The Next Best Thing

I needed a new phone. OK maybe wanted is more accurate but the fact is my trusty Droid Eris was showing her age. Many of the apps weren't able to be updated, the phone was choking trying to keep up with my contacts lists and the phone was slow- reliable but slow.

So I spent about 2 months looking at phones-Verizon phones that is since that is the network that our family uses (Sorry Sprint). So I was reading the reviews and also spending a number of Saturdays at the local Verizon store comparing phones-asking arcane questions and just in general driving the sales people crazy. I hung out on the forums reading about the joys of owning- or all too often it seems the frustrations of owning- this phone or that phone. And I began reading about upcoming phones. I gave up paying a lot of attention to that when I read one post in a prominent tech blog about a rumored phone for which the blog seemed to have all kinds of technical details. If the phone is rumored, I thought, why the heck are you publishing these specs? What is the point? Well it turns out lots of people seem to enjoy looking for the NEXT BIG THING in phones. That plus probably a bit of subtle information placement and misdirection by manufacturers to build up anticipation seems to drive most of the digital slathering one sees on phone related blogs.

Well one of the Next Big Things was this Motorola phone called the Bionic and since it was coming out on September 8, I decided to wait and look at it when it came out. The other phones being considered were the HTC Thunderbolt, Motorola D3, Droid Incredible 2, Samsung Charge and of course the iPhone 4.  As you can guess I am not  a partisan of one operating system or another. But there are some things I wanted. First (or so I thought) was a physical keyboard. My Eris was lots of fun but typing on the little screen was not quite my idea of fun. I did it because I would rather text than talk any day.  I wanted a decent phone camera. I found with my previous phones that I really get a lot of use out of my cell phone's camera as an adjunct to my SLR or as in today when I went out with my SLR bereft of its SD card.

Cell phones represent engineering compromises and that is true for cell phone purchasers. So here is how the phones seemed to stack up. The iPhone? Real nice; in fact I bought one for my wife and I use Macs at work. But I found the display a bit too small for my taste. Plus and this may seem heresy, the display was a bit stark for my taste. Besides I like Android's flexibility. But it probably had the best camera of the bunch.  The Incredible 2 had a good camera, nice display, and I am used to HTC sense; same goes for the Thunderbolt which also runs on Verizon's fast LTE network and guess who still has an unlimited data plan. Next the D3. I really wanted to like the D3. I had never liked the other Droids with physical keyboards but the D3 has a wonderful keyboard. The D3 does not run on Verizon's fast network but that in itself was not a deal breaker since in Lawrence we don't have LTE let. But where I teach we are just inside the extended LTE range-that means maybe you can get it.  The D3's issue is the camera which renders shots way too blue. I know this is correctable to a degree but the images I saw often looked way too blue to be easily correctable. Now this brings me to the Samsung Charge and the Bionic-the most expensive phones of the lot. The Charge has a wonderfully detailed OLED display with great contrast-big screen the iPhone display on steroids. But-of course there is a but-I did not like the feel of the phone-it felt cheap and plasticy and I did not like the little physical keys at the bottom. Also the display struck me as being over saturated.  So that left the bionic. Expensive as is the Charge-really an unknown. Do I really want to get a phone that is just coming out. Hmmm and  $299 for a phone?

So I put it through its paces as best as I could. No physical keyboard-so I matched it up against the D3 and discovered that I could type faster on the Bionic's screen than I could on the D3's physical keyboard. The D3 was cheaper $199 as opposed to $299 but that camera really bugged me. The Bionic's display is a bit bigger and brighter and it runs on the LTE network so as Verizon extends service this way I will hopefully get some benefit. Plus bigger storage capacity gave the Bionic the edge.  What made me hesitate was the camera-color rendition seemed fine but it was obvious that the auto focus was sluggish and there didn't seem to be a way to turn it off.  But the display is stunning-excellent color fidelity without over saturation- to me a winner. The phone is big but it just felt solid and the screen is really responsive and the UI which is suspiciously like Motorola's stock android skin that must not be named-had lots of fun visuals that made HTC sense seem, well boring, even if the weather widget makes it rain and lightening in my Eris.

