Category Archives: Technology

ThinkPad tilting revisited

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Back in March we started talking about some hacks which demonstrate the coolness that can be achieved using the accelerometer inside the ThinkPad (the ‘Active Protection System’).

Thanks to Steve Farrell for pointing me at something which Mark Smith (of IBM’s research center in Almaden) has been working on; a modified version of SDL (the Simple DirectMedia Library) which supports the ThinkPad accelerometer in any game (on Windows or Linux) which uses the SDL to provide input. Using Mark’s modified library means you can tilt your way to a high score on all these games and more.

Internationalised URLs

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One of the web projects Rob and I are working on at the moment has some internationalisation requirements that are pretty key to its success. The standard user-application interactions aren’t that problematic, there’s some things to think about encoding/storage wise, but it’s a well understood area.

The tricky bit is that URLs are ASCII only. You can encode non-ASCII characters and handle things in the application to make it look and act like it’s coping with different character sets, but this only really works if you think of a URL as a pure reference, that isn’t containing any information in itself. For web 2.0 type applications (and when using REST), this doesn’t really work as the URL contains information in itself. If you want a piece of information referenced by a URL like http://mysite/user/page1 making that URL make sense in languages not using ASCII is hard.

Content 2.0 at the RSA

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I was at the Content 2.0 conference yesterday. The main topics of discussion were around user generated content. Some of the content moved a bit too much in to marketing for my interests, but overall it was a good event. As you’d expect there were a couple of notable bloggers there, including Hugh McLeod from Gaping Void, who talked about how blogs had impacted businesses he’s involved with.

Marc Canter talked about some ideas in his new social networking project, People Aggregator, about how social networks need to be more open and let the user’s control their own data. Bradley Horowitz gave a great talk on Flickr and how it’s philosophies were being adopted by the rest of Yahoo! All of the people writing on eightbar are happy Flickr users, so it was good to get a bit of an insight in to them.

I thought Jamie Kantrowitz (from MySpace) was great, mainly as it’s the first time I’ve heard someone mention The OC in a geek-centric environment. She came under a bit of attack for the way MySpace locks in their user’s data, but I thought she countered that well. I think MySpace targets a different market than a lot of the social networking sites. It was interesting how she talked about successful users on MySpace are those that improve a conversation, rather than simply disagreeing or agreeing.

Main themes of the day included: microformats, myware, attention data, implicit ratings, people-like-me, control and measurement. I think they recorded the event and podcasts of the content should be available soon.

IBM & Dojo

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Given the buzz of Web2.0, its not surprising to see lots of ajax-based toolkits emerge from lots of different sources, Yahoo! and Google included.

I am glad to see that IBM are getting involved by contributing to an open source project.

Dojo has been on my list of things to learn about for a while now. As a starting point, I can recommend this talk by Alex Russell of the Dojo Foundation that was given at the XTech 2006 conference.

SL Projects to watch out for

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The community around Second life is building up and there are more and more skilled people joining in, as a result some pretty interesting projects are starting to emerge in the secondlife forums, here’s a heads up of a few that i think are especially interesting…

Second Life Protocol
First up there is the SL Protocol Reverse Engineering effort being run by Reuben Stein, this has fired up an interesting discussion thread on the SL forum, the initial posting sparked some serious debate with Reuben being accused of all sorts of things including illegal reverse engineering and opening up SL to a host of security problems. Luckily Phoenix Linden stepped in on behalf of the SL development team to clarify that Linden Labs were in support of the Reverse engineering effort providing it was good natured and not to the detriment of the community.

After this post a few more people emerged and admitted they had been looking at the protocol for some time, a few had actually written bots that work in SL (something that was not widely known before). In addition it was revealed that the entire protocol was described in a file present in everyones install directory and protected only by a simple bit of XOR encoding.

One of the most interesting things to come out of the project (or be uncovered by the project publicity) is the libsecondlife library project coded by Eddy Stryker which provides a C API for writing Secondlife clients, I’ll be having a play with this soon if i get time.

Offline Builder and .obj importer
The Offline builder is a Second life plugin written for the popular Blender an open source 3D editing tool. It gives you a panel in Blender that gives access to the primitives types and options that you have in SL itself.

This tool written by Jeffrey Gomez has tremendous potential, it’s in beta stage at the moment and the functionality to import the objects you create into SL isn’t built in yet, however the ability to build offline and import in will certainly lead to more ambitious projects and a greater audience of content creators.

For the time being Jeffrey has written a 3D model importer script which you can use to get objects inside SL.

Whats next …?

Offline scripting
Another amazingly useful bit of tooling would be a virtual machine to test Second Life scipts out in, I haven’t seen anybody having done this yet but please let me know if you have. I guess that some people are waiting until Linden Labs adopts Mono as thein game scripting engine.

SL offline chat client
I know that some people have already started looking at this one, but with the sudden amount of information available on the SL protocol it’s only a matter of time before IM clients and plugins start to appear.

