My original attempt to href="http://dedricmauriac.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/how-to-not-see-
shadows/">view shadows in Second Life failed about a year ago. I
figured that I needed to use a special viewer such as Kirstens viewer to do
so. I've been noticing that my friend, href="http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/ProfilePage.aspx?Name=Matthew%20Kidomen">Matthew
Kidomen has been taking lots of photos for a while with Shadows. I
looked up some instructions and found even the Alphaville Herald reported
http://foo.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2009/06/secret-shadow-
settings-in-new-sl-viewer.html">how to enable shadows in the Second Life
viewer with the same steps that I previously took.

I decided to
try it again, and it was like magic. I saw shadows everywhere. It seemed to
slow my computer down quite a bit through. My FPS is down between seven and
eight when standing still and goes down to a solid six when walking.
Removing the settings had my FPS jumping back up in the thirties.

One
interesting thing is that snapshot previews don't seem to show the shadows.
I'm doubting if I'll see them in my blog post either when I send the final
image. I'm hoping it will be available though. The place looks much better
with shadows, even if it's just for photo shoots.

I was helping out Hottie Something to get her skype status indicator
working. Most people contact me about it with problems because their skype
settings hide their status from the web. She didn't know where she had
gotten it, but the two of us are thinking that she may have gotten it from
Help Island since it is one of six freebies that I have listed over there.
We eventually got it working.

I looked up and noticed that she had a
little display setup to view her website, twitter, avatars united, and
facebook profiles on the web. It gave me an idea to create something that
is easy to set these up along with more social network and social media
sites. I was primarily focused on social networks related to Second Life,
or those that many people who used the platform were aware of.

The
majority of the work was just hunting down and creating icons for all of
the networks. I eventually got 16 icons setup that seemed pretty popular
and went to work on the script.

The product is customizable.
Depending on where you touch, it looks up the associated text from a note
card and sends it to you. If you change the texture, it will still read the
note card just fine.

My guess is that not everyone has an account at
all of these social networking and social media sites. If they are up to
the challenge, they can replace the texture with sites that they belong to,
as well as change the note card to say something else for the area of the
texture that was clicked. The sites that I have included are:

• href="http://dedricmauriac.wordpress.com">Blog
• href="http://www.avatarsunited.com/avatars/dedric-mauriac">Avatars
  United
• href="http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/ProfilePage.aspx?Name=Dedric+Mauriac">Avatars
  United
• href="https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&MerchantID=9165">XStreetSL
• href="http://my.bloghud.com/dedricmauriac/">blogHUD!
• href="http://www.myspace.com/dedricmauriac">MySpace
• href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dedric-mauriac/">Flickr
• href="http://www.slprofiles.com/slprofiles.asp?id=4150">Profiles
  Live
• href="http://bletaverse.com/dedric%20mauriac">Bletaverse
• href="http://www.facebook.com/lewis.moten">Facebook
• href="http://www.koinup.com/dedricmauriac/">KoiNUP
• href="http://www.youtube.com/user/dedricmauriac">YouTube
• href="http://www.subscribeomatic.com/groups/view/1522">Subscribe-o-
  matic
• href="http://www.plurk.com/dedricmauriac">Plurk
• href="http://twitter.com/dedricmauriac">Twitter
• href="http://slurl.com/secondlife/Skegemog/10/96/112">SLurl

Visit
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ross/64/134/51">Ross (64, 134,
51).

I'm starting to look into ways of getting people to my shop, and the
traffic cone from bletaverse was still fresh in my memory. I purchased the
gold version at the bletaverse head quarters. They are no-copy, so each
gold cone is 500 L$. There is a free silver cone, but each visitor costs 1
L$ more.

For starters, I put in 666 L$ of credits. I'm a little
curiouse to see if people would end up buying something since it requires
them to be here for 10 minutes. The Bletaverse site has a little report
that shows me a few statistics as well.

After finishing setting up some land that I had just acquired, I looked
up at the map. It seems that I was next to the first sim that I had
purchased land from. Actually, Dagger was my first sim that I purchased
"first land", but I moved out of there and purchased some land in
Higgins.

