The good news about the Barnes & Noble announcement is that they plan to make their ebooks available on many platforms. Here’s what the company president had to say about that:

“Today marks the first phase of our digital strategy, which is rooted in the belief that readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time,” said William J. Lynch, President of BN.com.

vReveal is a MS-Windows® program. Normally this would not be a problem, since I have Windows XP Pro®, Vista® and even the Windows 7® beta operating systems running in virtual machines on my Mac. I use both Parallels Desktop for Mac and Sun Microsystems’ opensource VirtualBox. But my new 24″ iMac apparently has some hardware not supported yet by either of these VM systems, and it’s possible that vReveal itself does not support my video card, even though it’s made by their partner, nVidia (nVidia GeForce GT 130). Maybe upgrading to the latest version of Parallels will help, too.

So, I have some more work to do before I can try out vReveal. Luckily, nVidia has a nifty tool, shown below, that can help locate drivers for their video cards. By having it here in my blog, I can use it from within the various VMs I have running to see if I can get them optimized to take advantage of the nice graphics I enjoy on the Mac OS side. And of course you can do the same; enjoy! The sound card issue may be isolated to Sun’s VirtualBox, and if that’s the case I’ll have to spend some time on the users forum over there to see if I can resolve that issue. But at any rate, here’s the nVidia widget:

I even tried pulling it up on my iPhone with the WiFi turned off, in case it was something that got into the router. Same symptoms. So I wrote back and the techs put a customer support rep on it. By this time, though, I had decided to start up one of the virtual machines I have on this computer, in this case WindowsXP running on Parallels. Being Windows, I keep an anti-virus program updated on that, even though it’s only a virtual machine, and being too cheap to actually pay for software to run on an Operating System I only boot up once in a blue moon, I use AVG Free. Good stuff, that. As soon as I tried to open the blog, up popped a window announcing that it had detected an infected file on the page.

I logged back into the webhost’s support page to close the ticket, and discovered their rep had also seen a javascript file that was the problem, but didn’t take the time to discover which of many I’d installed in that blog was the culprit. However, AVG Free had already told me the URI of the site that was doing bad things, and I was able to find the link with my blog theme editor. I deleted both lines of code that pointed to the offending site, restarted the blog, and there it was, as good as new.

I never thought I’d see the day when an application on Windows saved me from malware, instead of exposing me to it!

The ones I found (all prices are in US$) are:

• Color Expert $9.99 by Code Line Communications
• Palettes $9.99 (also has free Lite version) by Rick Maddy
• cliqcliq Colors $2.99 by cliqcliq
• colorSutra $1.99 by Alex Rybkin
• Color Set $2.99 by Corellis

Color Wheel $0.99 by Trevor Gray

Here’s a few screenshots from the two apps I bought. First, colorSutra:

I generated the “Peachy keen” color using the color wheel, by dragging my finger across the display then adjusting a couple of slidebars to manipulate the tint (amount of black or white added to the pure color) and saturation. I clicked the “Display” icon on the bottom of the screen, which showed it along with coordinating colors. Finally, after saving the color, and giving it a name, I was able to see the hexadecimal value, which is useful for web site design since that is how colors are defined in HTML.

Another way to find colors with colorSutra that I really liked is illustrated here. By selecting the “Camera” button, you are presented the choice of taking a new snapshot with the iPhone’s camera, or selecting a picture already in your Camera Roll. Once an image is imported, you can tap or drag your finger around on the image to choose an individual color, as I’ve done here. Then you save it and display the definition, as above. It is a useful little app for finding exactly the right shade you want.

Then, from Palettes:

Palettes is quite a bit more sophisticated, as one would hope for an app that costs five times as much as colorSutra. This app also has a tool for extracting colors from a camera snapshot, although it does that automatically rather than letting you scrub around the image yourself. What is particularly good about Palettes is the large range of colors you can store in each palette, or collection of related colors — up to 25 — and the way you can extract additional palettes from any color in the set. There is even a function for creating blends from any two colors in the set, with choices of 1, 2 or 3 blended colors along a spectrum from one original to the other. On another menu, you can drag one of the colors from your palette into a “well” at the bottom of the screen, and the app generates another palette of colors, from five to fifteen, based on your choice of controls, selected by tapping little wheel icons. If you want to create not just a color, but a whole color scheme, Palettes is an app you will really appreciate.

