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:

My results were somewhat mixed. I could not duplicate the counter error she’d seen, but I did enjoy trying out another blogging software. I’ve been using WordPress for several years very happily, but it’s always good to try something new. I don’t think I’ll be switching, but I was impressed with how capable Blogger is these days.

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!

However, now I’ve gotten a little crazy. I heard in a podcast that MicroSoft has a free beta release of Windows 7 that will run until June 2010, and since I’d just bought another 2.5″ external hard disk drive and had plenty of storage space, I decided to see what it’s like. Well, this is what it’s like to run Windows 7 in a Sun Microsystems VM on Mac OS X:

Now, is that geeky, or what?

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.

For instance, in late December I discovered a nifty website/Web app called Scrapplet. When I created a free account and started building pages on this site, it was more or less just for fun, to see what was possible. Now, though, I use it for my own organization, mainly to keep track of all the social networks I’ve joined. One of my pages is simply a collection of hyperlinks to each network’s page, so when I have a few minutes to check out the discussions, but don’t want to bother with organizing browser bookmarks (which are only up to date on one computer at a time), I just pull up my “social networks” page and click away. I was even able to quickly sort the network links by topic. Most important, the app works visually, via drag and drop. It’s possible to enhance the pages by adding code, of course, but that’s not strictly necessary. Virtually anyone capable of handling a web browser should be able to create a personal site at Scrapplet. It could be used to quickly prototype webpage designs, too.

Oh, and those online social networks! Obviously, to be active, it’s necessary to be online. Yes, I can see the sites on my iPhone, but except for a few individual networks, they are dependent on full-sized web browser screens, and use lots of visual effects. In at least one, I can’t even post a comment in a group discussion from my iPhone because of the underlying code. Apparently it requires a plug-in not available on the iPhone, like Flash or something.

But the thing that is really irritating is the way flakey internet access is making it difficult to do research for the book I’m working on (about ebook publishing), and to work on my websites. I would like to revamp my old History-eBooks website, and I have been working on it, but being frequently interrupted by crashing routers or bandwidth restrictions make that an uphill battle. In the time I’ve been able to get online, though, I’ve found a new tool for developing blog page themes, Wordpress Theme Developer. It’s a free application running on a website, and works very well indeed, but yes, you have to be online to use it. Argh!

mDNSResponder, by the way, is a software server that enables Apple’s Bonjour network, among other things. It is part of the MacOS. However, I didn’t know that when I started trying to track down all the rogue processes. As I mentioned previously, I blocked mDNSResponder using a Little Snitch “rule”, but I wanted to eliminate what was launching it. To this end, I started up the MacOS utiliy, Activity Monitor, which in addition to showing all the processes running on the computer, allow the administrator to shut them down selectively.

Little Snitch network monitor

Well, to make a long story short, apparently I got carried away. The concept was sound, but since I didn’t take the time to learn enough to really know what I was doing (always a dangerous thing for someone poking around the underbelly of the OS), I must have killed too many instances of the process, or the wrong ones, or something. Every time I tried to open a web page in FireFox, I had to click away a warning dialog, which got very old, very quickly. But the Little Sntich network monitor still showed traffic trying to go out to the Ukraine, even after restarting the computer and reinstalling FireFox!

So, I made an appointment with the “genius bar” at the local Apple Store. The very helpful techs there hadn’t seen this particular problem before, but they were able to isolate whatever it was that was making that call, and shut it down. As it happened, it was a QuickTime™ process, which is not surprising given that Phil probably acquired the trojan by trying to view a video someone had sent him. To help avoid such problems in the future, the “genius” suggested installing a bit of freeware, Perian, a QuickTime component that opens just about any video codec on the Mac without having to go out and find a tool or possibly accept dangerous suggestions from potential malware. Not only that, but “genius bar” help is even free!

So, we’re back to responsible, malware-free telecommunications. Next month, when we try using our Verizon wireless internet gear without the added stress of unwanted transmissions, we’ll reevaluate our experience with that system.

