Cafe Bucky

Not long ago, I wondered aloud about what to learn.  Even if I stopped sleeping, I’d still not have the time to absorb all of the things I’m interested in.  I’m glad that I will never be bored, but I am always dealing with the priorities of “what to focus on?”  It’s a fun side of being a generalist: so much is so damn interesting!

So I thought I would write about the flip side, and mention what I am learning.  That way, potential employers and friends will know that I am not sitting around cooking bacon for my cat all day, and that I do have a project or two.

I am focusing on Cloud Computing, C# and .Net/Mono, NoSQL, OpenSim, and Unity.

They all tie together too, kinda.

As you know, a big interest of mine is Virtual Worlds.  I’m a champion of OpenSim and the Hypergrid, because I see a lot of parallels to where we were with Apache and the Web in 1995.  I am glad we have the Windows Sim on a Stick download which utilizes the Diva Distribution.  I am  currently looking into how to use MAMP to do the same thing for the Mac community.

Now that I have mentioned the server side of things, let me do a quick take on the client.  As I’ve written, I really want to see a Unity-based front end to OpenSim.  I have started porting my Slider object from SL to Unity.   My work so far has been in JavaScript, but in order to network it with, say,  Smartfox Server, I’ll be writing a bit in C#.  I see some good reasons to learn C# and Mono (starting within the contexts of Unity and OpenSim [1]).   I’ve been reading Programming C# 4.0.

[1] Seeing as how OpenSim is written in C#

So far so good.  You may be wondering how I tie Cloud Computing into this.  On the Cloud Computing side, I’ve been a user of Amazon S3 for a while.  EC2 was sorta off my radar, but a recent post by Ener Hax caught my attention, where she points at the idea of using the cloud to host OpenSim instances.  This put me on the chain of thought of “how to quickly scale for events in Virtual Worlds?”.  That has me delving into Amazon Web Services, and I am reading Jeff Barr’s Book “Host Your Web Site in the Cloud“.

The last bit of my current techy study stuff is NoSQL.  I’ve been through the try-redis tutorial and love it.  I am decent with MySQL, but I’ve always been a big fan of hashtables/associative arrays/keys & values etc… it fits my mental model of what I like to do in a program (index into an array, based on a key) — having that approach for a database makes sense for a couple of projects I have in mind (my photo database, and ThereThen addresses) .

So that’s my current focus.  I see jobs come across that want other things (like Java…), but I like what I’ve picked for myself!

[I just sent this to the developer email list for the Snowstorm project at Linden Lab.   Although I am not a code contributor, I've followed it and have contributed some ideas here and there.   I can't tell other developers what to do, but based on how LL is treating the community, I cant turn a blind eye and continue to participate in their effort]

In some small way, I’ve contributed some ideas (but not code) to SnowStorm.

I do hope SnowStorm, and the 2.x codebase, prosper and find greater acceptance.

However, I am a tech/developer/VW enthusiast, and will be focusing my energy elsewhere.

I dont like how Linden Lab is treating the Education and Non-Profit communities (ending their 50% discount).

I cannot, in good conscience, contribute to the efforts of a company that treats its customers that way.

My efforts will go towards the development of OpenSim, OpenSim grids, Unity, and possibly the 1.x and/or 2.x codebases in the TPV sphere.  It may well be that I receive no compensation for those efforts, but I will feel much better about participating in that community.

Linden Lab cannot treat customers the way it has, and expect to outsource some of their development efforts for free.

Daniel Smith

It is the community that will win the Metaverse…

Overview

I see an inevitable migration on the horizon of residents from SecondLife to Opensim
based grids. There are two main forces at work:  the decline of Linden Labs, and the
ascendency of the OpenSim.

• Linden Labs has been making a series of moves that are alienating the users.  They are neither leaders in policy, nor technology.  Not even meshes will save them.
• OpenSim is the clear technical leader, is rapidly making strides to stability, and the variety of grids springing up will assure that every community will have a strong home.  OpenSim is much like X11 in the sense that it provides “mechanism, not policy”.   Grid Operators take on the role of policy.