When I called the sales person over, I could hear that sigh of relief-no arcane questions-I'll take the Bionic and oh by the way do you have the Otterbox Defender? I am a firm believer in protecting my phones. What about accessories- a media dock or the Webtop adapter for your HD TV? Nope just the Otterbox, oh yes, and a car charger.  By the time I was done though I was almost $400 poorer and had joined the ranks of Early Adapters NOT  my usual position. I am technologically comfortable but normally wait a bit and let every one else have the ulcers of putting up with glitches in new devices. Remember antenna gate?

By the next day it became apparent that people had serious issues with the phone. The first issue was with the diplay-Motorola uses a pentile display which has an extra white pixel that makes the display brighter to the eye without using more power-at least that is my understanding of what this display does. I may enjoy technology and be trained as a scientist but an engineer I am not. I had heard about this controversy and had carefully compared the display to the competition and decided that the display is fine in a side by side comparisons. Not perfect but very nice. There is a sort of diagonal grid work what one commenter on the Android  forums called a half tone effect. Yup I saw it-but to me it was only obvious when I looked for it. Besides, in a perverse sense it actually made the display visually interesting. Last time I checked the world -you know that area outside the computer screen-is a many textured place. But to this day one month after the phone's introduction there are whole threads telling Motorola never to use a pentile display again!

So this is the first cost of being an early adapter. Not that there are issues and bugs- there are. The cost is that people get obsessed with what they see as imperfections in a device that really represents design compromises required to get a working phone.  And well if you don't see what 's wrong with the display you must be a dolt. The next big issue is audio-some users began to report a high pitched whine that at least by some reports was quite loud when the user did certain things with their phone. Nope my phone was and is fine, makes sounds at all the appropriate spots though after a couple of days reading the discussions about this issue I began to get paranoid at every stray sound-maybe my phone has caught the whine because some arcane grounding issue or interference from flying saucers or electric eels. Or maybe my hearing is just bad so I even tested my hearing threshold- just under 13,000 Hertz- above which any sounds get lost in my own rarefied high frequency tinnitus.  Some discussants even insisted that all Bionics had this issue those few of us who claimed not to have this whine were deluded and just not listening. One forum participant polled readers if they did or did not have this whine and 95% said yes and 5% including poor deluded me said no. Now personally I think some phones did and do have a serious audio issue-but I think that that 95% represents a load of self selection. If the problem were really widespread then the issue would be a big one mentioned in the Verizon reviews of this phone. It is not. So either Verizon is pulling negative comments off their site or the audio issues are much less ubiquitous than one might think by reading some forums.

Is the Bionic perfect?  Certainly not. First in my mind is the camera-or to be more precise the user interface Motorola provides. I have less control over the camera settings than I have with my Droid Eris. Now that said, since I am a photographer I know that stock settings are not the way to go and if you must you figure out a way of working around the limitations of your equipment. Besides specialize in macro shots which require lots of patience so I am predisposed to put up with cameras that aren't ideal. So I took the settings I had and experimented. Then bough several third party camera apps from the market and worked the camera with those and showed along with a few other people that the camera is fine (for a small camera) and that with a little work you can get some nice creative shots.  The sensor is small-representing another compromise the engineers had to make. This is not a point and shoot let along a single lens reflex-but since I always have my phone with me I can get some really spontaneous shots-again working the limitations of the camera.

Of course there are software issues. One that had me tearing my hair out was that one of my camera apps was supposed to save pictures to the phone's external SD memory card. And the software indeed saves the photos to a camera folder inside a folder called like mnt/SDcard/dcim/ . Sounds promising right? And it even matches the instructions given by the camera app manufacturer. Well it became clear that the app was saving photos to the phones internal memory. Fortunately it is easy to move files to the external memory but it is an extra step. So I wrote the app developer who merely repeated the instructions in the documentation which I had already tried.  So back to the forums where I found a post discussing the fact that the Bionic calls the external SD card - mnt/SDcard-ext/. Ha ha so back to the software which fortunately allows me to save an alternate storage spot, I found the right file in the external SD card and everything is fine. Apparently Motorola's naming convention relates to the type of memory Android uses-SD memory and so there is SD memory wired into the machine as while as the removable SD card. Problem solved, but of course it doesn't satisfy some people who scream at Motorola that they need to fix this. Maybe they do I don't know. Or maybe app developers need to be aware of these issues because other phone builders seem to adopting different names for internal vs external memory.

