I’m sure this has happened to most of you. You make a “friend”. Exchange cards. Maybe you talk to this person now and then, or whatever. Then some day you realize, they are no longer on your friend list. They’ve cut up your card.

I can’t really recall cutting up any card from an avatar I’ve exchanged with. I have heard that some avies prune their friends list now and then. What do you do? Do you prune your list?

Do you try to find out why they cut your card? Let them go? It seems to be an area of etiquette in Second Life that has no Real Life counterpart.

-Veyron

Rumor has is that Linden Labs is trying to fix an old exploit in the grid that is being, well, exploited. And that is what is going on with the current grid instability we have all been feeling for the last week or so. It’s good that LL can fix a security bug within 18 months and keep everyone informed of why the grid is going down the toilet….

-Veyron

Well seems like someone in Second Life is up to shenanigans over supposed patents of a fairly neat tool Dalien came up with and gives away. I believe this avatar, Jerry Martin, is full of smoke. It costs a non trivial amount of money to file a patent, and you need to do a patent search to search. To get it done right, you usually need a patent lawyer. As of 2005 the US Patent and Trademark Office was about 4 years behind in examining patent applications.

If Mr. Martin actually applied for a patent, and IF there is no prior art the USPTO has found, and IF there is no challenge to the patent, he might have a valid patent by 2011? Which by then should be worth about $2.53 - US.

Depending on how the patent is submitted is might even be easy to circumvent the patent by making a minor change to the algorithm used in the process.

-Veyron

Well, I lost two no copy items with this weekend’s fun. While attempting to rez them, they failed to rez, but still appeared in my inventory. I gave up trying to rez them, and then when I logged in later, they were gone from my inventory and not rezzed where I tried to rez them.

Really irritating. Sometimes I’ve had objects like this reappear a few days later or when a sim is rebooted. We shall see. It’s just not acceptable for a computer system like this to loose items to easily, especially when we have no means of backing them up.

-Veyron

Well, gambling in Second Life is kaput. I’m not sure if to covers sploders, but I suspect it will. I suppose I’ve played my last sploder already. I hardly ever gaming in real life anyway and I never trusted any gambling in Second Life anyway, so no great direct loss to me.

I’m sure Linden Labs is being pushed to at least make an enforcement statement about this from the US Government. Oddly enough, gambling in the US is not illegal, as long as the local government is getting their cut of the action. It doesn’t really matter arguing or pissing or moaning about it. Gambling inside of SL was always an edgy proposition, because it is/was so easy to cheat the customer.

The pessimist in me believes this is the beginning of the end of this incarnation of Second Life from a number of stand points. This probably has the potential to crash the SL economy. All gambling assets are now essentially worthless. Anyone who has a gambling business is now effectively out of business. Expect a flight of L$ out of the world ahead of any banning of accounts by the gambling operators.

Land prices, along with the new continent coming will probably cause a property price crash. This is a good deal if you don’t own land, not so good if you already own land.

The next obvious attack of course will be on the sex side, and as people have alluded to the Furries seem to be the first target.

Private sims are not going to save any of us. Linden Labs still “owns” the server. They released the client, a good first step. The next step is the Open Simulator. I think Linden Labs anticipated this by open sourcing the client and trying to open source the server. I believe LL wants to just manage the asset server and the “directory” server, much like Network Solutions manages (and greatly profits) from managing and controlling the Internet domain system. In this model, anyone can setup their own physical server running the SL server software, perhaps pay some fee to connect up to LL’s asset database and directory server, and then join the grid.

LL avoids all of the issues over what is going on in that server, as they have no control or management of that server, just like Network Solutions.

The big deal now is to get the Open Simulator running….

-Veyron

One of my favorite clothing designers finally started a blog - after much prodding…. Eloria LeShelle promises to update it frequently and to show us all of her hot new clothing on her blog….

-Veyron

Surprise, surprise…. The World Stock Exchange in Second Life has been hacked. Banks, stock exchanges, financial institutions in Second Life are a fraud. From top to bottom, start to end. There is simply no recourse for any theft, fraud or swindle. It’s the perfect breeding ground for thieves and con men (women?). Who knows if the hack is real or not. It does not matter.

It’s all fake. A bank offering 50%+ annual return on deposit is too good to be true. And it is. It’s called a pyramid or Ponsi scheme. Last ones in loose it all. Firsts ones in get it all. Who started the bank? The crooks….

Virtual stocks in a virtual company in a virtual world might be amusing if the virtual cash it was paid for didn’t come from real money.

If you have Lindens in a SL bank or one of these goofy schemes, get it out now, while you can. You have no recourse when you loose all of your money. The police will laugh at you, the courts will discard your papers, and Linden Labs will giggle all the way to the delete button on your email.

You’re all smart enough in Real Life, don’t be a putz in Second Life….

-Veyron

Alright, it looks like we have some sort of consensus on what to vote on. At least we don’t need a poll on what to vote on. JellyBean and Hawks sound like they are going to host the next party. Do we have a date yet on when the party is? I’d like to close voting 5-7 days before the party.

For the next party here’s what we have:

-Veyron

The new client has a bug in it…. It can cause HUDs to malfunction or disappear. It’s hit me several times. The solution is to remove the HUD and reattach it.

Log into Second Life Jira and vote for them to fix it. It is bug VWR-1448. Thanks to the Huddles Blog for pointing out the problem. I was wondering what was going on.

-Veyron

I’ve dealt with griefers before, but I decided to pop in on an NCI class on them tonight.

I picked up one tip that was too good not to pass along. If you get a particle attack or something is driving you nuts with particles at a club or similar, you can turn it off really quick.