I remember the feeling back then. It was a large amount of
land. I believe it costed me about $75 US. I was debating if I should go
for it or not. My friend owned land next to it, and I was hanging out with
her debating on it. I had just gotten my tax return and decided it would be
ok to splurge. I remember cleaning up the castle in which part of it came
with the land, and other parts had to be returned to other
people.

It's been so long. Looking around, I can remember where I
built certain things, and some of the ideas that I had. I remember the good
times we had as well as the bad (suffering grid attacks).

They say
that you can never go back. For anyone who tries, you are often
disappointed by change. I knew that my friend had stayed in Higgins for a
long time, but now even she is gone. Both her lot and mine is now owned by
someone else, and it is empty. Surprisingly, the neighbors cave is still
there.

Visit href="http://slurl.com/secondlife/Higgins/20/20/144">Higgins (20, 20,
144).

I was talking with Prokofy Neva about the battery idea I had, and they
pretty much shot it down. Prokofy pretty much brought up the problem that I
wasn't advertising. I had done quite a bit trying to advertise, setup many
shops, but my store in search, do the commission catalog thing and run
classifieds. It seemed like ot of work without getting anything in
return.

I decided to try and go for it once more and set up shop on
the main land next to a road. I now have the "show in search" marked, and a
classified listing for the location. In addition, I'm marking up the land
to a higher price for sale. I imagine if it sells, I would immediately make
a good profit anyway that could enable me to expand. We'll see what
happens.

Visit href="http://slurl.com/secondlife/Skegemog/10/96/112">Skegemog (10, 96,
112).

Recently, Crap Mariner was commenting on href="http://firstlife.isfullofcrap.com/2010/02/the_rental_model.html">the
rental model. He suggested that our inventory would soon offer the
ability to rent the use of objects. This is similar to how 'href="http://www.there.com/">There' works with it's clothing. The
article he was commenting on was about href="http://abovethecrowd.com/2010/02/08/virtual-goods-accounting-and-the-
power-of-the-rental-model/">Virtual Goods, Accounting, And The Power Of The
'Rental' Model. Most types of items in Second Life are not capable of
being scripted. These include sounds, animations, note cards, landmarks,
textures, gestures, and most importantly - clothing.

If you look at
the large number of http://secondlifebloggers.ning.com/">blogs
covering Second Life, you'll notice that the majority of them cover
fashion. The model for fashion appears to be a crippled demo model, in that
consumers can try out clothing free, but with altercations that deteriorate
it's quality. This is most notably clothing with the word "demo" written on
it, or attachments that have a large box attached to them with an
advertisement for the creators store. If anything would get a change to the
"rental" model, clothing would be the first candidate as not to deteriorate
from the designers original work.

Objects are another story all
together. With objects, scripters are able to create their own payment
models. When I read through Crap Mariners comment regarding metered access,
I brought up the idea of making all of my gadgets free, and then selling
batteries to keep them powered. The more that I thought about it, the more
that it started to sound like a viable plan.

There are more benefits
here than I first realized. The first benefit covers the web based
marketplace, XStreetSL. The marketplace is adding monthly fees to list
items at 10 L$ per month. Since I list 163 items on the market place, I
would be losing 1630 L$ per month. I don't always sell that much in a
month. If I marked all of my gadgets as being free, the price would shoot
up to 99 L$ per item at 16,137 L$ per month (about $64 US). The benefit of
having a freebie listed on the exchange is that there is a separate section
for it on XStreet and people often like to get tons of freebies.

This
in turn makes me think about changing the format of listing my products.
Instead of listing each product individually, I could list one product that
contains all freebies as a bundled package. In turn, I would only be
listing four items in total. That would be three different batteries (1, 7,
30 days of juice), and a freebie bundle. This brings me down to spending
129 L$ per month - a savings of over $60 US.