So, why do I care? Well, as a website developer, I sometimes struggle to find just the right shade or combination of colors for a page design, and as a jewelry designer I also look for new combinations to generate ideas for new items. Actually, there are dozens and dozens of reasons to use apps like these, but having them on the iPhone makes them particularly useful for crafters and decorators, since having a color scheme with you when you go shopping can be very handy. But there is another reason to use them on the iPhone, and that is the touch screen. Both of these apps I’ve reviewed here use touch gestures to perform actions quickly and easily. This makes them intuitive and fun to use, as well as producing quick results. I will be using both these apps for some time, I’m sure.

One of the things that frustrated me most about the 360MB/48 hours limitations imposed by NomadISP at Beaudry RV was that I couldn’t download software and updates, much less audio books or podcasts or Adobe Acrobat to work on some ebook projects, I had to order it on CD-ROM instead of getting it immediately via download.

I wanted to start figuring out how to use the new features in version 9, so it was frustrating to have to wait for phyical delivery. Besides, we weren’t even 100% certain we would stay at this resort long enough for it to arrive! I went ahead and ordered it anyway, but after getting here and discovering the WiFi is decent, and that they won’t throttle our bandwidth (or so they advertise), I decided to get the 30-day trial. Well, that is only available for Windows™, and while I do have Parallels Desktop for Mac OS, and it is on the same computer, to the ISP it looks like a second machine, with its own IP and MAC addresses. I was able to log in long enough to update my copy of WinXP Pro to SP2, thank goodness, but when I tried to download the Acrobat 9 trial version, I got an error message saying my username and password weren’t accepted. So, I sent a query to Tengo’s support, explaining my situation, and will wait to see what they say. Meanwhile, though, because Parallels allows me to access a “shared” folder from Windows, I downloaded the installer from the Mac side, and copied it over to the Windows desktop. That worked!

I will not be happy (nor will I do it) if I have to buy yet another “card” to use the local WiFi on each virtual machine. That could really run into money, at $29.95/month per VM! If I absolutely must use the ‘net from a VM, I’ll switch over to our Verizon AirCard, but it is limited, too, and I don’t want to overdo it in case we need that bandwidth later on.

If President Obama really wanted to stimulate American productivity and commerce, he’d consider upgrading the country’s internet infrastructure, perhaps using WiMax, to make sure everyone, everywhere can get online to do what they need to do. Think of all the thousands of ebook and independent music publishers out there who could supplement their faltering personal economies by selling their wares online, if only they could!

Update on Local WISP

4 March 2009 — After I posted this blog, I got a reply from TengoInternet. Apparently I do not have to buy another account to use with my virtual machines. Sometimes switching between them lags slightly, but the same account does work on both MacOS and WinXP (and presumably Linux) on the same hardware. So my rant was unnecessary, but it’s possible that just after informing tech support of what I was doing they flagged my account to allow the strange-looking behavior. I got a reply to my email to tech support, and although they didn’t say so explicitly, I haven’t had any problems with it since then.

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]]> http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2009/03/01/virtual-machine-real/feed/ 2 http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2009/01/25/rubber-meets-the-road/ http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2009/01/25/rubber-meets-the-road/#comments Sun, 25 Jan 2009 03:27:03 +0000 Katherine W. Prawl http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/?p=144 So now we know we need that amplifier. If you haven’t been following this blog, you might wonder what kind of amp is under discussion. Your best bet would be to start here and work forward in time to get the gist.

Back now? Good. OK, what convinced me was watching the “Cellular Signal Strength” indicator on the router all the way across New Mexico on Interstate-40 today. Dismal. The most it got was one and a half towers (tower #2 flickering off and on — mostly off). Now that we are in Albuquerque, or just outside the city limits, it’s up to three and a half out of four, which is not too bad. I am using the system in spite of the fact that the local RV park offers “WiFi access” because I’ve had past experience with the provider they use, and I was not impressed. If we are going to pay for WiFi, I’d rather pay for our own system than somebody else’s.

