When I got to the meeting place, I saw my friend Piet Hut, who is the group’s founder. He’s in Japan right now, so the time of day was downright normal for him to be out and about. The other person there tonight lives in Australia, so her clock is also on a diurnal schedule. But even us nightowls can always find somebody awake in a virtual world whenever we decide to go there.

Anyway, the person I’d been twittering with earlier, Wan-Qi Kim, is involved in teaching meditation, etc. so I had suggested he might like to visit Kira Café. I think it would be fascinating to introduce these two brilliant men, but don’t know if I can lure Wan into SL to do so, and catch Piet there at the same time. Maybe someday. If it’s meant to be, it will happen.

First, I had to choose a WordPress “widget” to use. There are at least 20 in the WordPress website, and who knows how many more elsewhere on the Web. I settled on Twitter Widget Pro by Aaron D. Campbell, but after installing it I got a fatal error message, so I went to the author’s blog and read the comments about this app. Aaron is good at replying, and sure enough, several other people had the same problem. The solution was to use PHP 5.2+, but according to the readout on my site’s control panel, I was using the latest and greatest… So, it was off to the Knowledgebase on my webhost’s support site. Ah ha! Even though the latest version was shown to be available, the default was to use PHP 4.x! So, I had to rummage around and find the place to make it default to version 5. That done, the widget worked like a charm (aside from being a little slow updating).

So, now that I know what I’m doing, it’s time to add this widget to another blog I’m working on, one for a new ePublishing venture. Oops, sorry, we’re not ready to launch that site yet, so I can’t give you a link, but rest assured that when it is time, I’ll post about it here, and on Twitter and other places as well.

But that leads me to another topic. Since I started a new Twitter account for the new venture, now I’m in the market for a Twitter client that will not only allow all three of us involved to post to its account, but will also let me easily manage multiple accounts I’m using. It could get messy, especially since I’m involved in yet another ePublishing venture and will want an account for that one, too. I found something that looks promising, CoTweet, but it is still in private beta so it could be a while before I can try it. Since the new Twitter accounts aren’t active yet, though, I can afford to wait.

Twitter and WordPress are not the only online communications tools out there, of course. You may have noticed another addition to this site, a collection of icons at the end of each blog posting. This widget was (thank goodness!) very straightfoward to install. It’s called Sociable. The configuration page for that widget offers a plethora of linked icons for an enormous array of social networks, including of course Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as well as email and your printer. As dynamic as social networking tools are, though, new ones are always popping up. No problem! Sociable allows you to create your own icons and link them to sites you choose. It doesn’t get much more flexible than that.

At the same time all this is going on, I’ve been working with a new volunteer at the International Spaceflight Museum who is taking over our exhibit sponsorship auctions on eBay. Our original “auctioneer”, Opal Lei (Second Life name), bowed out after working very hard to not only set up the auctions, but also scripted signs in Second Life that display the sponsor’s name and automatically reset when the sponsorship expires. She also wrote up very clear instructions for her successor, making it not just easier, but possible, for someone to follow her footsteps without going completely crazy trying to figure it all out. She even did an inventory of all our exhibits, which she put in a wiki! Those early auctions kept the museum solvent for months, but since they ended we’ve struggled to pay the bills. So finding a replacement auctioneer has been a true blessing. I just hope we can get his first round of auctions rolling in time to avoid losing the islands, since the rent is due next week. If you’re interested in helping, either by sponsoring an exhibit or simply donating, please visit our website for more info on how to do that. We have a PayPal donor button as well as info on the auctions and even a Google spreadsheet that shows our current (sorry) state of financial affairs.

While mentioning the ISM and communications, I would be remiss to not also mention a new book by a friend of mine, Kimberly Rufer-Bach, The Second Life Grid: The Official Guide to Communication, Collaboration, and Community Engagement. She interviewed me for a case study on how the ISM uses a wide variety of Web tools to manage our world-wide distributed nonprofit organization, and according to another friend, Dave Taylor, the ISM was featured very prominently in the book, perhaps getting the most space of any of the case studies she includes. I’ll find out for sure next week when my copy arrives.

Got all that? Good. I’ll stop writing now and get back to work. Thank you for your attention.