Other issues keep cropping up to such as how come my social networks stopped syncing with the phone the other day (solved) or how come I cannot share photos from my gallery directly to my Flickr account (not solved but there is a work around) but I get a little emotional reward when I figure something out or am surprised over some image that reminds me that its not really what our technology can do which is important but what we do with our technology. I suppose it is just a phone-but it is really more than that that. After all a recent article (http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-19/tech/apple.religion_1_apple-store-apple-employees-brains?_s=PM:TECH)  suggests that Apple products can incite almost a religious experience.


Now I am NOT suggesting that our technology can replace religion but these new phones are very physical-think about  touch screens and the feeling of pinching in and pinching out to contract or expand an image. Typing directly on the screen or doodling with our fingers on the screen gives a physicality to using these devices that was missing before with keyboards and even mice. These devices (phone is so 20th century) be they iPhones or iPADS or Bionics or the NEXT BEST THING allow us to do so much so easily that for some of us it is easy to get overly caught up in debates about the merits of our respective phones or magnify what really are relatively minor flaws that hopefully will be fixed in the next update. I like to see these devices as tools for good but it seems that there is a danger that they will trap us into a desire for technological perfection where we forget that these devices are tools represent different sorts of compromises and thus keep searching for that NEXT BEST THING.





Oh and my old Droid Eris? She sits by my computer in case she is needed as a phone or an extra Wi-Fi device. Call me anthropomorphic but the Eris is still useful like a hand tool superseded by a newer electric tool only this is the 21 first century where the pace of obsolescence is such that today's NEXT BEST THING becomes just another old thing to be thrown away. 

G+ One Week Out

G+ or Google+ is supposed to be Google's answer to Facebook. I have been using G+ for a little over a week now and so far it is a mixed bag. The good is that I can set up different circles for people I know in different contexts. This set of slides you can scroll through explains the concept quite well.

You can set up what ever circles you want and that way separate people you know say from work from those you know at the local bar....of course maybe these are the same people. That way each group gets only those posts that you think they might enjoy. It's really cool.

You can also follow people you don't know, celebrities for instance, no need to friend them. In fact there is no friend button. You can also control whether or not your posts can be shared outside your circle. Another cool feature is that you can set up a video "Hangout" for your friends and you can have a video chat with up to 10 friends simultaneously. Set up is easy- though I have not felt the hankering to actually start a "Hangout". Besides I don't have enough people in my circles to wait around for visitors. But I can see this as a good way to hold virtual office hours for students.

Google is still at the beginning of this experiment and that has led to no little controversy about Google's profile requirements. Google requires you to use your real name when setting up profiles. In fact Google has allegedly been suspending accounts if the name even sounds fake. If you want, you can also on a separate line provide other names you go by. As you might expect, privacy advocates have been upset at Google-there are after all legitimate needs for pseudonymous profiles safety being one.

Here is a good concise discussion of the issue. What astounds me is the blindness of Google executives to the whole issue. Former CEO Eric Schmidt is alleged to have said: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Of course the fallacy here is that there are plenty of things that either you don't want everyone to know - example medical issues-. Then there are things that you might want everyone to know but not be able to trace the revelation back to you-whistle blower for instance.

At least some people in Google do understand the issue as evidenced by this post in Google's Public Policy Blog. The message seems to be that yes you can be what you want to be but don't expect to be able to use all of Google's products using a pseudonym. This is a tough balancing act for Google as it strives to integrate and rebrand it's diverse products.

Reposted from my Science Blog, Dangerous Ideas.

Science Friday in Second Life!

I am not much of an online chatter. I've tried chat rooms for instance and found them too confusing for my addled brain and in Second Life I have been to openings and parties and found them difficult to handle. But then I am sort of a solitary type whether in first or second life.

But I decided to look for some SL event Friday when I was spending a ton of time in SL rather than working on my Syllabuses (or should that be Syllabi?). So I decided to visit Science Friday, which if you are a listener, you know Sci Fri is streamed in to SL and to the Science Friday site and during which the host of Science Friday is in World.