Speaking of paying, I was finally able to get MS Windows® to work again on a Parallels virtual machine today, so I plugged in the modem to the USB port on my iMac and finally was able to launch the MyVerizon desktop tool that indicates how much bandwidth has been consumed. I was a little disappointed that it only told me the damage up through two days ago, but that is better than not having any clue at all. It was good to see that till 3:45 p.m. (what time zone?) on 22 Jan 2009 we had only used approximately 218.something MB, out of our 5 GB monthly allowance. The bad news is that we used that much in just five days of not very intensive networking. Still, if we watch it, we ought to be able to stay under the limit. I do still think it’s pretty lame that the Mac version of the desktop tool won’t show bandwidth usage, though.

So, since we plan to spend time in cellular fringe areas, I suppose we will be ordering the amplifier that Mark recommended.

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]]> http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2009/01/25/rubber-meets-the-road/feed/ 8 http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/07/23/new-world-page/ http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/07/23/new-world-page/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:15:18 +0000 Katherine W. Prawl http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/?p=77 I’ve just added a permanent page to this site, featuring a link to my “room” in Google’s new Lively virtual world. Please link to my Lively room and let me know what you think. Oh, sorry, but so far only MS Windows XP/Vista users can actually do that for now, but Google promises Mac software soon, and presumably will also have something for Linux, too.

The ability to put a 3D world in a webpage has some intriguing potential.

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]]> http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/07/23/new-world-page/feed/ 0 http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/05/18/virtual-progress/ http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/05/18/virtual-progress/#comments Sun, 18 May 2008 07:31:03 +0000 Katherine W. Prawl http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/?p=70 Since my last post here, a lot has been accomplished.

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.

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]]> http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/05/18/virtual-progress/feed/ 1 http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/04/12/more-vws/ http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/04/12/more-vws/#comments Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:58:48 +0000 Katherine W. Prawl http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/?p=59 After one of my friends in SecondLife, Opal Lei, asked me if I’d seen OpenLife and I had to say no, I decided to take a look. We at the ISM have been talking for years about finding if not an alternative, at least an adjunct to SecondLife, since having all our IP eggs in one fragile, proprietary basket is a very scary thing. So when Opal said this new VW, based on OpenSim servers (which is a reverse engineered version of Second Life), had regions for sale for very low prices for early adopters, I had to see.

Sure enough, one can buy a whole region (equivalent to a SecondLife sim, or 16 virtual acres, 256 meters square) for just USD $90 for the first month, and $75 per month thereafter. That’s compared to Linden Lab’s new low price of USD $1000 set up and $195 per month land use fees. Of course, not much is working in OpenLife yet, and there are almost no residents, but I got so enthusiastic at the thought of a viable alternative world that I went ahead and signed up to become a “Foundation Resident” — one who owns a region in the first wave of land sales. My region is called “Queenstown”.

The text on the sign in front of the big ISM logo block reads:

This land was purchased on behalf of the International Spaceflight Museum R&D expeditionary force.

The International Spaceflight Museum (ISM) was created in Second Life in September 2005.

For information, IM Kat Lemieux in either Open Life or Second Life

But first, I should tell you how I got into the world. User accounts are free, just as in SecondLife. The client application in the OpenLife website is for Windows only. I did boot up my WinXP virtual machine, and dutifully downloaded their client, but I couldn’t get it to run. However, when I went looking for help I discovered a page in their wiki that described how to use the Second Life client by adding a single line to a file in the “Resources” folder in the Mac OS X application’s contents. It worked like a charm. It’s just as easy to do this on Windows or Linux by adding the same target definition to the application’s shortcut or (in Linux) command line.

However, while rummaging around in the OpenLife website, I found information about the OpenSim Standalone server code. This software does require Windows, though, and while one can set up a sim or a region of up to 4 sims using it on your own server, at present this cannot be connected to the OpenLife grid. What is more, according to one of the residents I met in the world, the plans to enable linking a server to this grid are far, far down the road.

