Reading Radar

Alright, I ADMIT IT!!!!!! It’s not original. But I finally put 7Seas fishing equipment on Podcast Island and Podcaster Island. Dedric asked if I wanted to go over to Woodbridge and fish, so I joined a huge crowd of people there… unfortunately I was lagged out, as you can tell by the green clouds where avatars should have been.

But the net result was, I found out how fun the 7Seas thing is so I bought the vendor kit and put a copy on Podcaster Island on the SW corner. There are servers on the shore and in the “floating hut” as well.

Then I flew over to Podcast Island and put in a vendor and some fishing servers there too. Hey, we have a dock, just sitting there….

Yay, unoriginal fun! Come catch something! Wait, I heard that at a party once. But this time I mean it in a good way!

The php script Dedric Mauriac gave me relies on the xml DOM’s open method, which under php apparently must use fopen under the hood. At any rate, the fact that my host has allow_url_fopen false in the php.ini means it won’t work.

What I did instead was rewrite it to use curl to grab the rss feed for parsing, and it seems to be working. Once I get the bugs ironed out, I’ll pass it on to Dedric in case he wants to make use of that method as well.

The fun part is that, although I’ve never programmed with php, my asp and asp.net and now LSL background has made it pretty trivial to pick up on what’s going on and modify things as needed. Very fun, since I always wanted to add php to the list of things I’ve at least used, and this project forced me to dive in and do just that.

At any rate, it won’t be long before I’ll be done with both the php and the LSL and have nice rss players for audio or video podcasts that we can copy (and therefore rez on demand) and let the podcasting community make use of. All credit will go to Dedric and if you have any scripting or gadget needs, please check out his stuff or IM him about your project. He does do custom work projects and he’s very good at what he does.

Read two good posts (one linking to the other) today reminding us yet again of how SL residents always come totally unhinged anytime something changes and then in a few weeks don’t even remember it anymore.

Voice.
Trademarks.
Windlight.
Dazzle.
Gambling ban, although this one definitely did affect some people who ran businesses who I’m sure still definitely do remember this one.

What else? What next?

What happens when an Englishman (Warf) meets an Irishwoman (Reino) and gets talked into hugging her (after.. much.. coaxing…)?

Looks like he gets what he deserves, that’s what. Oh, well. How could he have known she’s the Irish equivalent of Hannibal Lecter?

Dedric Mauriac, the original guy with blue hair, took time out of his busy schedule tonight to come help me get set up with what I need for running a php script on my server for converting rss feeds to SSS. I was looking for a way to get rss parsing onto my own server and have flexibility on how to implement the LSL scripts in-world to call that, so that we could create video players for the SLPN headquarters and the Destination Station on PI for video podcast viewing which are fully copiable so that they can be rezzed from a variant of Itazura’s RezzHud.

This kind of help goes above and beyond the call of duty and it shows the really giving side of community in SL. Huge thanks to Dedric for setting me up.

You can find his store on his Woodbridge sim next to Edloe, or check out his products on SLExchange. And finally, here’s a video from an SLCN tv interview with Yxes Delacroix.

One thing I almost forgot to mention, there is another scripter in SL with a free podcast player who states on his slexchange page that he’ll help people get set up if they want to run the php scripts on their own servers. I contacted him via IM and notecard (which he accepted) but never got a response. Even a simple “I don’t have time for this nonsense” would have been fine, because that’s an answer I can completely understand. The moral of the story is to support people who have a history of collaboration with others. Dedric’s always been really involved in helping others find answers to their problems.

One of the things I love about being a podcaster in SL is that people have access to you, if they want it, in a way that being a “normal” podcaster will never get you.

Tonight, I was up in the sky working on some typically unskilled build ideas for the new SLPN building on Podcast Island, when I got an IM from Mathaios Brandenburg. Yes, he has a name that will have Keeme Brown ranting about names again. Anyway, he’s a listener and he wanted to come by and say hi. I tp’d him over and we talked in voice for a little bit. He’s got some interesting ideas and some of his thoughts about doing things in SL that aren’t possible in RL fit in with what I’m working on for episode 35 of the podcast. What about 34? That’s going to be the recording from the SLPN meetup. If I edit it and podpress fixes their little Wordpress plug-in.

Sorry for the bad picture, it’s the one saved by SL from when I logged off. I didn’t think to get a picture before I logged off. I really wasn’t thinking about blogging about a random conversation, but it really illustrated the coolness of meeting people who listen to the podcast and understand that I’m just some dude and I’m every bit as excited to meet them as they could ever be to meet me. I’ve met too many cool people this way to count… I’d forget someone and that would suck, but you know who you are and it’s been fun each time. Tonight it was especially nice as it, along with a conversation and blog post from Crap Mariner, turned my mood about podcasting in SL for the positive again.

People bitched about how, in flycam mode, the word “flycam” appeared at the lower right of the screen but would not disappear with the UI toggled off. This was not aesthetically pleasing for machinima and other such activities.

LL fixed this in the new 1.20 release – they got rid of the word flycam altogether. So now when you DO have the UI on and DO want to know when you are in flycam mode, you don’t.  Normally this is not a huge deal at all, but it is if you are editing objects. Anyone with a spacenavigator knows what happens if you go into edit mode and start using the spacenavigator while not in flycam mode. Bad things, my friend. Bad things.