Sparkle is a virtual worlds (VW) client for the iPhone that allows the user to login and communicate via instant messages with friends, and via proximity chat with avatars that are in the same location. Sorry, you probably need to try a VW like Second Life to understand what that’s about and why it is an exciting development. For now, please just accept that being able to connect to Second Life and interact live with others there even when you can’t log in normally is a big deal. For instance, I’ll be able to attend meetings from my iPhone and see what is being said in chat even if I don’t have my computer set up or if I’m in an internet café without my laptop.

Besides Second Life, Sparkle will connect to other grids as well, such as OSGrid or Second Life’s beta grid. Right now, those three are the only VWs available, but I’m sure others will be added as demand warrants. It’s possible to set up any number of accounts for various grids, limited only by the number of avatars you have. In fact, you can even sign up for a new account via Sparkle! Select the approprite service, fill in your account username and password, and there you go.

Choose the account you want to login with from the resulting list, click the “Go!” button, and your friends list appears on the next screen, with those online indicated with highlighted stars beside their names, while offline avatars are shown with dimmed stars. To send an IM to one, you select the name, then click the “IM” button on the next screen. A window with the virtual keyboard appears, and you proceed to communicate.

It seems pretty simple, and it is easy to use, but the implications are really awesome. The only real gripe I have about it is the requirement to use WiFi, but there is probably no way around that. Second Life in particular probably needs more bandwidth than the plain old cellular signal can provide. As it is, people who have very long friends lists (like me) have reported long waits to log in. Genkii’s tech support is working on it, and in fact I’ve had better luck logging in with my main account lately, after the first few attempts when it took several long minutes.

Sparkle IM gets a high rating from me. I’ve been waiting for someone to publish an iPhone app for connecting to Second Life, and this is a good one that works. Thanks, Genkii!

Meanwhile, the data speed is pretty good. I haven’t had any trouble logging into Second Life, which is one of the more demanding applications I’ll be using. It’s still worrisome to think about running over our 5 GB/month limit since after that the charges really add up quickly, so I’m trying to use RV park WiFi as much as possible. But it’s very cool to be able to attend meetings while Phil drives. So far I’m still favorably impressed with Verizon’s service.

Maybe, just maybe, now we have an answer.

Yesterday, after reading an article by Tony Cornett on RV.Net, in which he discusses some of the essentials for fulltime RV living, I called up the 3G Store, which was referenced in Tony’s blog post, and ordered a wireless modem (“AirCard”), router and booster antenna. Of course, this entailed signing up for a 2-year contract with yet another provider, but there’s no escaping that. Following the advice of the sales rep, I decided to go with Verizon instead of Sprint since after asking where we would be traveling he said Verizon probably offers better coverage for us. I had already researched the data only plans offered by both companies, and they appear to be just about the same right now, with 5GB/month bandwidth allowance for $59.95/month.

The gear should be waiting for us by the time we get to our stopping point in the Dallas area later today, according to FedEx. What we’re getting consists of a Novatel USB727 AirCard, Cradle Point MBR-1000 mobile router and a Wilson Omni RV antenna, along with all the attendant cables, cards, instructions, etc. 3G Store will have activated the AirCard and installed all the latest firmware updates, so we should be all ready to plug it in and get started. It was a real pleasure to talk to a sales guy who knew what he was talking about, too.

As well as simply being more reliable than other people’s WiFi, with this set up we can stay at places that don’t have even poor internet connections, which ought to save us quite a bit on RV park rentals and frustration. We can even “drycamp” or “boondock” while still staying connected. Oh, and we should also be able to get online even while driving down the road. Since we travel most of the year, but I still try to run an online business, this ought to elminate a lot of stress.

I will report here on our experience with this setup as we go along, and will probably also tweet about it as things happen. My name on Twitter is katlemieux if you’re interested in following the story blow-by-blow.

That sounded pretty good to me, so in spite of the rather confusing instructions on the download page, I grabbed both pieces, the client and viewer. Hmmm… I thought the SL client was the viewer? Oh, well, terminology…. Anyway, I followed the instructions on the Mac FIRSTLOOKSLIM disk image, and dragged the icon (whether it’s the viewer or the client I’m not sure) into my Applications folder, and did the same thing with the icon in the other image, called “SLim”, even though there were no instructions for what to do with it at all, just a EULA. mutter, mutter.