Right now we have the router (with the USB modem sticking out the side of it) sitting on the dashboard of our RV:

Connected to the modem is the coax cable from the antenna, which is presently propped up at the middle of the windshield on top of the dashboard. Our friend, Mark, first told us about using a Wilson antenna to boost his cellphone reception and got us thinking about better ways to manage our connectivity. He says he never has used an external mount for his antenna. Sitting it in the windshield or on a table has worked for him even in fringe areas. While internet data at broadband speeds may require it to be placed higher, partiularly in hilly areas, right now having it on the dashboard seems to work for us here, too. The iPhone was having trouble getting a good EDGE network signal, but with the antenna it’s doing just fine on WiFi. Oh, by the way, if I understand it correctly even though the iPhones aren’t connected to the router, just having the antenna and router running and rebroadcasting the signal gives us the benefit of stronger cellphone reception.

To avoid having to lay the antenna down while we’re driving, we will attach it to the windshield center post with velcro loops. We do want to have it available over the road instead of stowing it away. In a few days I’ll be able to report on how well it works in a totally mobile setting as we drive to Amarillo and on toward Tuscon.

If all goes as well as it has been so far, I will be able to restart my history ebooks website, and perhaps change the distribution method from CD-ROMs to online downloads. I have an antique history book, the Standard History of Essex County, Massachusetts, that I’d scanned several years ago and converted to PDF files, then indexed every proper name and loaded them into a database for easy lookup. At one time, when I had the website on a Lasso™-based server, we were able to make the database available online, but I’ll have to learn more about MySQL (or some similar opensource database system) and PHP to do that again.

Having fulltime high-quality internet access is going to open up a lot of possibilities. The only potential problem I can foresee is that we are likely to need more than 5GB of throughput per month if we use this system as much as I expect we might. It’s possible to run over that allowance very easily the way we use the ‘net, with two computers and two iPhones. Every megabyte over 5 gig will cost us US$0.25, which can add up very quickly. Whenever it’s available and not too frustrating, we’ll use the WiFi provided by RV parks, roadside rest areas and internet cafés, and at least until we get an online account with Verizon that will let me keep track of our usage, we will play it safe.

Oh, I didn’t mention the problem I had with Verizon’s website, did I? When I tried to sign up for their online account, it turned out that to enable it I have to enter a code they text to the “cellphone” the account number is connected to. Except that we don’t have a cellphone, we have a wireless modem. Doh! The site says that if they aren’t able to text the code, they’ll mail it to our billing address. Lovely. That means we won’t get it till our mail is forwarded to us in Tucson, at least two weeks from now. Sigh! Maybe if I call Verizon, or the 3GStore.com who sold us the gear, it will be possible to get around that. Verizon ought to have a better arrangement for modem customers since they have been doing this for several years already. It being a weekend as I write this, the call will have to wait until tomorrow, and hope the 3G Store doesn’t observe MLK day.

More details will be forthcoming here as we acquire more experience with this stuff, or watch my Twitter feed (“follow katlemieux”) for minute-by-minute comments as things happen.

I tried to save this post, but a “save” button never appeared. Now that I’m back at my desk I can see why: I needed to upgrade to the latest version of WP. That’s done now, so I’ll try again and hope the fact that now there is support for XML-RPC will make the difference. If not, I will just have to wait for the next version to use this app. That would make me sad, but not sad enough to give up on it. Here goes! If you see this post you will know it worked.

more cat pictures

As it happens, I left a MICA meeting to talk to Henrik, and we had just been discussing many of the same things there, although on a more concrete basis. While Henrik was interested in general concepts, the MICA group is actively working on establishing one or more servers using different VW platforms, to use for developing their astrophysics simulations in 3D. One simulation that has already been done using OpenSim software is documented in this YouTube video:

The developers of this Newtonian n-body simulation, a group in Japan called Genkii, are now working with MICA. Adam Johnson and Jeff Ames are members of the Tokyo Genkii group, and are also OpenSim developers.

Tonight yet another group I’m involved with, the ISM planning group in Second Life, will be discussing yet more aspects of the same things, how to expand our virtual museum into the growing (someday to be) interconnected metaverse.

So, all the research I’ve been documenting in this blog is starting to have some results in the real world … uh, I mean, virtual world. (It’s more and more difficult to tell the difference between them these days.)