You can disable the ability for this to happen accidentally by going into the Advanced menu -> Debug settings and finding an option for JoystickBuild or something like that (I’m not near my puter atm).  Set this value to false. This means that, when using the spacenavigator it won’t matter if you are in flycam mode or not, if you are editing objects, they can’t be moved by the spacenavigator inputs.

Why they couldn’t just leave it in and have it toggle off with the UI is uncertain.  If anyone knows a setting that makes this happen, please let us know! Thanks.

UPDATE : Stuart Warf points out that you can disable joystick build in the input/joystick controls preferences. Apparently I found the debug settings option first because I was already in there anyway. Sorry. /me hangs head in shame. Now that I’m home from work, I can not only verify this, but give you a screenshot. Here’s where that option is:

Yay Stuart. Enjoy that tidbit from the founder of the SLPN himself.

Podcast Island has taken its share of shots by people in the past. Sometimes it’s about the fact that Gary’s not around much (and he’s not at the moment, he’s dealing with RL work), sometimes it’s about the fact that it’s often empty (which it is to a large degree, atm).  The funny thing is that a lot of the people who say it’s empty are the same ones who didn’t want to stick around and help make it not empty.  I heard on another podcast this week that we are boring and stuffy there. My immediate mental response was “how would you know?”

Recently I was told by someone that they didn’t want to live on podcaster island because of all the weirdos. What weirdos? That’s either me, Arri, Rob, Itazura, or Chug, and now Stuart, a lot of times. There is no one else there, remember?  Sure, there are some shops and some presences set up, but I rarely see any of those people.  I’m paying rent on the SW corner and I’ve never been bothered by anyone.  Then again, I’m personally not looking for privacy and seclusion. So maybe I just don’t care if people blunder in. That’s part of the fun.

I guess where I’m going with this is that I stand by my answer to Crap on his “Podcasting in SL” series of interviews.  My answer to the question of is there a podcasting community in SL is no. There are several communities, and people move between them, collaboration takes place between them, sometimes verbal potshots and comments are issued towards the other communities in them, but they are definitely distinct and (for the most part) fairly fluid.

Everyone has their ideas on how things should be run. I have mine. Certainly if I wanted to I could lob a few cheap shots back at people without even having to strain, but I’d rather not. I know people are all limited on time and energy, and I don’t mind if people aren’t coming running offering to help build community on podcast and podcaster islands. Certainly there’s areas where those of us who are there could do a lot better. So that doesn’t bother me. But you’ll have to forgive me if my enthusiasm for helping your communities sometimes dampens for a little while after another snarky remark or a stupid statement. I’m only human.

Update: I appreciated Crap’s response to this post.

Seems like a lot of people I know are taking their land and shutting stuff in and making everything private. I’d rather see people making use of stuff. The SW corner of podcaster island may not be spectacular, but it’s open, and meant to be used by people.

I’m still messing around with the main buildings, and there will be a deck again to replace the one I tore out.. when it’s there, use it. It’ll have a dj area again, granted no one can change the stream atm, but I’ll put in something for setting the stream that anyone can make use of. The merry go round and the bouncy animal rides that Chug set up are still in place.

Look, I even put in a laptop for you to gaze in wonder at my podcast site on. It’s got high speed wireless too…. as far as you know.

Once I get the building figured out and find something likeable in those prims, it’ll have a lounging area for video podcast viewing for SLPN and Torley videos.

There’s a fire and benches on the boomerang boardwalk if you want to sit and talk and hope I don’t pop in and start asking lots of personal questions.

It’d be fun to have a whole sim full of residents who put up things they like and then open them up to anyone. But that’s not really how podcaster island is set up and it’s not really what people want to do in general, I guess. I understand wanting your own “stuff” but let’s face it.. in SL, if someone wants in, they’re coming in. Besides, you meet the coolest people and have a lot more fun encountering those people than you do hiding inside a closed up building. Rocky and Jane have been long time practitioners of making stuff that others can wander in and make use of on Edloe. And here on Podcaster Island, Rob’s place has long been open and accessible to anyone.

Come around and see who’s around sometime.. or just hang out and use whatever’s there.

Hopefully people will come around more with the SLPN building moving to Podcast island, and a couple friendly accessible spots on podcaster island, and people will realize that, despite pronouncement on a recent SL podcast that we’re stuffy and boring on PI, that’s never been the case with the people I know here. You just haven’t been around.

I’m just one little avatar, and I’m not really trying to change the world. All I’m saying is, come use the stuff on these islands. Respect those residents who aren’t so open, but come play on the SW corner of podcaster island and hit the Destination Station on the south end of Podcast Island (west of center on the south end). Or stay locked up playing house and be stuffy and boring yourselves. Either way’s fine with me.

Sitting here with an iPod touch, posting to my blog from it, it occurs to me once again, people need to create. It’s in our DNA.

SL is full of examples of it. Builders, scripters, artists, bloggers, podcasters, teachers, community developers… all working to build things of lasting value. To DO something.

I’m going to be exploring this in more detail, but not from my iPod!