The trick of this would
be to figure out how to keep the products updated. In addition, how would I
know if it's really going to pay off or not? It seems as if it may be a
risk. There are many ways down this path to address different problems. I
could even make my products go viral by allowing anyone to request a copy
since everything would be free, but batteries would be purchased
separate.

Someone told me that they got my unfortunate cookie as a freebie over on
help island. They went back to take pictures of it and showed them to me. I
went over to the public versions of help island, but I couldn't find them.
I looked back at the pictures he showed me and noticed the New Citizens
Incorporated logo (NCI) at the top. This was the first group I had ever
joined in Second Life, primarily so I could set my home point to something
other than ahern. I went on a search to find out where they were. I used to
live accross the street from them in Ebisu in 2006, but it seems they had
moved since then. I found them located not that far away in Kuula.

I
soon found the vendor full of free items and found four items of mine that
they were offering to people. The Texture Map Demo, Skype status indicator,
Unfortunate cookie, category menu demo. It's interesting that Help Island
has more items then the public version. Impressive that people are happy to
see my stuff and offer it to others.

I've setup more accounts in posterous to cross-post. Ping.FM seems to
only post short status messages. Even at that, it takes time before it
shows up because it depends on twitter feed to poll my RSS feed once an
hour. Hopefully these other services will show the full content along with
images. Here are the accounts I'm testing with posterous:

• href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=691365215">Facebook


• http://friendfeed.com/dedricmauriac">FriendFeed


• http://www.plurk.com/dedricmauriac">Plurk


• http://dedricmauriac.jaiku.com/">Jaiku


• http://dedric.tumblr.com/">Tumblr


• http://dedricmauriac.livejournal.com/">LiveJournal


• http://dedric-mauriac.blogspot.com/">Blogger


• http://dedricmauriac.typepad.com/blog">TypePad


• http://dedricmauriac.xanga.com/weblog">Xanga


• http://dedricmauriac.wordpress.com/">WordPress

Long before I started blogging from within second life, I would often
take many snapshots and post them to snapzilla. When different blogging
services came along, they started to offer cross-posting capabilities. I
would still post to snapzilla in addition to the blog services. It looks
like snapzilla is now comming full circle in offering a solution to cross-
posting.

Christiano has recently added support to not only post to
Posterous, but to also post automatically without the need to log into the
site for a manual post. There is a different address that you need to send
your snapshots to (post at slpics dot com), as well as setting up your
posterous email address in the control panel.

Posterous offers the
ability to cross-post to other blogs as well. They support Facebook,
twitter, flickr, picasa, youtube, vimeo, tumblr, blogtger, wordpress,
xanga, and more. With this, I am now using snapzilla and posterous to post
new content to my wordpress blog.

There is one little problem though.
The posts do not include any information about where it was that I took the
snapshot. Christiano is on top of it though. He's working on features to
support tagging and including slurls.

Why do I prefer snapzilla over
bloghud? there is a simple answer. Quality. I have never seen an image
posted more than once in my snapzilla library. In addition, every snapshot
I have sent to snapzilla has always appeared on snapzilla. I can depend on
snapzilla to process all of my images with accuracy. Snapzilla also stores
the full size of the original image and has a way to dynamically request
specific sizes as well. Snapzilla does not add their own watermark to my
images. Snapzilla is not only the oldest (and first) service of its kind,
but they also keep improving over the years. Did I mention Snapzilla is
free? Snapzilla is free.

So I believe you can see why I am excited
about this. As soon as slurls are sent to posterous, I'll be 100% happy
with that part of my blogging solution. I'll need to update my tutorial on
http://dedricmauriac.wordpress.com/guides/blogging-from-second-
life/">how to blog from second life to reflect these changes.

If
anyone is wondering where I am, I am on href="http://slurl.com/secondlife/Edloe/106/17/21">Edloe (105, 16,
21).

