still way off the radar screen for most people.  I was at Autodesk, and I can say most managers there Simply Did Not Get The Web.  I went on to AOL to work on AOL.Com.  I made and lost a fortune, but that is not today’s topic.

So I am used to the blank stare thing.  Y’all will get the Virtual World thing… eventually.

Enter SecondLife and OpenSim.  SecondLife is a great VW platform.  It’s controlled by one company, and the server side of it is proprietary.  A few of the strong points of SecondLife are:

• immersive 3D environment
• user created content
• an economy
• great place to have meetings and trainings
• it is what you make of it
• strong creative and educational community

The client side of SecondLife is a viewer you run on your computer that gets you into the immersive 3D environment …

… and it so happens that the viewer (and its derivatives) work fine with OpenSim servers.

.. Where can an OpenSim server run?  On your Windows, Mac, or Linux machine.  Yes, you can have a self-contained virtual world on your laptop.  This is fine for some.  They’ll run a server, tell their friends how to connect, and that’s that.  Just like a private web site but in 3D.

Where it gets really interesting is to survey the publicly available grids out there (collections of one or more OpenSim instances), and to realize that companies and organizations can have their own private ones.

1994.  Apache.  Web.
2009.  OpenSim. Virtual World.

I’ve thrashed through some of the basics.  You can go to SecondLife.com and Opensimulator.org sites to get more background.

OpenSim is becoming to Virtual Worlds what Apache has been to the web.  It’s Open Source, there are brilliant people from all over the world contributing to it (echoing the development model of Linux, Apache, PHP, Perl, and some other high profile successes).

And we are at 1994 all over again.  OpenSim is at version 0.6.4, which means it is 64% of the way towards implementing the functionality found in the SecondLife server.  It looks as if it could reach 100% parity by the end of 2009.  There are already many organizations getting real results from their initial explorations (such as IBM), conducting meetings and trainings, or using a virtual space as a museum (ReactionGrid.com is recreating the 1939 Worlds Fair).

Do you think I mention meetings and trainings too easily?  Would I really do that?  Of course not.  Amada Linden did a good writeup entitled “Working in the Virtual World“.  Amanda says:

“I believe that the only good alternative to virtual meetings is a face-to-face meeting. It would be a hard to argue the teleconference calls or WebEx can create as immersive an experience”

If you want to drill deeper, see Caleb Booker’s post: Why Webcams Fail

I had known about OpenSim last year, but dismissed it as too early.  The wake up call for me was an article “OpenSimulator: The Choice for 2010” by Gwyneth Llewelyn.  She analyzed the state of OpenSim very well, but more importantly, she has a great handle on what it is going to take to succeed as a VW platform.  It got me thinking, and together with my partner Kim, we started checking it out.

Without going into 20 reasons why we personally love it, I will just paint with some broad strokes:

• SecondLife provides a great reference example
• the OpenSim developers are very capable, and there are organizations such as IBM committing real resources to the effort
• the developers of OpenSim do not feel constrained by the Linden Lab efforts
• there have already been very real advances in the OpenSim platform that cant be found in SecondLife, such as scripting at the region level, integration with skype, dynamic text on prims, arbitrary images on prims from URLs, and HyperGrid (teleport from one grid to another)

In a nutshell, OpenSim is evolving into the sort of effort we have previously seen with Linux and Apache.  A very real community is forming, and there’s even some tutorial material out there …

It’s 1994 all over again, and it makes me smile.

The countryside beckons.  Worn out roads need their picture taken.  They aim to put on asphalt makeup and cover their bots dots for a “Roadway Pinup Monthly” centerfold (daring Cornwall cliffs shed retaining walls, show you all!).  I aim to see a few roads.

I love to travel, and so have been mulling over dastardly plans on how to do that and get paid.  Snicker not, kind reader, for I am armed with a skill or two!  I shall Dance In The Country! Techstyle!

Perched in the midst of Getaway Central, Somewhere in Europe.  Perhaps I am in Tuscany.  Go with it, y’all…   Some people cant make it that far, ya know.  They have boring jobs and soccer brats and mortgages and neighbors with habits that scare them slightly and one too many frikken meetings to go to this week, and, yep, looks like the next one after that.  Their life is living them.

However, some people love to live vicariously….  We’re not just talking about the Peeping Toms and Tanyas…

And therein lies the country wheat germ of a hint of an idea.  Somewhere in this post I will spell it out, but I am going to my damnedest not to crystalize it in one sentence.  This is a post about the country, where paths meander.

Back to Tom and Tanya and their Peepers…

Would they watch an irreverent slidecast that shows the beauty of Dancing In The Country?  Which country?  Which part of the country? Well, send me money and I’ll alter my travel plans!  I sense that there is an opportunity to cater to the wannabe traveler.  Ok, well a subset of them.  I aim to displease those who would look down their nose at anything less than a high minded exhaustive treatise done by thee Almighty BBC.  Think of David Letterman and Monty Python pulling into town in a noisy oil smoking 1969 VW Bug with a grinding clutch and rusted shirt hanger antenna. Whoa there, move it, we have weak brakes!  Park, grab camera, some cafe coin for coffee, cheerful attitude, and a hankering to satisfy the insatiable desire of Jonathan Livingston Armchair Traveler Seagull.