And I was pleasantly surprised at how wonderful the communal experience of listening in SL with a group was compared to just listening on the radio.

The avatars actually chatted (mainly texting) during the program's audio stream. I should point out that the host Ira Flatow was in World but not his guests. What I found though was that first of all the chat was surprisingly on topic. Second of all, though I did not contribute a whole lot, the chat in parallel with listening to the audio stream really forced me to pay closer attention to the broadcast than I otherwise might have. And this is in spite of the texting going on constantly during the broadcast.

Granted, the audience appeared to be really interested in the topics, but it would be interesting to test listener retention of material when just listening while in SL versus having real time messaging and social interaction while the material is being presented.

Here are some shots of the session from my Flickr stream:



This shows the audience..thank god for camera controls so that even though I was sitting in the audience I could effectively look at the audience including myself.

And next a shot of the Ira's avatar...



Now if only I could get an autograph.

If you are a Second Life member and have SL on your machine the Science Friday Site SLurl is
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Science%20Friday/128/128/2

Not much to see in the Science Friday sim itself but right near by is all kinds of neat science stuff so explore around! More on some of the new science stuff later...

To get you started visit Science School at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Science%20School/128/128/2

Visting Here in Second Life:

Torley Linden is known for his quirky but always useful Second Life tutorials and now he has gotten his own island called Here..so tonight Simone went over to have a look.



An Easter Scene.



Playing in the Melon Patch.



Should I kiss the frog?



Simone meditating. Torley does bill himself as the Resident Enlightenment Manager of Second Life.

A Script Generator for Second Life

Anyone who scripts in Second Life knows that the scripting language has a pretty steep learning curve, especially if you are not used to event driven programming. So it would be nice to have a code generator-maybe something a novice could use. Well today a post on SLED, the Second Life Educator's list, had a brief mention of a system called Scratch for Second Life (S4SL).

S4SL can be down loaded for Macs and Windows machine. I tested the Windows version on my home Vista machine and hope to test the Mac version on my iMac at work later this week.

S4SL is developed by Eric Rosenbaum at MIT, using Scratch . Scratch allows you to program graphically by snapping together little "modules." It sounds like a lot of fun in itself! But getting back to S4SL, the program has 8 classes of modules including one called pen which apparently requires an extra set of tools. Here is the opening window loaded along side the Second Life client. The left hand part of the window shows the eight modules, and the shapes associated with motion commands.



Click on the image to go to my Flickr stream to see a large version of this screen. The basic idea is to snap together modules in S4SL. Then you press the copy code button. This copies the generated SL script into your clip board. So all you need to do is to rez an object SL, and paste the code in place of a new script.

S4SL is loads of fun and I spent a delightful evening making little Second Life "pets" that follow my Avatar around. The next image shows a Scratch program for a pet that exhibits random motion, but then attempts to find my avatar if it gets too far away.



The "modules" are color coded based on function and notice how the "modules" can be snapped together. This sort of approach ought to be appealing for novice programmers including biology types who are of course used to thinking of shape as related to function.

There are some limitations to S4SL. First, since it is in development, only some of the capabilities of SL's language are implemented. The code is fat, meaning there is a lot of non functional material in the code depending what sorts of features are enabled or disabled. Also the resulting code, because not everything is implemented may not work the way the user expects.

Originally I pasted the script into a cube prim for testing but it so happened I had a flexi prim representation of a phospholipid hanging around and I thought it would make a cool bacterium complete with flagella. So here is a brief movie (A still is here) of the resulting "bacterial cell:"



I think S4SL has a lot of potential as a learning tool. For instance someone interested in behavior could use the system, as my example suggests, let students design bots which mimic different sorts of orientation behavior. Students without any programming experience can give their simple prims behaviors and there are good pre-made S4SL projects that come with the down load to show how this can be done.

S4SL, a neat learning tool and lots of fun and it doesn't require any scratch for the fun.

Cloning Copybot Hitting The Grid

Cloning Copybot Hitting The Grid
Originally uploaded by Prad Prathivi

While browsing my Flickr contacts I ran across this photo and entry posted by Prad Prathivi, a designer in Second Life. Apparently a copy bot exists now that will duplicate a Second Life Avatar, including major features of the Avatar profile, and and at least some of the Avatar's attachments.

