Blinding Snow

So some people don’t like the blinding light of snow. The answer is simple really. Make a prim, turn it black, and then adjust the transparency. Last, put it on your HUD and resize. Wallah! Non-blinding snow shades. I was tempted to just make them a solid black color, but that would have been too funny.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nowhereville using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Last.FM Love Spree

Today was the day that I look at the list of tracks that I recently marked as “Love” on my Last.FM profile and go on a shopping spree in iTunes. Here are my recent purchases:

• Gorillaz – Feel Good Inc.
• Goldfrapp – Ooh La La
• Flunk – Play
• Goldfrapp – Happiness
• Moloko – Sing It Back (Boris Musical Mix)
• Bitter:Sweet – Take 2 Blue
• Hooverphonic – Waves
• Royksopp – This Must Be It
• Elsiane – Mend (To Fix, To Repair)
• Novika – Movie Girl

posted by Dedric Mauriac on Ambleside using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Nounours

I got a bear from Merov Linden. He was a bit reluctant at first because he felt his bear was ugly. I pressed on and said I would be more than happy to have an ugly bear in my collection. He gave me an object called “Nounours”. I like the cute smiley face on his nose. Merov Linden works with the open source viewer.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Hippotropolis using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Nounours

I got a bear from Merov Linden. He was a bit reluctant at first because he felt his bear was ugly. I pressed on and said I would be more than happy to have an ugly bear in my collection. He gave me an object called “Nounours”. I like the cute smiley face on his nose. Merov Linden works with the open source viewer.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Hippotropolis using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Emotional HUD Trial

I decided to create a free trial version of the Emotional HUD and distribute it thorugh my Subscribe-o-matic. With 352 subscribers, I am hoping that a few may actually find a benefit to trying out the product. The trial is set to expires on the 7th of January. I think this “try before you buy” idea may be a good way to get products out to people who would otherwise pass them up. With expirations hard-coded into the scripts, I would need to keep updating the code. It would be preferrable if there was a licensing scheme online so that each person could have a 7 day trial from the first day they rez an object, and to prevent the object from working even if the rez it again after 14 days.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Emotions With Less Effort

I took a look at the Emotional HUD and started working on an update. The first thing to do was to compile all the scripts in Mono. This decreased the time from an average of 0.027 down to 0.021. It’s about a 22% increase in performance. I went ahead and started using UV touch mapping to detect which picture the end-user clicked. This allowed me to remove 5 prims as well as 5 scripts. I also moved all of the touch commands from the pictures and arrows into the root prim, allowing me to remove two additional scripts (back/next). The overall performance is now setting at an average of 0.011 (almost 60% increase in performance), with less prims (7 prims instead of 12). There are additional features comming to LSL script that would help me out in reducing the overall number of scripts used – specifically llSetLinkPrimitiveParams and the new properties for PRIM_TEXT (SVC-5168). Still, an object only using 0.011 is very light weight. I may eventually change the look of the object as well. Currently it’s a pretty significan’t size as a HUD attachment. Anyone can resize it, but I’m thinking more or less a way to make it easier to use in general.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nowhereville using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Free Office Hours HUD

Peter Stindberg handed me a HUD a while back to help me catch on to when Linden meetings are held, the topic, location, and host. I must say that it has become a pretty handy tool. The downside is that most meetings are held during the week with normal business hours. That’s a bit of a downer since I’m often at work during those times. I looked at the properties of the HUD and found that it’s creator is Gellan Glenelg. The creators profile had a picks tab leading strait to a location specifically set asside to acquire the free office hours HUD. I clicked it just to make sure I had the latest version.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Ciel using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Kaleidoscope TV

After watching another persons Kaleidoscope videos last night, I decided to do my own little attempt at it with only showing a portion of a video and mirroring it. It looks pretty wild, but I needed a little TV in the center to show the actual video as well.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nowhereville using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

U2 Kaleidoscope

Now watching the U2 video. Pretty interesting visuals with this one. Many people are starting to gather around. I’m seeing that there are 59 agents on the region at the moment.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Open Habitat using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Geodesic Kaleidoscope Dome

Pooky Amsterdam invited me over to have a look at a kaleidoscope dome. While the media loaded, It appeared that I was in the middle of a black megasphere. I then saw that it was made of many pieces like the old domes before megaprims became popular. This gave an advantage of flipping the texture on each prim. As the owners changed the different videos playing, each one had a pretty wild kaleidoscope effect. What would be really wild is if they clipped the texture to show a sliver of a video, and made something that was like a real kaleidoscope.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Open Habitat using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Crontab with a minute delay

I started to look into a way to get a php script to execute on a timed event. I found that crontab is used for this purpose. I can have quite a bit of control over it to run ever minute, hour, day, etc. It doesn’t give fine control allowing me to run during specific seconds though. My commands in the queue may end up waiting for a minute before they are actually executed. When there is only a few commands in the queue, this is unacceptable. Why wait when you can do it now? I wonder if there is another approach to this to run every 15 seconds.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Alexa Linden Bear

Collectable Linden Bear from Alexa Linden. Appears to be a bunny rabbit with shades enjoying a warm day in the water with iced tea. No chance of her drowning in 3 inches of water as she has a life preserver. Alexa Linden was helping Soft Linden triage open bugs on JIRA during his office hours.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nowhereville using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