While I was in the world, playing with my new region, I met someone who is also a member of the Association of Virtual Worlds. When I went to the association’s website to add him to my friends list there, I joined a new group on that site about Central Grid, which is described as “… a virtual world platform where recreational and business users create 3D communities or grids which are all interconnected.” Naturally, I had to try that one out, too, and see what was there. I instantly was overcome with buyer’s remorse over my OpenLife (OL) region purchase, since Central Grid appears to be much further down the development road than OL. However, their prices are rather higher than OL, although still far less than Second Life. Central Grid also uses the SecondLife client, with a one-line change to define the target definition, just like OpenLife. The only difference is the URI. Maybe I didn’t make such a gross mistake after all.

But I wasn’t through. From there I went to the OpenSim website, where I discovered a page that lists several more open source projects based on the OpenSim server. OpenLife is listed there, but Central Grid is not. However, another VW, OSGrid, looked very intriguing because according to its description, “Sims are all owned by individuals, companies, universities and are connected at no charge. [except the plazas, which are community regions]“. So, I made yet another copy of the SecondLife client, changed the line in the target definition, and went to have a look. I was impressed! This may be the place where I recommend the ISM put our efforts once we figure out how to create a Standalone sim. In the meantime, we can play in Queenstown to see what we will be up against when we try to recreate some of the ISM in another VW.

it occurs to me, though, that since all these worlds are based on the same code, and eventually all of them say they will allow 3rd party servers to connect to their grids, maybe we can just use one server for them all? Or perhaps it would be necessary to have a copy for each grid, but the group could do its work in one Standalone iteration, and the administrator could copy it to connect to the other grids on a regular basis, or better yet define a cron job to do it, in effect creating mirror sites. This might be the way all these grids are eventually connected to one another.

Someone speculated that in future your personal inventory would be saved to your own hard disk rather than being in a central asset database, thus allowing you to carry all your “stuff” from world to world. Being a person who tends to log in from different computers, I would hope that instead we would find some data grid in the cloud to store our things, so we aren’t tethered to a single machine. Since the inability of Linden Lab’s asset database to keep up with demand seems to be one of the major problems with scaling Second Life, maybe this would be just as difficult for an open source community to manage, but maybe it would be planned out in advance better for all the OpenSim based grids, since now we have a better idea of what the metaverse probably is going to look like for the immediate future than Linden Lab knew when they were designing their system.

One can hope that we will be able to learn from Linden’s experience, even as we take their open sourced code to go beyond the SecondLife world. However, given the unfinished state of all these worlds and the limited number of people using them, I think we (the ISM) will be in SecondLife for a long time to come, even if we experiment with additional virtual locations.

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]]> http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/04/12/more-vws/feed/ 1 http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/03/05/yavw-yet-another-virtual-world/ http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/03/05/yavw-yet-another-virtual-world/#comments Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:35:01 +0000 Katherine W. Prawl http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/03/05/yavw-yet-another-virtual-world/ Troy McConaghy just posted a message to the Qwaq MICA group about a brand new Virtual World, Tomorrow Space from a company called Transmutable Networks.

I naturally immediately signed up for an account (katlemieux) and briefly explored this Web-based world, which only opened to the public this Monday. So far, they have two types of “rooms” available which one can rent on a daily basis and invite people to join you for free, and two generic avatars, “Joe” and “Jane”, which can be customized to a limited degree. With a Pro account, one can upload textures to create a better looking avatar and wardrobe, etc., but so far I haven’t found any specifications for those.

In general it looks promising. The idea of a low-cost, Web-accessible virtual meeting space has some real possibilities, even if it’s not visually rich yet. Already one can link to a folder of images to display as a slideshow, or a video file, and a voice chat tool is available. Adding voice to a meeting room rental (US$5.99) costs an additional fee (US$4.99), but that’s not horrible considering that people you invite to your room don’t have to pay a cent.

So far I’ve only tried browsing this site with Firefox on Mac OS X.5, but (after adding a line to my computer’s Java settings, according to Transmutable’s very clear instructions, and restarting Firefox), it worked very well. Later I’ll fire up my virtual machines with WindowsXP® and Debian GNU/Linux, and see how it works on them.

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