According to Prad, Second Life allows copy bots for legitimate purposes-backing up inventory for instance but using them to copy other people's stuff-including their avatars is against the Second Life terms of service.

Indeed, according to Second Life's Knowledge Base entry on protecting copyrights, using copy bots to "infringe" on someone's content is a violation of the Terms of Service. However, SL also notes that residents are allowed to have Copy Bots for legitimate reasons.

When I asked Prad how one could tell the real Avatar from the copy he said this:

"I wouldn't have been able to tell them apart, aside of the rez date, quality of avatar and the No payment Info on File. But even that wouldn't have given me a second thought.. your avatar could be duplicated without you even knowing it, as well as content creator's work being stolen."

By the way I have a query to the person, whose AV is allegedly Kulton Short, who was reported to be selling the copy bot, but I have received no response.

Not everyone responding Prad's post feels there is a problem, several SL users didn't think there is much merit in duplicating avatars. Caliburn Sustanto says basically who cares, noting that it is already possible to make a copy of someone's avatar by tracking down all the attachments and duplicating the appearance of the avatar. Besides "Thousands of avatars already look pretty much the same already".

It is not clear to me how big of a problem copy bots are but I think there is at least the potential of a problem. The analogy is of course phishing in which users are lured to false websites in order to steal passwords. IN the old days an alert user could generally spot phishing sites after all. Once before phishing became widespread I got a message about my AOL account that said to go to the AOL website and enter my account and password because of some security issue. The site looked official but the URL was clearly not from AOL. So I called AOL security. As a reward I got several months of free service.

At the very least, these sorts of copy bots might have the affect of undermining confidence in Second Life's security and users ability to protect their avatars and original content.

By the way these bots don't seem to reside in Second Life but are external programs orginally developed for debugging purposes. Also they cannot get at account information so the avatar show up with no payment on record.

Here is another very recent report of what sounds like the same copy bot that Prad reported.

Now You See It...

On Wednesday I giving my Second Life office a make over to make it more comfortable looking when I suddenly could not take stuff from my inventory folders into my land. So I got on SL's help chat and Rika, the tech I got at SL patiently had me try various things. None of them worked. So she had to reboot my entire region.

I went across the way to the next region to watch what happens when a region is taken off line. My office is the low build with the green roof. Not very imaginative I know:

Now you see it:




Now you don't:



While I was waiting for my region to be restored I found this wonderful build nearby-



slurl.com/secondlife/Cisseps/45/213/212

where I could relax a bit:



The reboot worked and I could could return to my Second Life office:




Having access to online help is one advantage of a premium account and Rika was great. She probably spent 20 minutes working with me to figure out what the problem was. Second Life has been experiencing inventory problems this week and it may be that my problem was connected to that.

If you have the Second Life client on your machine you can visit my office/laboratory at
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Carmine/176/217/137

At work in Second Life

OK..maybe a little bit of playing. I've gotten back to working with sculpted prims and just for the heck of it and to challenge my limited skills but together a flower out of sculpted prim parts.

Here I am hard at work in my laboratory putting the insides of the flower together:



The final result:



And Simone sitting on a petal. She's not a very good pixie.



If you have SL installed the flower is at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Carmine/121/195/137

Simone's new doo

Last night I decided to get some flexi prim hair for my SL avatar. I was amazed at how different she looked compared to her normal prim self.

Before:



After:



I like the new hair but for teaching I will stick to my old look except when I want to let my hair down...virtually that is.

Simple Pleasures for Simple Geeks

Saturdays at the Lawrence Farmer's market there is a vender who always has a display of deer skulls, skins and antlers. So this last Saturday I took this picture with my cell phone-just didn't feel like bringing the SLR.

And decided to have some fun with Photoshop. Cell phone photos really lend themselves to simple pleasures for simple geeks.

It also has not escaped me that rendering is a good choice of words to decribe this process given the subject matter.


I did this rendering using photoshop's Plastic film filter which gave a nice sort of O'Keefe sort of feel.















If you like a more two dimensional rendering then this one made by tweeking the cutout filter might grab you...

