Category: Second Life

Twitter Posting with PHP and Curl

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As it’s so utterly and incredibly easy to do this, I thought I’d add to the resources of how to post to message to your Twitter account using PHP and Curl.

So, to add to the other PHP scripts I’ve been plonking out here, here is the PHP source code to a simple  function which will post to a Twitter account. Send data to it from a form or a service, or even another script, even from an llHTTPRequest from an LSL script in Second Life! Easy and interesting stuff, that messaging. 😉

Here you go: http://kosso.co.uk/twitter/twitterCurl.phps

php, Second Life, twitter

KozCast2 : Koz Farina in Second Life

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Wow! Can you believe it!! Two in one day!

DOWNLOAD PODCAST MP3 HERE

This one is more focussed on my Second Life. Still a bit of a ramble (just the way I like it) – tangential thoughts and ideas. No outline. Podcasting by the seat of my (flexi) pants! Woo!

I made the intro music here, using sounds that the UI makes, along with some beats and stuff I threw in there 😉 Hope you like it!

kozcast, podcast, Second Life, secondlife

Ansche Attacks!

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Before Christmas, I had heard about the griefing attack which happened on Ansche Chung, Second Life’s first ‘real’ millionaire, during an interview with CNET.

Some residents present took photos and video footage of the attacks, which included self-replicated flying penises floating at Ansche. Another attack during another interview saw a swarm of photoshopped photos of her holding a large copy-pasted penis.

It appears now that she is trying to enforce a takedown of all media showing her avatar or places her organisation has built. She has succeeding in using the DCMA to take down the video of the attack from YouTube.

Reuters have a full article on the events, which also included the mistake of also trying to get BoingBoing to step into line too. D’oh!

The video is still available on Google Video (and downloadable in .mp4 format which SL/Quicktime can play if you want to show it on your land) – all nicely edited to music too 😉

I host pictures people take in Second Life over on blogHUD and if she asked me to take down someone’s photo, I would be hard pushed to do so, as she’s a celebrity, who was effectively ‘papped’ in a public place. She cant stop that. The photographers should be rewarded! Community-style! 😉

And if she wants to try and stop photos of her ‘places’ and builds being posted online, then I think she’s totally off her rocker object. Sure she could try, but she’ll cause herself more harm than good if she does do that. People in communities don’t react well to that kind of control.

We have politicians who have eggs and stuff thrown at them in real life – do you see the footage of this being censored by the victim? No. It gets out there as ‘news’ content. Public domain. No holds barred. (Possibly there are occasions when it does happen though, depending on the image and circumstance and situation)

Ansche needs to deal with this PR in a different way. Laughing usually works. It’s not the emotion the attacker wanted or expected. Stamping your feet like a little girl is not the right way to go.

I think she’ ll learn – the hard way. Like most ‘celebrities’.

Second Life

Neuronet – ‘Worlds First’ Real-Time Virtual Reality Network

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Rezzing soon to a visual cortex near you, Neuronet is preparing to launch next year.

Set up by the IAVRT – “The International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT) is a not-for-profit professional organization dedicated to fostering scientific research and business development in the area of Virtual Reality (VR) technology for the benefit of society.” – wants to create a network of virtual reailty spaces, which will apparently be accessible/marketable via two top level domain names (TLDs) .vr and .cin

It looks like they care about alot of the important things which need to be under control and understood for this to all work.

They will surely make good money selling domain names under the .vr domain, but I don’t know too much about .cin (cinematic virtual reality neurosites). Who knows, it might get traction eventually.Domains names from both will cost $100US .

I have recently been suggesting to people that Linden Lab contact on organisation called ‘Sierratel‘ who appear to the people in charge of selling domain names with the .sl TLD. The trouble is, this company does not seem to reply to emails, so should really look for an agent/organization to handle the job. I think Second-Lifers would no doubt swarm to these and would provide decent income in other ways than rising land prices beyong many people’s reach.

Back to the Neuronet though, I am very much looking forward to the evolution of ‘truly’ immersive environments. I have always been closely watching the rise in speed in power of home PCs and their graphics capabilities, along with the rising speeds of internet connectivity. It will be interesting to see how the fantasy of a truly global 3D VR world lives up to the actuality of it. Will it scale? Is it secure? etc. Situations which LL are constantly dealing with. It appears that you will get a ‘development neurosite’ with your domain name for $2500US a year (wow), so I wonder if this means that people will be able to host their own nerusite systems on their own servers. No idea what the requirements and costs might be yet.

Pre-orders for names (The Sunrise Period) looks set to start in February 2007, with the General Registration period, which they call the ‘Land Rush’ period (already!) starting on June 4th 2007. MY BIRTHDAY!!! Ha! I want koz.vr 😀

I will also be keeping a close eye on an Australian/UK company called Inition (with a shop in London! W00t!) as they appear to sell just about everything you could want for an immersive existence in a 3D world. Great stuff! Some of the kits there looks prohibitively expensive, but some are certainly affordable for the hardcore pixelvertex junkies out there/here! 😉 I thoroughly recommend browsing through their huge range of products, as it really taught me alot about all the amazing VR devices which are now on the market, along with their current value. They sell kit for VR HUDs (heads up displays), headsets, glasses, gloves, motion capture kits, 3D digitizing/scanning and even 3D printing (rather like a friend, Mike Buckbee’s Fabjectory, which will ‘print’ a 3d sculpture of your Second Life avatar – amazing, and I still need to get one 😉 )

Unfortunately, this cool little device, ‘The Monkey’ has been discontinued. If anyone else out there knows of any motion (or pose) capture desktop mannekins out there, please do let me know. Thx 😉

It looks like 3D is not going to go away next year. On the contrary, it’s going to get deeper – much to the chagrin of many a 3D/SL-widow/widower out there already! :p

More discussion on 3pointd

Also, the rebang blog seems highly suspicious of a potential scam!