A working boat (almost)

I thought everything was setup. I have the boat configured to allow any one to sit in the passenger seats, but only the owner can sit in the drivers seat and drive the boat. Anyone attempting to sit in the drivers seat is moved to a passenger seat. It looked like everything was settled until I took it out for a spin. Crossing over into Edloe, I noticed that my Avatar seemed to have risen about a quarter meter from his seat. Standing up and sitting back down yeilded even more strange results. It wasn’t until I got back to my parcel on Nowhereville that the seat behaved normally. I am confused at this point in why an Avatar would change it’s seating position during a region crossing.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nowhereville using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Motorboat Fixes

I got the motorboat to slow down when I’m not pressing forward or backward. It rides pretty smoothe now. Board crossings are sometimes a problem, but that is a given that is not under my control. The last part to setup is the sitting positions and allowing others to ride along with me. I even fixed up some of the textures to look a bit better as well. Running around the five islands is an excellent place to test out my boat and view the great sceenery around here.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Motorboat Fixes

I got the motorboat to slow down when I’m not pressing forward or backward. It rides pretty smoothe now. Board crossings are sometimes a problem, but that is a given that is not under my control. The last part to setup is the sitting positions and allowing others to ride along with me. I even fixed up some of the textures to look a bit better as well. Running around the five islands is an excellent place to test out my boat and view the great sceenery around here.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

A Little Speed Boat

I was having difficulty understanding how to sail a flying Tako. I had made a note to myself to just build a speed boat so that driving would be a bit more simpler since I wouldn’t need to worry about wind direction. I created a mockup of the motorboat with just 20 prims. Again, it’s got that blue and white theme to it that I always like to use. Now I just need to script the sitting positions and give it an engine to propel it forward.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nowhereville using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Same web texture for multiple prims

Earlier, I had though that the viewer was creating a separate texture for each prim that displayed a web page. After looking a bit closer – specifically at a page that keeps generating random content, I found that the same web texture is generated once and mapped to all prims. This helps out on client-side resource usage since only one browser instance is used. I am a little concerned about why my viewer crashed on a page that had 9 frames. One of the benefits of a web page on a prim is that it is constantly updated/animated with any javascript timers. For example, the XStreet page keeps changing the featured itmes that are displayed on its own. This introduces the ability for me to display a single product image, with overlayed information regarding the price, description, creator, permissions, etc. I think I’ll avoid frames overall and stick with just multiple images and text on a single web page.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nowhereville using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Pages on a prim

I’ve got my little experiment setup to do the following. Touch a prim. You get a dialog asking which page you want to change (1 to 4). After choosing the page, you are asked to enter a URL. The url is sent to http://is.gd/ to be shortoned to a 5 character code. Afterwards the four codes (1 for each page) is sent to a server that I have on my local network which generates a frameset of 4 pages. Those four pages are shown in-world, but only portions of the texture. It’s nice how it works out, but resource intensive on the client. I’ve already crashed once when I tried it with 9 pages and 3072×3072 resolution. The SL viewer UI only allows me to go up to 1024×1024, but scripts are not limited. Pages with a lot of content seem to take longer to display as well.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nowhereville using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Multilpe Pages

I was considering this idea the other day on a cinch cast to use a single web page and clip it to show different parts of it on different objects. I took it a step further and used framesets to enable multiple web pages to be displayed on the same parcel. Using this technique, you can have an unlimited number of pages displayed on the same parcel. Just keep in mind that each face that displays a web page is rendered individually and may start to consume resources. Since half of the page isn’t seen for each prim, that seems like a lot of wasted rendering.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nowhereville using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Text Box – Two years and counting

Almost two years after it started to appear in source branches (Feb 2008), the llTextBox method is still delayed. llTextBox shows a great promise to combining security and ease of use. It gives content creators the ability to provide a dialog box with a free text field instead of buttons. This is useful because the current methods of entering configuration information is through editing a note card, scripts, or typing. For objects that have no- modify permissions, users are limited to just typing. Typing in the public channel allows anyone to see what you are configuring your objects to use and may confuse them as it looks like you are talking nonsense. Imagine setting up an object to talk to twitter by providing your credentials in clear text for everyone to see. To avoid this problem, content creators start using non-public channels to listen on. To talk on these “channels”, the end-user prefixes their comands with a forward slash and number. (/5422 password). For an added measure of security, the channel to type on is changed randomly for each request. (/5422 username, /5200 password, etc.) It is a bit crazy having to type all these random numbers to enter information. With a text box, you can take out all of the extra steps and just enter the data directly. The text box allows the content creator better control over the security without making the end-user jump through hoops. The problem though is that this feature has been in the works for over a year and a half. I created a TwitterBox almost a year ago, but delayed it’s debut in waiting for the text box command to become available. Rite now, you need to prefix every response with a random number between 1000 and 9999. The llTextBox command does compile, but as always, it shows a button with the text “!!llTextBox!!”. There is some debate on the exact implementation of how it should be implemented. One suggestion is to have the ability for content creators to pre-populate the text box (SVC-2406), and another is to have both the buttons and free text box (SVC-2405). I’m getting to the point that I just want to see something. I could care less how. Simply put, something is better than nothing. A two year wait is way too long for a really simple feature. I am beginning to wonder if the Lindens forgot about this implementation and left it behind.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nowhereville using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]