A Big Dog of a Robot

While people are running around in a panic over the economy, new innovations are constantly happening. It's beginning to look like robots are the new "Next Big Thing". Of course robots have been used for years in the assembly of automobiles, but what's new are completely independent robots that can coexist with us as part of our daily environment.

Most familiar are iRobot's rug and floor cleaning robots. But iRobot also makes a number of robots for the use in dangerous environments. If you watch CSI or similar shows, you may have seen these 'bots.

So check out this video from a start up company called Boston Dynamics which has developed an autonomous robot called Big Dog:



I am not sure what the loud noise is due to. But since Big Dog doesn't seem to make the noise when tethered to cables, perhaps the noise is due to some sort of power generator.

Speaking of iRobot, people I know who use the rug cleaning 'bots all have super neat houses and they probably really don't need the robot. So as an iRobot stockholder, I keep trying to get the company to beta test its housecleaning robots under real battle conditions- namely my house.

What are they afraid of? Don't they want to see if they can pass the cleaning 'bot Turing test?

Needless to say, these robots do raise a number of ethical issues. As robots become more and more autonomous do we want robots to make life and death decisions in the battlefield? I would argue probably not. But decision making speed is important so this will put pressure on developers such as iRobot to work towards robots that can make independent decisions to kill, at least in certain situations.

Can use of these robot weapons be justified in terms of the rules of war? Ethicists have begun wrestling with those sorts of issues. Here for instance is a paper from the Georgia Institute of Technology: Governing Lethal Behavior. It is a large file. The article notes though that we already have semi robotic systems in place that do make decisions whether or not to fire.

This paper quotes a government study which says:

"Armed UMS [Unmanned Systems] are beginning to be fielded in the current battlespace, and will be extremely common in the Future Force Battlespace…
This will lead directly to the need for the systems to be able to operate autonomously for extended periods, and also to be able to collaboratively engage hostile targets within specified rules of engagement… with final decision on target engagement being left to the human operator….

Fully autonomous engagement without human intervention should also be
considered, under user-defined conditions, as should both lethal and non-lethal engagement and effects delivery means."

Note the last sentence. Now warfare often is constrained by various sorts of rules of engagement and conventions, but what's going to happen when these systems begin to fall into the hands of a determined foe who isn't constrained by the same sorts of rules. What about our government finding some justification for a previously taboo use of these systems? And I am not being partisan here. Linguistic shenanigans are not a monopoly of Republicans or Democrats, shocking as that may be.

Suppose humans are left in the decision making loop. Is the result going to be any better? As warfare becomes more and more like a video game, will the detachment of humans from the actual battlefront lead to greater abuse of these systems?

Geesh! What ever happened to those good old ethical issues-embryonic stem cells for instance. We haven't adjusted to issues raised by those technologies and here is a whole set of new issues. And I just want a 'bot that can clean my floors!

Cross posted from Dangerous Ideas.

What happens when we die?

I'm not thinking of the big question here, but as our lives get more and more online, what happens to all those pieces of stuff that we leave online? And equally important, will anyone know we are gone as opposed to merely lost interest or a bad connection?

Well a Second Life cyber friend of mine, Mike Burleigh has set up a cyber memorial oriented mainly to Second LIfe Life Residents who have died.



The memorial is at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cassandra/147/188/79. Second Life users who are on a machine with SL installed can paste the slurl into their web browser to launch the SL map and teleport over.

Seems macabre at first until you think about how intertwined we are with the web.

New Features in Second Life

One thing Second Life users have long been screaming for is better integration with the web. Linden Lab's new Second Life client finally address these issues. First is an integrated media browser that allows the user to open a web page in a dedicated Second Life window rather than launching an external browser page. This feature works like OnRez's internal media browser.



What is really cool is that I can open my blog page and work on my blog from within Second Life. I am not sure if OnRez does this. But as a blogger I think this is really slick to be able to do.

SL has also introduced the ability to display a web page on a Second Life object or prim. This goes a a long way to enabling complex displays including large amounts of text on a prim, something that up to now has taken some really kludgy work arounds. To the left is a picture showing my avatar, Simone, with the media viewer interface on the left and my blog displayed on a prim.

