Linden Lab opens it’s world — mrtopf.de
Linden Lab opens it’s world — mrtopf.de: “What it will allow you is to teleport not only inside the Linden Lab Grid but also to the outside, e.g. OpenSim hosted regions.“
(Someone remind me to talk to Mr Tao Takashi about “it’s” vs “its”)
iPhone Reviewers FTW
I am amusing myself this afternoon by looking through what freebie Apps are available for my iPod, and reading through the reviews of them.
It strikes me that some kind of new breed of software reviewer is being born — one who has more in common with the HYS Commenters than anything remotely sensible.
My favourite so far, plucked from the reviews of British Airways’ little app that lets you see departures and arrivals, is this one:
Well done BA you have just given the terrorist all your flight data on the move…
Priceless
“QUICK OMG TURN OFF THE INTERNETS IN CASE THE TERRORIST SEES WHAT WE’RE DOING“
Portfolios
A comment on some text I just wrote on the cagd site seemed worth expanding on:
also, any news on the idea that the site can somehow be used as a place to post work that is publicly available (like a portfolio for alumni[remember that at all?])
I’ve been developing something just like that for a while now — mainly concentrating on the API (or, my hideous stab at an attempt of an API) and a test site for myself.
Apart from the ongoing challenge of finding time to write such a (fantastically useful) thing, one of the stumbling blocks for me is the idea of an ‘installation procedure’. WHat I mean is, it’s all very well for me to write a chunk of code that works as a personal portfolio, but the tricky part seems to be making it easy for other people to install on their own sites.
The portfolio works, at the moment, by pulling a hand-coded series of sets from a user’s stream, and presenting it with some funky CSS. And the problem seems, to me, to be that “hand-coded” part.
Basically, the publishing/curation tools in the main site are good, but not good enough. What’s needed is a way to say “Oh hi. These sets here? I want them to appear on an external website”, and for the site to automagically generate the code, or do it all seamlessly in the background.
I mean, on the one hand, I think it’s probably good if you can put together an external site with some hand-coding, but it should have an equally easy part that assumes that each and every user is at some point going to want to publish a portfolio after they graduate.
Which makes me think that there should be two aspects to this:
The installation process should be as simple as Wordpress’s. “Here is a zip file, expand it onto your web server and edit the configuration file. And you’re done”
Perhaps the site should offer hosting for portfolio’s itself. At urls such as “http://fas19069.leedsmet.ac.uk/~hibber02″
If I did do that, I could probably write something rather nifty that offered the option of using your own domain name for it — much in the way that Tumblr does it.
Also, I would need one or two standard themes, plus a very easy way to make new themes.
And basically, I need a year off to write t all.
Please?
FLV Player
Video player for FLV file, intended for the diffusion on websites.
Building By Numbers (Broadcasting Place)
I’ve been asked to create an accurate scale model of our new building in Second Life, so I thought I would share the process I use to make this sort of thing.
I use architects’ drawings, traced out in Illustrator, then run through some scripts I made that churn out prims in exactly the right places, at the right sizes and rotations. Then I tweak everything by hand.
There’s a couple of days’ work in the video above, but fortunately most of the floors are very similar — so the prospect of doing the other 27 isn’t too daunting
iPodtastic
I imagine that writing a whole post like this would be a nightmare. I guess I should practise my typing.
Also, is it practice or practise? Hmm.
Polygonal Annoyances
Part of the process I use to build the enormous re-creations of real-life buildings in Second Life involves tracing architectural plans in Illustrator. I go through PDFs, drawing rectangles where I want prims, then save the whole thing as an SVG and use some PHP-voodoo to translate that into something I can use inworld.
The first time I did a massive build like that, it was a building that was nothing but right-angles — pretty easy really. The one I’m currently ploughing through is a series of weird angles, and as a result, Illustrator is doing something odd and annoying…
I’ve just spent three hours tracing out all the glass-work for the building, but when I can to save it as an SVG Illustrator decided to ignore the fact that all the shapes were rectangles, and lazily translate them into <polygon> — which my PHP scripts can’t deal with.
It seems completely arbitrary — it replaces some, but not others, and I can’t seem to see any pattern (so that I can do something different and avoid this)
Anyway. Arse.
…
[Update] I fixed it. I figured it was probably easier to write a new piece of code that translated coordinate points of a polygon into the same data structure as the rectangles, than it would have been to go back and try and redraw everything without doing whatever it was that made Illustrator give up and resort to lazy shape-descriptions.
I was right 