One thousand paintings

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I recently discovered One thousand paintings, a project with the aim of selling 1000 paintings of the numbers 1 to 1000. The pricing model is quite interesting:

Generally, the value of a number is defined by the number itself, in the following way: value = 1000 – number. However, this is only the maximum price. Initially, a discount of 90% applies. This discount will decrease by an absolute 10% for every hundred paintings that are sold (for example, after 300 sold paintings, the discount will be 60%)

I thought the whole thing was quite cool. Having showed it to my wife (who is herself an artist), we quickly started looking for numbers that were still available. Many of the likely choices had already gone (including my preference, 404) but she pointed out that 365 was still up for grabs (yes, yes.. we should have got 366 as well, for leap years). Before long, we’d ordered it, happy to support a cool project and wondering where we’d hang our unique 12″ x 12″ painting.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that the Million Dollar Homepage was taking off. Ian, while wondering whether gullibility was a pre-requisite for early adopter status, bought an ad for eightbar, which I notice still manages to bring us in over 30 clicks per month. While these are undeniably different projects, it’s hard not to compare them.

When Mrs Roo and I bought 365, it was the 98th painting sold (handily just within the maximum discount). Today, having been linked from boing boing and other prominent blogs, he’s already sold 144 225 and rising very fast. Surely mainstream media attention can’t be far behind.

O’Reilly protecting the “Web 2.0” name

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A few of us were so busy drinking nice red wine and chatting about Web 2.0 yesterday that we didn’t notice O’Reilly attempting to protect the use of “Web 2.0” as a service mark and prevent its use in conjunction with a 3rd party conference.

Thus did controversy ensue.

I can’t help thinking that O’Reilly are victims of their own success here. Like it or not, “Web 2.0” has stuck pretty well as a term. Protecting their Web 2.0 conference while still hoping to keep it in popular use is going to be a difficult line to walk.

How is anyone else going to have conferences about what is, after all, a popular subject? Well, in this instance, O’Reilly are offering to let the “IT@Cork Web 2.0 conference” go ahead this time, but have requested that they agree not to use the name for future conference.

It seems Tim O’Reilly himself is on holiday. I wonder whether things will change when he returns.

Games within games: Tringo in Second Life

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As we all know by now, Second Life is less of a game and more of a virtual world with its own economy. Of course, inhabitants in a virtual world need virtual pastimes. A quick scan of today’s advertised events demonstrates that ‘Tringo’ and ‘Slingo’ are both more popular than ever.

Second Life events

While Slingo (imagine a slot machine merged with bingo) has long been a popular game on the internet, Tringo seems to be more specific to Second Life.

So what is it? Well, earlier today, Wired reported on the background and popularity of Tringo, which is an unlikely cross-breed of bingo and tetris. I won’t try to cover it in detail here (perhaps because I’m busy playing it in another window? I’ll let you guess) but there are plenty of excellent coverage of the game out there already. If you don’t fancy trying it in Second Life, you can always play it on the publisher’s website instead.

There are plenty of other games in Second Life besides Tringo. In fact, Linden Labs hosts an annual contest to develop compelling in-game games. (2005 winners, 2006 winners).

It will take some time before any of them overtake the *ingo games for raw popularity in Second Life though. As a sign of its success, and another excellent example of a real world crossover, I notice that Tringo has become a GameBoy Advance title too.

Second Life 3d Printers and ARGs all in one post

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At last a business is emerging to combine second life and 3d printing

A few people may have heard me harp on about 3d printers over the last couple of years, yes even before blogs 🙂

We have seen a few ideas and hacks that let you get opengl renderings out to a 3d printer. I had talked about buying one anyway and running it in my garage.

Things being what they were I ended up in investing time and money in a Second Life which has had much more impact amongst my community.

Now though, things are merging, maybe it is time to start going RL to SL and back to RL all as a service. RL drives the creation of SL space and objects, those objects can now be recreated as RL objects.

Also as the TV show Lost seems to have started creeeping its way out Alternate Reality Game style (see post on perpexcity.com) with its http://www.thehansofoundation.org/ then maybe we have three trends merging? ARG in SL and RL but requring actual physical objects to be printed in 3d

Just for completeness. The Alternate Reality Game is a specific type of media experience. Notable for its weaving of various types of technology to deliver a message or story. The ‘story’ is usually not planned in advance , but the authors watch the fans as they start up wikis and blogs and websites and adjust their path and involvement based on that activity.

Unlike a lot of marketing, it seems to be based on not having much in the way of advertising to start off with. There is a reliance on a small clue (referred to as a rabbit hole) that the writers are relying on an observant and inquisitive person to pick up on. This then acts as a seed of viral enthusiasm. With the original finders feeling a sense of one upmanship or leaders of a community. Whilst still allowing the later adopters to pick up on the whole story.

Web front end for Second Life ?

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With the enthusiasm for Second Life going strong among our group the ideas are flying everywhere. One major area of interest is getting information from outside in and vice versa. Along this theme one idea was that of presenting Second Life in a browser, this is in someways a step backward but would allow access to Second Life to be more pervasive and accessible to the majority, dipping in to the game for a short period of time or when on the move at an internet cafe could then be possible.

I stumbled across Hive7.com this morning when reading an article by Phoenix Psaltery in the latest copy of the excellent Metaverse Messenger Second Life’s web published news paper. Hive7 is very much modelled around Second Life, placing you in an MMO setting with custom scripting and object creation, only this time its all 2D in browser and written as an AJAX application. It’s a great example of what can be done when you’re prepared to push browser technology near to its limits. Unsuprisingly Hive7 has attracted the attention of Pathfinder Linden who spent some time there creating a replica of one of Second Life’s welcome areas. There isn’t currently any link up between Hive7 and the Second Life world, but with the similarities I’m sure either the Lindens or Hive7’s team are thinking about it….