I was helping Someone out with a simple request. He wanted a prim
to change it's hover text to display messages from a note card. Once you
reach the end of the note card, it needed to start from the beginning
again. It took about 10 minutes, but i came up with a pretty strait forward
example of how it can be done.

integer noteCardLine;

integer noteCardCount;

string noteCardName;

key noteCardCountRequestId;

key noteCardLineRequestId;



init()

{

// reset to read first line

noteCardLine = 0;



// find the note card name

noteCardName = llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_NOTECARD, 0);



// if note card is missing

if(noteCardName == "")

{

// notify owner

llOwnerSay("I don't have a note card to read!");

}



// count number of lines in note card

noteCardCountRequestId = llGetNumberOfNotecardLines(noteCardName);
/>
}



default

{

state_entry()

{

init();

}



on_rez(integer start_param)

{

init();

}



changed(integer change)

{

// did note card change?

if(change & CHANGED_INVENTORY)

{

// initialize again

init();

}

}



touch_start(integer total_number)

{

// no note card?

if(noteCardName == "")

{

// do nothing

return;

}



// empty note card?

if(noteCardCount == 0)

{

// do nothing

return;

}



// if already past end of available note card lines

if(noteCardLine >= noteCardCount)

{

// reset to read first note card line

noteCardLine = 0;

}



// read the next line (and incriment to next line)

noteCardLineRequestId = llGetNotecardLine(noteCardName,
noteCardLine++);

}



dataserver(key queryid, string data)

{

if(queryid == noteCardLineRequestId)

{

// if no more lines

if(data == EOF)

{

// note card count changed? reinitialize

init();

}

else

{

// we have something from the note card!



// display the text

llSetText(data, <1, 1, 1>, 1);

}

}



// got feedback for the number of lines in the note card?

if(queryid == noteCardCountRequestId)

{

// save number of lines

noteCardCount = (integer)data;



// no lines?

if(noteCardCount == 0)

{

// notify owner of problem

llOwnerSay("Hey, this note card is empty");

}

else

{

// request first line

noteCardLineRequestId = llGetNotecardLine(noteCardName,
noteCardLine++);

}

}

}

}

Someone contacted me a while back. They liked my Unfortunate
Cookie and was asking if I had any other freebies. Interesting, as I no
longer gave it away free due to the XStreetSL policy regarding freebies.
Avatar contacted me again tonight and we got to talking. I soon found that
they picked up the cookie somewhere in-world. After doing a bit of
searching, I found someone selling it for 1L$. The interesting part is
that they created a new image for the presentation and it looks much better
than what I had done.

Long, long ago, I used to watch href="http://www.rockyhorror.com/">the Rocky Horry Picture Show (RHPS)
every Saturday night at midnight. This cult classic was released in the
year I was born, and even in the 90's when my friends brought me to it for
the first time, I was hooked on the interactive aspect of the audience
participation. We would often href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/lewismoten/5036835/">dress up to see
RHPS. At the Hollywood Theater in Pittsburgh, two music videos "href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUsQj_ha0zU">I Do The Rock" and
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIgGrzQVK3g">Paradise Garage"
were always played before the film started.

There were many fun times
that I had at the show, but those times are long gone. Oddly enough, it was
this experience with RHPS in my life in which href="http://www.lewismoten.com/2005/02/how-i-met-my-wife.html">my wife
discovered me through ICQ. I've attended one showing of href="http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=102147">RHPS in a virtual
world since then, but it wasn't exactly the same. Although it was
pretty fun throwing cards and toilet paper. Recently someone showed me an
old VHS movie that they made back in the 80's as a tribute. He had taken a
pile of old movies and put them together with music from the opening
credits. It was a bit old and the switch between clips was pretty bad. He
started working on a digitally remastered version and I was pretty
impressed with what he had come up with. For any RHPS fan, as well as
virgins, you may want to take a look at the href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qif3Shc62hE">Science Fiction - Double
Feature (a tribute) video.