Second Life

Dana Gardner Has Second Thoughts

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What makes Second Life eerily powerful is the zero-distance between thinkers and technology by ZDNet‘s Dana Gardner (and the ‘Briefings Direct’ podcast)– There is an egalitarian equalizing effect when your avatar IMs with another … even if you know who they are. There’s a comfort level with being virtual, and the IBMers seemed eager to chat with lots of folks. I can see getting better access to executives and the creative minds at IBM in Second Life than I do in real life, and that’s a good thing.

—–

He’s right. But people also said that the internet and computers themselves take away a certain amount of the human experience too. I was told this ever since I fell in love with ‘playing’ on a computer as a child. I was told I was wasting my time and ‘missing out’. I sat and thought that I was seizing an opportunity to learn about these things, as we’d soon be surrounded by them everywhere we went. Whether for business or pleasure.

Then, when the Web and interent came along, I immediately connected and communicated with people all around the world (this totally blew my mind). Some of these people have become good friends who I go to stay with, or vice versa, in the ‘real world’.

Communication like this is so unbelievably powerful and incredibly resourceful, it almost brings a tear to my eye. Just about all the fundamental knowledge in various programming languages I know came from information from people on the internet, directly or indirectly. (I owe them all big time – and try to share knowledge back to this new ‘community resource’ as much as possible – and more in the future, in a more structured way).

I was invited to this IBM event too. Who me? Little old me? Sat at home on a computer? Yes. Me. How cool is that!? Unfortunately I couldn’t make it. We know the world is round, but sometimes we forget the time differences in a global forum. 😉

I had the pleasure of having lunch with Dana back in the summer too. All through connections made through work, which in themselves are a product of my online world. A great, smart guy. A pleasure to talk to.

Second Life provides us with a feeling of ‘proximity’ to people we communicate with and gesture to. It’s hard to explain. It’s not like the odd feeling you get having a video conference with someone, where you look into the camera or not. It kind of feels more natural in a virtual world. (For me, anyway)

This platform is so powerful it must not be ignored. The interfaces will become more stable and realistic as time goes by. The landlord of the metaverse of the future might not be Linden Lab. It could be you. It could be the person sat next to you. Whoever it is, I promise you it’s not going to go away. It’s going to get BETTER.

Embrace it. You will thank yourself for it in the future. And who knows, you might actually make some money and new friends and have some fun on the way! 😉

ideas, Second Life, secondlife, technology, web

3D News with RSS

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For Vista, when it comes out, here’s an app/widget from Microsoft called UniveRSS.

UniveRSS is a showcase application that demonstrates the use of several WPF features, 3D animations, data binding, and data visualization. Currently UniveRSS uses the RSS Feed Store managed through Internet Explorer 7. Later versions will allow you to manage the Feed Store from within the UniveRSS application.

It looks very nice and very much the type of thing I envisage in Second Life, when (and if) we get html on a prim surface. With all the available data bindings and communications we have at our disposal there, it should be faily easy to build this in the Metaverse.

Thanks to Dave Winer for the link.

feeds, gadgets, grazing, rss, Second Life, secondlife

Second Life : The Book – Out now!

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O’Reilly has finally released its book on Second Life, available for pre-order now via Amazon called ‘Second Life : The Official Guide’.

I had heard about a Second Life Hacks book from O’Reilly in the works a while ago. Someone in world had even gone to the trouble of mocking up a book cover ages ago which I saw in a sandbox area, claiming the authors to be the ‘FIC’ (Feted Inner Core). Since all the hack shenanigans on the grid recently, I can’t imagine a ‘hacking’ book will go down well with those who get scared by that term. ‘Hacking’ is not always bad. In fact without it, innovation would find it very hard indeed.

Second Life Hacks MockupSomeone once called me a hacker about 14 years ago. I was rather proud! 🙂 I think they only called me that because I sat down and worked things out by myself, rather than followed ‘official intructions’

There is no spoon!  🙂

Second Life, secondlife

SL Money Spent Spiked

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SL money spikeThat graph looks pretty impessive huh? It shows the US Dollars spent in Second Life over last 24 hours at $1,726,930 as of 9:00am PST today (10th Nov 2006).

Well, it turns out that something many people has thought is true – the daily dollar amount which Linden Lab tout as spent is actually (simply) total transactions in world.

This ‘spike/cliff’ was caused by an anonymous resident who wrote a script which passed some Linden dollars back and forth between two avatars. After an hour of running it had generated over one million Linden dollars of transactions, but no money was spent. The avatars which this was running on ended up with the same amount they started with. Zero sum.

I’m sure this is bound to come up at the next Town Hall Meeting with Linden CEO Philip Rosedale/Linden on November 16th. Many companies that arrive in SL are doing so due to all this ‘real’ money being ‘spent’ – hmmm. I wander what they will think. People will want better figures – like the ‘over one million residents’ stat. We want to know how many unique and ACTIVE users there are. Linden record the ‘MAC’ address of your network card, so they have the data.

(Graph saved from secondlife.reuters.com )

Second Life, secondlife
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