There are some limitations. Right now you can not have multiple web pages displayed on the same parcel. Also the visitor cannot interact with the web page. So even though the web page's scroll bars show up on the prim, the user can't interact with the page.



However, if I am giving an in world presentation on my land or land where I have permissions I could control the display of pages from within the media browser. It is a bit clunky but you could do it. I think this would be most useful for web pages with URL's that include targets to areas with the page, or blogs where you want to display different entries.

Second Life's official blog has more information for Second Life users about these new features.
http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/03/06/parcel-media-changes-in-1191-release-candidate/#more-1705

A New Second Life Client

I am a CSI freak and interested in Second Life as an educational tool. So I eagerly last week's CSI NY which featured a crime involving a Second Life Avatar and promised a CSI Second Life site with crimes to solve and a CSI crime lab. Also involved was the use of a new Second Life client called Onrez from Electric Sheep. I must admit I was skeptical as was James Au over at New World Notes. He was afraid that Onrez would "AOL-ize" the Second Life experience.






But as he, I was impressed. First the interface is a bit more like using web browser in that there is an address window in the menu bar where you can directly type a Second Life address and teleport there. That saves a step in that you don't have to go to the SL world map first. Next, the menu bar includes a search feature for SL. Typing "education" into the search window gives a list of education sites in SL. Back and forward buttons work much like those of a browser but only within Second Life. Thus novice users might find Onrez more intuitively appealing.


There is more! Second Life supports the opening of web pages via its scripting language, but the Second Life client currently opens the web page externally by launching your default web browser. Onrez is much slicker. It has a built in Browser that opens a window within the client. Granted, the web as a texture on a prim would be slicker yet but Onrez's approach nice and clean. As James notes, right now you can't get certain web features such as quick time to work with in Onrez, but that apparently is coming.

The Onrez client does seem to be tweaked for graphics performance. For instance frame per second rates (fps) are better using Onrez (version 1). Earlier today on my land in Carmine, the SL clent gave fps of 12 and Onrez of 50 fps respectively in consecutive trials. That's is a bit extreme but Onrez seems to give around twice the frame rate as Second Life's current client release (1.18(3)5) on my machine (Specs here).

The average user will notice this speed difference and I found an amusing visual difference in the performance of particle scripts. For instance I have a script that produces little dragonflies around a coy pond in my SL house. (Hey haven't you always wanted a coy pond in your house?)




First, is a shot taken of this particle script's performance in SL. You might get a pulse of 10 dragonflies and they move at a pretty sedate clip. Next is a shot taken from the same vantage point using Onrez. Lot's more dragonflies and they move at a pretty good clip. I suspect this improvement is a graphic's issue rather than faster script execution time, but i don't have any good script bench marks such as are used to compare computer performance. I find it interesting that Second Life viewed via the Onrez client seems to use a lot less bandwidth than when viewed via Second Life's client. I don't know if that is real or how it is done.

Oh as for the CSI Second Life site, I quite frankly haven't played with the crimes scenes yet. I did visit the crime scene lab and was disappointed in the lack of functionality. Most of the equipment is not scripted. I think the CSI people missed a great chance to educate visitors about the science behind CSI. Also I found that novice visitors to the site were confused what to do. But at least they were spared to culture shock of Second Life's normal orientation since Onrez takes the user to CSI island by default.





The SL episode of CSI New York is a "two parter"; the second part to be shown in February. So it will be interesting to see how this experiment melding SL with broadcast television works out. Did I like the episode? Yes I did. There were lots of in world shots, and an arena fight involving some pretty nasty monsters to appeal to the novice gaming set. I am not a gamer but I suspect gamers might not have been impressed with the graphics. Maybe I am missed whether this is possible, but I would like to be able to visit the arena and other spots used to stage the CSI Second Life scenes.

Operating systems

Here is a snapshot from Sitemeter of visitors to The force that through... in terms of operating systems used. Two things standout. First MacOS is running about 7%, as is Vista. Windows XP is still the most popular system, most Windows users choosing not to upgrade on their current machines. That is quite understandable as older machines can't handle Vista's graphics requirements.

For the record, I run Mac OS at work, Vista Home premium on my home desktop and XP on my laptap. The laptop most certainly would choke on Vista. Since most of my visitors come via Google-roughly 75%, looking for answers to such questions as "Why are plants green?" or "What is weasel sex?" or.. How do I do problem 5 on my evil genetics test?", these may represent a pretty good cross section of users.