The Decline Of Linden Labs

Just since the time of SLCC (August 13-15, 2010), I can point to no less than four Linden Lab missteps which have upset various parts of the community:

1) Display Names – with over 1000 comments on blog, the Lindens appear to be intent on going live with a very ill-conceived plan to allow anyone to choose almost anything as a display name. What’s the problem with that?  They are not providing a means for users to protect their names from abuse.   While it may be true that a click or two will always reveal a true user name, it is still not clear what (Display Name?  User Name? Both?) will be written to chat and IM logs.  It is also not clear what the IM logfile names will be.  This is a huge worry for anyone who is concerned about identity and reputation.

The Lindens take the view that people can file Abuse Reports.  I note that this approach
attempts to address a symptom, but is no cure.  With all the layoffs that the Lindens have been through, and the recent reduction in support hours, do they have the staff to handle the increase in ARs that will be generated by Display Name abuse?  It would cost them less
to provide a control to prevent others from using your name as their display name.  It would also go over with the community a lot better.

2) Teen Grid Closing - I can understand the economics of closing the Teen Grid.  It costs a lot to run, and has a mere sliver of the main grid population.  What has a lot of people up in arms is the misguided idea of migrating 16 and 17 year olds to the main grid.  They would be better served by migrating to a grid that has been proven to be more focused on education (Reaction Grid comes to mind).

3) Customer Service Cutback – The short of it: same tiers, less service. Combine this with a slew of new problems (numerous ARs occuring from Display Name abuse, and legal/customer service issues arising from the presence of teens on what used to be a strictly adult grid).  The hours are also incredibly USA centric.  This will be one more factor that drives European and Asian users towards grids based in their regions.

4) Snowstorm, Do We Care?

Wizard of Oz: [in a booming voice] Step forward, Tin Man!
Tin Woodsman: [terrified, steps forward] Ohhhh!
Wizard of Oz: [still in a booming voice] You DARE to come to me for a heart, do you? You clinking, clanking, clattering collection of kaligenous junk!

Although SnowStorm is a great concept, in that there will be one viewer source code stream internally and externally, I sense that much of the developer community will focus their efforts elsewhere.  The Wizard of Oz Linden (who, as far as I can tell [1], has only
been in SL for 4 months) has declared:

“Don’t waste everyones time suggesting that we throw away Viewer 2, or that we revert the UI to Viewer 1. It is absolutely not going to happen, and any suggestion to that effect will be ignored.”

Yes, Scott really said that: http://www.mail-archive.com/opensource-dev@lists.secondlife.com/msg02459.html

Since the overwhelming majority of the community uses third party viewers, and does not like the 2.x UI, sensible developers are going to focus their efforts on giving the community what it wants.  The Linden Lab attempt at outsourcing some of their viewer development for free, while at the same time insisting on the 2.x UI, will not get much traction.  There is some limited cachet in being able to say that you contributed to the mainstream SL viewer, but if its usage is eclipsed by the offerings of several third parties, is it the best use of your valuable developer time?

The Ascendency Of OpenSim

I’ve touched on just some of the factors that are upsetting the SL community.  It’s time to shift to the positive.  We should be very glad that we are seeing the rise of a viable alternative!

As I have written before, and as others (such as Gwyn and Maria) have noted, OpenSim is showing itself to be a serious metaverse platform:

Technical – HyperGrid, MegaRegions, choice of voice (Whisper, FreeSwitch), more flexibility, compatible with existing SL viewers, archiving of regions and inventories.  Willingness to evolve past LSL.  Region scripting as well.

Policy – widespread, dependent on Grid Operators, if you dont like it, run your own grid!  Opensim grids win because none of them has to address the issue of trying to come up with policies that would satisfy everyone in a large walled garden.  We can easily move between web sites with varying policies and narrow niches.  The same thing will be true in the Metaverse.

Cost – a fraction of what LL charges –  Is there a market for high end grids with hand holding support, as well as a slew of specialty bargain basement offerings?  Yes!