I was surpised to find out that one of my friends from href="http://secondlife.com/ss/?u=9b235e2d4186950d6591bc4d2412ede5">Second
Life had started up a blog, href="http://macramaking.wordpress.com/">Macramaking!. She is on a
mission to http://macramaking.wordpress.com/about/">make 100
macramé hanging baskets and href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/macramaking/">photograph all of them
before spring to sell locally and through the web. Macramaking is not
something new to her, but something she has learned to do back in the 70's.
She already has 15 pictures of href="http://macramaking.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/macramakin/">natural
Macrame' Hanging Baskets uploaded to her site. I particually like the
http://macramaking.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/double-star-vino-
memento-3/">Double Star Vino-Momento <3, but alas, it's not for sale
as it was a personal gift for her babytzu. If you like Macrame, or are
hunting for a special valentines gift this holiday, consider paying a visit
to a heaven of href="http://macramaking.wordpress.com/">Macramakin'.

I started playing a little bit with Augmented Reality tonight. Perhaps
it is more like augmented virtual reality. I was mainly playing with href="http://artag.net/">ARtag. I don't have a webcam to play with at
the moment, so I decided to see what I could do with virtual worlds.
Thankfully, a program from ARTag had some sample patterns that I could
upload, as well as a program to read images besides video camers and then
Augment Reality to display a computer generated image.

I had quite a
few problems getting the image to work. I had to save it as a portable gray
map (PGM). Adobe Photoshop was saving it, but the program couldn't
understand it. I found a href="http://www.richardrosenman.com/software/downloads/">plug-in from
Richard Rosenman filters to import and export PGM files that did the
trick.

I found that image with multiple patterns caused problems, as
well as images that were too large. I found that the format that caused the
least amount of problems was 640x480, and removed all patterns from the
scene.

The augmented reality showed an image of myself in-world
standing behind a giant floating fish. Everything was gray except for the
fish. I think tomorrow I may dig up an old USB camera to see if I can get a
video of it in color. It may be possible that I can use the href="http://www.hmelyoff.com/index.php?section=1">VH Screen Capture
driver to capture my desktop directly.

With the plug-in
archtecture that the Second Life Viewer 2.0 is going to expose, I am
curious if we can add in plug-ins to augment virtual reality. That is to
say, you can see a museum with tags all over it, but with the plug-in, you
would see very complex and detailed sculptures. The museum on it's own
would only need a few prims since everything is represented through the
tags. A 512 parcel can then have a rich environment that appears to go well
beyond 117 primitives that a parcel of that size supports through Augmented
Reality.

It's been about a year and a half since I tried out CodeBastard
Redgraves previous FilterCam HUD. I saw in href="http://www.google.com/reader/shared/dedric.mauriac">my Google
reader that Mechanized Life now has a new version along with a href="http://www.mechanizedlife.com/2010/02/06/filtercam-hud-photo-contest-
l15000-in-prizes/">FilterCam HUD Photo Contest in which you can win up
to 15,000 L$ in prized.

FilterCam HUD allows you to put images over
top of the sceenery that you are looking at, to add additional effects.
There are a wide variety of masks (over 80 of them) that make it appear as
if you have done post-production work in an expensive photo editor. Some
masks add lighting effects, others make it appear as if you are watching TV
on an alien planet. There are weather effects such as snow and even a few
masks of blood and gore for scary environments. The scene here used the
preset "Shrubbed" in the horror category. I like a few of the Frames such
as the iPhone.

Anyone who wins 1st, 2nd, or 3rd prize in the
FilterCam Photo Contest will not only win quite a few Linden Dollars, but
they'll also win Avimote PoseMaker Personal Edition worth 2450 L$ at msrp
along with some MechanizedLife gear and Tillie's Posestands. You have until
the end of the month to get your entries in. Just post your entries on
Flickr and add them to the href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/filtercam/">FilterCam Flickr Group.
Be sure to tag them "FILTERCAM CONTEST" or it will not count. You can
submit up to three entries, but make sure to read all the rules in the
photo contest post on the href="http://www.mechanizedlife.com/">Mechanized Life website.

A ton of us showed up for Babbage Linden's office hours covering
scripting and technology. So far he hasn't shown his mug. Usually I'm not
up this early on a Wednesday, but I took a vaction day due to the snow and
was working late on a few things.