Move over Second Life!

Second Life attempts to provide users with a virtual world. Now iRobot who makes those cool little cleaning robots has introduced a new robot designed to provide its users with a virtual presence. The ConnectR is supposed to be a "virtual visiting robot" allowing the user to visit a place from a remote. If you are on a business trip to some remote location, Kansas for instance, and you want to talk to your kids and your spouse at home in Boston. ConnectR has a video camera and microphone mounted as part of a flat Roomba style robot that you can remotely control and talk to your family through a home's wireless network.

Or if you have a cat that scratches your furniture when you are away then you could presumably scare the wits out of it even though you are at work. Depending how noisy the bot is, there are endless possibilities for spying on your kids or stealing trade secrets as a former iRobot employee is alleged to have done. Also this could really revolutionize education. You don't have commute to school just let your ConnectR stay at school while you interact remotely.

Oh and prospective Catholic saints have new way to do bilocation and avoid the heavy metaphysical labor involved in being, as iRobot claims, "in two places at once."

More seriously, I think this robot has possibilities for monitoring pets or aging parents who are far away. I think my father would have been intrigued by this robot but maybe he wouldn't have wanted me to see that he was not as able to get around toward the end of his life as he led us to believe. The robot is remotely saucer shaped like iRobot's cleaning bots and they might not be the best system for more sophisticated remote applications. Also it doesn't appear to have a screen so those people you are interacting with can see you.

iRobot also released a specialized robot for cleaning gutters, and I suspect this will be particularly useful in the upcoming presidential campaign in the United States - no wait- wrong gutter.

At any rate, if you're interested in field testing the ConnectR you can apply on the iRobot site and get one for $199, if you help field test it. Might be great fun for "early adapters". I signed up even though I am not usually far from my family and my cats are declawed so we will see if they accept me for the program. The regular retail price is supposed to be "just under" $500 according to the company's website.

By means of full disclosure, I do own stock in iRobot in my small caps portfolio.

In Wildness...

Yesterday driving to Doug's
I saw how the soybeans
Were so enriched green it was erotic
Like my eyes were hands laid
Upon your Jewel.

Then there was the corn,
Each ear at exactly the height
To be picked by some machine
Rumbling under a billboard that says:
Food from farms, not big Pharma.

The farmer is at least rotating
Corn with legumes with weeds.
But never enough time between
For anything to go native,
Let alone remember what wild was.

The past is said to be a foreign country.
O what hope is there for me
So lost in the present?
What hope for this weed lost
Among the stalks of the corn.

Commentary:

This poem coalesced in response to a brief prompt at a writer's workshop at school this week. The prompt was something about the past being a foreign country, but I forgot to write the actual quote down. The images and observations about corn and soybeans and the sign for the poem had been rattling around in my brain since the weekend when we went to visit a friend, Doug Patterson (AKA "The Gambling Geek").

I am not a luddite, and the point of the poem at one level is that people fear biotechnology "Big Pharma" and yet when we do something as mundane as grow crops we alter the evolution of the plants. For instance we select plants that are best suited for harvesting by machine. What we do, of course, makes the plants less and less suitable for more natural environments including unmechanized agriculture. So not only are we becoming more dependent on technology, but we are forcing the biosphere into a similar sort of dependence- forcing other creatures to specialize along with us.

Maybe that is inevitable but we ought to go into this sort of change with our eyes open as to the risks as well as the benefits. Are we getting ourselves as a species into an evolutionary trap that will doom us should there be some lapse in technology?

Dark Forces in Second Life?

Dark forces are gathering in Second Life, at least according to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald. Britain's Fraud Advisory Council wants real world financial regulations extended to virtual worlds such as Second Life claiming that terrorists could use Second Life's virtual economy to transfer money. And virtual gambling in Second Life has apparently gotten the attention of the United States Government which is concerned about violations of online gambling laws. Online betting on the horses is legal so I wonder if betting on virtual horse races is OK.


Other Links:

UK Panel Urges Real-Life Treatment for Virtual Cash.
Second Life Crime.

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