According to the download page, I also need to create an account, using my SL avatar’s name, but with a different password (oh, good, another password to remember). I wonder if that means a new account for each alt account, too? Probably, but that also means I probably won’t use it for them unless this thing is just too useful.

I had a moment of panic, trying to decide which app is the client and which the “application”, but after trying each decided the “viewer” is the one I have to log into first. OK, I’ve done that. It looks just like any SL viewer. Now I’ve logged out of there, and after creating an account for SLim (from a button on the download page), I’m opening the SLim app — that’s the one that had no instructions included. That opens a smaller window which should have displayed all my friends. It was blank. Oh, ok, RTFM…. I have to not only log on with the special viewer, I must enable voice in that viewer as well. That done, I do see a long list of names in the SLim viewer now, but quite a few people, including some I know are online, are missing. There is one person shown here that I think I can pester to try out the IM with, though.

I highlight his name, and click the little icon for IM. There’s one for voice as well, but I don’t want to push it. Uh, oh. I got a bubble that says, “[person] is using a version of the Second Life Viewer that does not support IM or Voice sessions with this application.” This is not helpful. Well, it’s beta software, after all, and brand new. Guess I’ll let it mature a bit and wait for more people to install it before I try to actually use the thing. Pity.

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″.

Other VW Developments

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.

Copyrights and DMCA Issues

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.

If you wonder how many science places SecondLife contains or just how serious work can be done in a virtual world, be sure to watch this slideshow, and turn on your speakers or headphones for the narration.

I should also mention that Troy has made enormous contributions to the International Spaceflight Museum, where he has been one of the planning group officers and an officer of the nonprofit corporation that supports it. As Kat Lemieux, I am one of the founders of the museum.

One of the things people have been clamoring for in SecondLife for as long as I can remember (back to about July 2005, when I first rezzed into that world) is “Web on a Prim”. A prim is a primitive object, like a representation of a 3D cube or sphere or cylinder. These are the building blocks out of which all the incredible representations of physical objects are made in 3D virtual worlds. By combining them, twisting and resizing them, “painting” them with textures, linking them together and embedding little scripts in them, all the wonders of the grid are made manifest.

All, that is, except for a functioning Web browser that an avatar can share with others in the world. The latest version of the SecondLife viewer, the client software that enables one to enter these virtual worlds, offers at last a rudimentary Web viewer, but it can only display a single page with no live links. Hypertext without hyperlinks is almost useless, but of course it is a step in the right direction, and better than anything that preceeded it.

In one of the derivative VWs I’ve joined recently, though, they have taken LSL a step further. As well as implementing most of the commands from that scripting language, a few home-grown functions are added. One specifically enlarges the ability to display Web pages on primative objects, chosen by anyone in the world, not just someone who has control of the media on the land parcel where the object exists as is presently the case in SecondLife. For the geeks among us (you know who you are), this function is called osSetDynamicTextureURL() and it allows a “voice” command to be used to surf to any given URL. Where native Linden LSL commands follow the convention of having their names preceeded by “ll” (two lower-case letter Ls), as in llSetText(), the OpenSim scripters have used os[Function name] to identify those that are not from Linden Lab. I’ve tried out an object that uses a script with this function, and it works quite well. However, when I tried to make my own Web display object using a copy of the script I found in the user’s forum on the OSGrid.org website, it did not work; I don’t know why. Perhaps the copy has a typo I’m not proficient enough to spot, or maybe the grid was just being a bit unstable at that moment. It is still alpha software, after all.

Still, even if I couldn’t make my own Web display (yet!), the fact that LSL is being extended in OpenSim grids is very encouraging.

Also encouraging is the fact that I heard from a friend tonight that a mutual acquaintance is also planning to install Sun Microsystem’s open source Darkstar server to run a Project Wonderland region on his own computer, as I hope to do soon. This is becoming the favorite indoor sport of the really extreme VW addicts on the block! I’m one step closer now, since I finally located the package I need to install Java6 SDK on Debian Linux, a requirement for running Darkstar.