I love to write and photo and video.  I also enjoy talking to the locals and getting the sense of things.  As it turns out, I’ve been doing this sort of thing in Second Life for the last 2 1/2 years.  Yeah, and the experience surely does spill over to the Real World.  Something about SL has made it much more comfy to strike up conversations with strangers.  Amazingly, most of them do not recoil in horror when I do this.  Could be all of the free Lindens I give em.

So the threads are  .. travel, take in the gist, write and photo it, and …

Omg.. is he going to talk about yet another fucking Social Networking Website?  Bucky!  How could you?  It’s almost 2009 you big smelly gorilla!

Now hang on there pardner.  We have the advantage of history.  We know what doesn’t work (like Sarah Palin applying for Mensa), and we know the world economy is on brink of collapse.  What a great time of opportunity!  Nobody can afford to travel, so we’ll do it for them!  We’ll mash it up on a web site with commentary, supplement with local feeds, point to Amazon Associates items that actually talk about the locale in question, and laugh all the way to the credit union.

So that is the thought .. how to mash up skills and local feeds, and turn the situation of traveling into a self sustaining gig.  It would be a side project.. a weekend here and there to start.  The two keys would be the power of the mashup info (content from elsewhere), and the irreverent look at things (local discontent :)

And that is the Dance in the Country.  Cha cha cha.

Yes, it’s a real place. Not something out of a Charlton Heston movie. Actually, it’s what you see on New Year’s morning after drinking too much at the Hyatt Regency party.

So, quick story. Walking through downtown. Argentinian looks at me and says “it’s about the people man! Not the architecture!”. I know he’s Argentinian because he says “wait a sec”, dips into his car, and whips out an Argentinian hat. Damn insists that I snap his photo. So I do. It’s not worth posting, so you’ll have to just nod along. So, anyfrikkenway, I generally don’t do the urban stroller photography thing – I give them the privacy. Oh, wait.. wait. No, I lied there. Here’s one of a Harmonica Guy:

One of the more extreme examples from yesterday … Name that place in SF.

“At The Center Of It All” – Union Square, March 2006

I coerced myself into getting to the City today to do some photos, as in the Urban Zoom Blur thing. It’s been a while. This one lept out at me. The zoom leads to what’s really important in life (no, not tequila), so that hit me the right way. I’ll have others on Flickr or FlexiPhoto as soon as I go through them.

The javascript-driven Pictures On A Page package has been updated (along with the demo) – poap-1.0b4.tgz. It features keyboard commands (’n', ‘p’, arrows, ’s’ for slideshow, ‘1′-’9′ to set delay).

POAP is now usable in Windows MSIE. There are some CSS quirks to iron out. It also should be updated to cache image src locations when calling into FlexiPhoto.

The followup to the Canned Gallery is Pictures On A Page. You can download from poap-1.0b3.tgz. This is entirely a soft launch, as I haven’t seen it on a Windows box yet. It might make breaking noises on MSIE for all I know.

It’s a simple front end for flipping through photos, and has many keyboard commands. A new feature is the ability to flip between different portfolios (see the demo). Another new one is to vary the slide show delay (in seconds) by using the ‘1′ – ‘9′ keys.

Have fun. Tweak to taste. Let me know if it works for you. Note that the “FP Collection” Portfolio in the demo is grabbing scaled photos of varying jpeg quality from FlexiPhoto. The other Portfolio is just a static directory of images… no php/db.

I did mention in Rev ‘Em Up and Shoot ‘Em that I was getting back to the track this year to do some race photography. Sophia and I made it to the ALMS race at Sears Point, and I was able to shake off a little rust. Some photos have been tossed up on Flickr. They’re just screen grabs of what I see in PhotoShop / Bridge. There’s a lot more to go through, but that will have to get in line behind my Portland, NYC, and Cross-Country trips …

I’m so out of practice! I might just hit the Portland ALMS race to sharpen up some.

Not only was I a little rusty at the race, but I wasn’t set up as well as I would have liked. There’s some things that I have managed to figure out about zoom blurs:

• Filters – I was using an 80-400 zoom, but without a filter. I should use a polarizing filter, in part to cut an f-stop off of the exposure. That’ll give me a little more leeway with shutter speed (I want slower)
• Monopod – get back to using that … a twist zoom isn’t as nice as a push-pull. Without a monopod, the twist gives a sideways motion to the photo (in addition to the zoom blur) that I don’t always want.
• Pan and Zoom – There are steady zoom blurs, and then there are the ones where I am zooming and panning at the same time. It makes a difference as to whether I should zoom in, or out, over the course of the exposure. I gotta think about what result I want

There’s a whole lot more I can say about zoom blurs. I will note that my blurs are all in-camera – I don’t use that aspect of PhotoShop. It’s a fun challenge to balance all of the variables (ISO speed, lens, amount of zoom, shutter speed, panning, timing) with moving cars. Not to mention the high contrast environment of asphalt versus bright sky. I’m sure it plays havoc with the exposure meter (”what the heck is he doing!?”).