A few of us were debating on
building Babbage a new office. Someone fell through one of his gears and
suggested that there should be a prim that is invisible that they could
walk on. We could build something, but it would only last 15 minutes due to
auto return, and only 32 prims are available.

Aimee Linden showed up
with an "off duty" group tag, but she admitted sadly that only her tag is
off duty. From what others are saying, Babbage is often late to his
meetings. After using his AVL scheduler (Always Very Late), he arrived 14
minutes late.

Babbage was late due to some Viewer 2.0 compiling
issues, but had gotten them ressolved. He commented on an update to a href="http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Twitter_OAuth_Library">Twitter script
for OAuth. Perhaps I need to look into using OAuth instead of Base64
for my Twitter Box. Babbage mentioned that people should start moving away
from asking for passwords and use href="http://adactio.com/journal/1357">the password anti-pattern.
Babbage also commented on how it took him only 10 minutes to make a plug-in
with c# that did the same thing for OAuth and Twitter since he had access
to the System.Security.Cryptography library.

Someone mentioned that
http://buzz.google.com/">Google Buzz appears to be a new
social network full of white noise.

As far as LSL updates, they are
focusing on things that are more useful. For example, the
llSetLinkedPrimitiveParamsFast is more useful than llSHA1String due to the
number of people that will benefit from it. There are tons of feature
requests for LSL, but the Lindens are not going to add functions that
overlap what can be done in C#. It appears that there will be a big
movement to go to C# once it is available and that LSL will become sort of
a dead langauge. Why work with a language that isn't supported?

Many
bugs went across the screen during the meeting and Babbage seemed to be
well aware of them or had some knowledge of some problems involved. One
topic that came up with with a mono problem. [href="http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-3895">SVC-3895] Rezzing
Mono scripted object cripples sim FPS. Besides upgrading Mono for C#,
Babbage also mentioned it would be upgraded for Big Scripts as well.
Someone kept mentioning Firefly, and Babbage finally addressed it, saying
he's trying to make sure that Firefly will work with scripts downloaded
from the world. Really interesting stuff. Apparently href="http://firef.ly/">Firefly and Pixie Dust are mentioned often with
the scripting improvements, big scripts, and C#. One resident commented
that the use of tying Firefly to SL semantics was going to make the
platform irrelivant to what href="http://internetmessagingtechnology.org/pubs/VWRAP-for-Virtual-Worlds-
Interoperability-mic2010010073.pdf">VRAP (Virtual World Region Agent
Protocol) does, but another commented that this may be an exageration since
Firefly would do something similar in flash. There was also talk about
packaging scripts and shipping them to other platforms to run, but it would
take a ton of work.

Babbage Linden is talking with Gisele about
publishing the C# API and showing some examples in his href="http://fosdem.org/2010/">FOSDEM (Free and Open Source software
developers Euopean meeting) talk (online soon).

The texture mapper program has finally been released. The rubber band
box has been improved, user interface fixed, and a few bugs addressed. I've
also finished the registration form. I've had a couple of friends who need
a program like this, so it was about time that I actually finished it up
and made it available. I had href="http://dedricmauriac.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/texture-
mapper/">started working on the Texture Mapper software about a year
and a half ago, but had forgotten about it after running into href="http://dedricmauriac.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/texture-mapper-
flipping/">problems with rotation. I have decided to clean it up and
release it without rotation.

The texture mapper is a simple program
that lets you click and drag your way to clipping your textures. With the
texture mapper, you can use portions of a single image on different parts
of your prims.

The classic example is my packaged box that I deliver
products in. It is a single prim with one texture, but looks different from
each angle. I saved 50 L$ because I only had to upload one image. It also
helps to cut down on lag since people are not downloading extra
images.

The software is free to try out and can be found on my
box.net account. You'll need to have .Net 3.5 installed as well as a
Windows operating system. Download href="http://www.box.net/shared/035ftzyomx">Texture Mapper
today.

I also have the registration portion for href="https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=2104330">Texture
Mapper listed on XStreetSL. Once you rez the object in-world, it will
give you your license information in order to register the software.