Currency – yes!  OMC and Cyber Coin Bank These work across grids.   Maria writes in depth about this.

Scaling – with one fell swoop, HyperGrid does much to address the issue of scaling.  How?  If people can easily get from one grid to another, then there is little reason to try to shoehorn them all into one place.  As we see with some web sites, there will be some huge grids, possibly with millions of users.  But balanced with that, there will a large number of grids that address niche communities, with 10’s of thousands of users.  If they choose to be isolated, they can turn off hypergrid access.   Within 5 years, the combined scale of OpenSim based grids will dwarf the walled garden of SecondLife.  It is like the old AOL service trying to compete with the entire web.

Third Party Viewer Community -  Not only will the viewers based on 1.x and 2.x source streams become the preferred entrance to OpenSim based grids (easy grid management in them), there will be a movement towards more types of front ends.  HTML5 is one possibility (resurrect AjaxLife?).  Unity3D holds a lot of promise.

What Could LL Do To Stave Off The Inevitable?

At this point in time, the biggest technical innovation LL has on their agenda would be meshes.

On the development side, they would have to show that they are open to some emulation of the 1.x interface, in order to gain traction.  They are competing for something valuable, developer attention, and are making a lot of wrong moves.

On the policy side, they need to show that they will provide adequate controls for display names, so that people can be proactive about protecting their identity.

On the support side, they would need to make a case as to why people should pay the same amount of tier, but accept a reduced level of service.

On the interopability side, LL finds itself in the position of being a large walled garden, a la the AOL service of the 90’s and 00’s.  LL should ask itself it wants to follow the examples of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy.

The Tipping Point

Having said all this, it is quite clear that the majority of Metaverse usage hours are still being spent in SecondLife.  I dont see any single event from the sides of OpenSim, or SecondLife, that will radically tip the scales.  I see something more organic going on: friends will drag friends to OpenSim grids.  Any one of several LL policy decisions will be a straw that breaks a residents back.  OpenSim will make some technical advance, etc.  There will be as many reasons to switch as there are metaverse residents.  The Tipping Point occurs when a sizeable number of people realize that their personal puzzle pieces have fallen into place for them to make the switch.

A quick question …

Wondering if anyone has done some work towards capturing motion FROM SL and exporting a stream that could be used in other 3D modeling/animation scenarios?

My thought is to capture sequences from SL and to have them in some form that would work in Augmented Reality…

I am in the middle of updating the structure, behavior, and yes, content of my Resume

The thing I have working now is a form of tooltip.  Click on any section that highlights, and it will go try to find additional info for that.  You can click again to toggle it off.

As for content:  I’ve lumped my work of the last few years together under Freelance Web Development. It has been a fun exercise in getting some breadth.  If I find the right thing now to commit to full time, then yeah, I am there!  Otherwise, I am happy to mesh with the right folks at the right times, do a good gig, and look back at it as a great experience (most of the ones in the last few years have gone well).

The other bit about contracting is that it has let me control my hours — I’ve been able to leverage that into a lot of learning about Second Life (scripting, building, managing).  There IS a plan to that :)  I know that virtual worlds will become more mainstream, and so I have spent time amassing skills that will serve well when that happens.

Back to the resume, it will be changing a lot in the next few days.  Let me know of any inquiries, suggestions, etc.

Contract wound up.  Looking for a new web/sl gig.  SF/NYC/Remote.  I’d rather fly to the east coast than drive to the damn South Bay.

Opened up "Women Who Rock" with my co-curator Abbey at the MuMu.  Off to a good start!  I got some video of Joan Jett at the Marin County Fair on the 2nd.  Doing some editing in Final Cut Express, and will add my own videos to the show.

Speaking of Final Cut Express — it feels good to learn something that is complex and challenging that is not programming for a change.  I am digging it.  My 2ghz/2gb iMac feels slow, but hey, I’ll make the best of it.

Did a DIY camera mount for my bike — too much frikken shake for my Flip Mino.  May work great for my Nikon digital cameras though.. (reflector mount drilled out for a 3/8" bolt + Manfrotto 3009 swivel head)