Finally published my own pfText.

Here’s a short demo of a text solution for Opensim, I built tonight: Text gets rendered in a proportional font, and displayed in Opensim.

Made with Python Imaging Library, Bitstream™ Vera Sans and Opensim. (And Ava100, the first image I uploadad onto our new grid.^^)

I never was much of a Mac personality. But even then, back in the days of MacOS 7, when I was still hooked on Atari, Win95, and the early Linux, there was a thing that raised my attention: Hey, is it scriptable? Somehow I heard, and that caught my immediate attention, these fancy windowed apps on the funny looking Mac computers could talk to eachother, share their special abilities, and even perform simple tasks without having a user press the buttons. Wow, scriptable. I decided to be a programmer, and chose the “Glue Language” Perl as my matter of subject. (Glue Language meaning: You can take a part of this Website, stuff it into your database, perform some math on it, and make it a nice looking picture on that Website. One would call that “Mashup” today, minus the fancy standardized interfaces, JSON, XML,  XMLRPC…) Anyway, the Glue: Perl, PHP and Python became, and still is my daily work.

Jump to 2006. I just refrained from a Job as a CTO in a big Cisco Training company, where of course I was doing the Glue stuff, Reading and cleaning the MSSQL backend from the CRM, making the CMS talk different languages, spread on different TLDs, and building a fancy new information system and time schedule for the Cisco instructors.

I found Second Life, dived in, and got immersed. And I found a smutty little pearl of scripting language, called LSL (Linden Scripting Language), taking the role of the glue that  “diese Welt im Innersten zusammenhält” (Goethe, Faust I). For a  second time, in this brave new world, I decided to be a scripter, a glue maker, a mashup puppeteer. With our Primforge group, we did such awesome jobs as exporting Second Life Avatars to the weblin World, build the Gamesload Tower of games, a Career Center for a huge consultants agency, an island for a insurance company, that media center for a Radio station, and much, much more.

Building stuff, interconnecting worlds, paring email or twitter, this employee database, your personal website, and that VoIP service to this fancy new island and collaborational meeting place was my job, and I hope that will always be my job. And of course I’m actively scanning for new worlds to conquer  as part of my daily business life.

I still think that all roads begin in Second Life, the one single commercial world, that has all fancy options, and a broad user base. But then, there is OpenSim, the “Apache of Virtual Worlds” as they call it… Back in 2007 some programmers started to reengineer the answer packets, that come from the Second Life sims, and launched a programming project called Opensim. Just like the basic unit of Second Life, one Opensim Simulator creates the virtual space of 256×256 meters land, you can visit with the normal Second Life Client program. But there’s more: With the Grid Server you can host a huge number of opensims, with a common user base, just like the Second Life world. An with the latest Hypergrid, you can even teleport from one hosted Opensim Grid to another. Hypergrid is a coarse protocol, that doesn’t care too much about the permissions of the different Grids that are connected intertwingulary. But there is OGP, the Open Grid Protocol. The guys that invented OGP (mainly from IBM and Linden Lab) are just trying to put together a standardisation request, to make OGP an official protocol, just like HTTP (running the requests from your browser and the answers from my webserver while you read this text) or SMTP (the protocol that receives and transfers your daily emails).

We will soon launch a server farm of Opensim Machines. And I’m really looking forward to glue this all together, our trails of communication in the flat world, the mobile paths, and the new and old 3D worlds.

[diesen Artikel auf deutsch lesen]

The Primforge group is proud and happy to release the weblin Gate in New Berlin, an avatar teleporter in cooperation with zweitgeist GmbH into the Public.

Weblin — that is small avatars that live on common websites, to chat, surf together with friends, talk about the current news on your page or blog (yes, they are there!), or just be present and greet their visitors on their own page. Since 2006, weblin avatars — created by the Hamburg company zweitgeist — are amongst us. I’m constantly amazed at that parallel cosmos that lives on lots of popular sites, that I surf all day.

June Trenkins ready to become a weblin.

Now you can visit our professional 3D photograph Weblin Paule in New Berlin who simply transforms your fully featured Second Life Avatar into a weblin, and surf the good old WWW with your very own look!

It’s an amazing opportunity for long time Residents of Second Life to take their beloved identity onto the World Wide Web, and a cool new feature for skilled weblin users, to create their unique avatar with all the features, Second Life can give you.

“Win win”, one could say, or just “Best of both worlds”.

Das war klasse heute. $Auftraggeber hat sich nach Second Life begeben, vor Ort, in medias res: Ein Programmierer, ein QA und ein Verantwortlicher.
Wir haben an einem Tag mehr geschafft, als man normalerweise mit Emails, ausbessern, Versionen freigeben, rätseln, was der andere nun wieder meint in vielen Tagen erledigen würde.
Ich hab die Hoffnung auf Agile Entwicklungsmethoden, Pair Programming und Code Review vor einigen Jahren mal an den Nagel gehängt, aber da war ich a) selber noch zu unsicher und b) von Luschen umgeben. ;P Aufgegeben habe ich das nie, und mit tx bin ich auch ganz gut auf einer Wellenlänge, dass es klappt. Schön, wenn — wie heute — der Kunde sowas mitmacht, und besonders schön, wenn es funkt.
Ach ja, es wird eine große Ankündigung geben, die Tage. Inter-Grid-Reisen, Virtual Entity Retainment, Virtual Presence. Interoperability.

Lately there was some joking in one of the SL group forums, that Second Life has a Physics engine (Havok4), but no Chemistry Engine yet. Well, there are a few things we scripters can still invent, while the common workflow is taken over by the big companies like IBM and Rivers Run Red.

Just visiting Microsoft Island:

C’mon guys, that’s not a big secret: If you make a slideshow in SL, make sure to preload the next image (and maybe some more, depending on your user guidance). It’s really easy, not a secret to do so in SL, and it’s a huge drawback for your audience to lose out on that.

Actually that’s just a tiny bit of really bad scripting/ergonomic knowledge, I find all over Second Life, but it reminds me so much to the “hey, it loads OK for me” from back in 1997.

When in Trouble or in Doubt, Run in Circles, Scream & Shout!
(Or just call 0800 PRIMFORGE)