Toggles particles on and off. Not sure what it is on a Mac, but probably something similar.

-Veyron

Here’s what I am hearing as far as themes go:

1. N00b
2. Tinies
3. Mystical Creatures
4. Movie Creatures (Hmm - that’s pretty wide open)
5. Super Hero’s
6. Luau
7. Non-humanoid

I’d like to start the poll this weekend. Any last minute additions or deletions?

Also, anyone volunteering a place or do we have one already selected (I can’t recall off the top of my head)? One suggestion might be the Paradise Lost club. It’s an entire sim and it’s been a bit dead lately. It might give us more room and space to support a lot of avatars. I doubt Paradise Lost would mind the traffic. Vint could show us her pole and Tiessa could show us some other things….

-Veyron

I missed most of it, but I was there for the first bit of the party. Looked like a lot of fun, and I heard we packed the sim and maybe even crashed it. Hmmm…

There were so many people there, it was hard to keep track of everyone. I think next time we need some sort of guest book so we know who was able to make the party, and maybe some sort of photo setup….

Some discussion about the next theme…. Any thoughts about a total non-humanoid theme? Something really out there?

-Veyron

Here’s something for all of you bloggers out there to hit back against the comment spammers…. Project Honeypot. You can signup for free, make a few really minor, human invisible changes to your blog and make life harder for the the spammers. In exchange, you get some stats on just how bad things are with your pages.

And we all know that the spammers will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes…. Until then, we need to make their lives as miserable as possible.

-Veyron

I was searching around for some additional pirate accessories for the upcoming party, I remembered this really cool pirate car from this blog entry in Motorati.

Wow! Very cool…. So, I decided to teleport over to the Pontiac sims and start searching for the car, perchance to see if it is for sale. Not much luck finding anything. Well, while I’m here, I might as well check out the bikini car wash.

Very nice build - complete with some freebies and some other interesting things. Too bad I missed the grand opening.

Then I noticed a large group of avatars, so I decided to investigate.

It turns out it was caLLie cLine giving a tour of Motorati with two of the Motorati girls. The tour was just ending, and I was about to leave when Amanda Shinji popped in to see Callie. She’s the builder of the car I was looking for! After swapping some fashion information and she told me where the car is on display - out in front of the Pontiac sim. She is quite amusing - having built several of the cars in on display.

She is also the first girl I think who knew what a Veyron is. In fact, when I asked her if she saw the video of the Veyron doing 250 mph, she said she did. Described it as “like watching a porn video.” LMAO.

Amanda has a blog but not a lot of traffic - and I’ve invited her to the party this weekend and the blogger group. Maybe if we’re lucky she’ll bring the Pirate car to at least display.

Yo ho ho!

-Veyron

Color is a funny thing in Real Life. Light perception in a human is the reflection of ambient light off of the object we are looking at. This light we see is “based” on the source light, the Sun, the light in your room, a flashlight, the Moon, etc. Now, here’s where the interesting thing comes in. All of these light sources have a different light spectrum or color temperature.

I do photography in Real Life, and I take care to get my colors right. This is not an easy task. One key it to calibrate your monitor. All displays will have slight color variations. That Adobe Gamma program some of you see, is worthless, by the way…. You do this with a colorimeter, which is kind of a video camera you temporarily attach to the monitor that the computer can read back and see what color is really on the display.

When I take a picture with my digital SLR, the camera tries to guess what the ambient color temperature currently is when the shot is taken. It stores that information in the picture for later processing. I take pictures in what is known as a RAW image format, which is a lossless compress sensor dump. It’s not even really a picture at that point. It has to be made into a picture on a computer. This is another interesting point. Digital cameras do not take color pictures. Each photocell sees only intensities of grey, but color filters are put in front of cells for red, blue and green and then these combinations of colors are mixed together to make a color pictures. Oddly, there are more green photocells than the other colors, because human eyes are more sensitive to shades of green (probably to see ripe fruits).

Now here’s where it gets strange. When I “develop” the digital RAW image at home, I decide what color is what. I start with the suggestion of the color temperature from what the camera thought it was when the picture was taken, but then I can adjust it from there. Usually I calibrate from a grey color - looking for it in the shot. Select it and set that as my baseline color. And all is well. Printers need to do the same thing to get the colors corrected as well.

Now here’s where it gets really weird. This complicated process of getting the colors “right” is being done by your brain in real-time - all the time. Your brain knows what color things should be and automatically color corrects - instantly. A blue shirt outside in the Sun is not truly the same color under fluorescent lights inside. But, your eyes and brain see it as the same color. Just like magic. Your brain is a very powerful image processor, but you can fool it, for example, under a black light, things look all wrong because your eyes and brain are not used to seeing things under that color spectrum and have no point of reference to work with.

What does this have to do with Second Life? The new WindLight add on for the new skies is changing the lighting in world. People can change the lighting themselves and they change the colors of pretty much everything. Your brain is not compensating for this because it is probably not real enough, and the Real World is in your peripheral vision - locking in your brains color correction. The Herald has a post about this problem.

The funny part is, it’s not really a problem. Life is like that. Photographers get up before dawn to get out at dawn to get landscape shots. Why? The light is different because the Sunlight must travel through more atmosphere (the angle of the Sun) and has a more golden color. All of the colors in the world look more lush and have more “pop” to them. This does not last long. About an hour at most.

Photographers do not like taking shots around noon, because the light can be harsh and ugly. It is called high noon and good photographers try to avoid taking pictures then.

The bad part is, people in Second Life may not be getting a consistent view of the Second Life world because they are twittling with the settings. So everyone is seeing different things. This is fine if your tweaking colors to get a cool in world photo, but not so cool if your trying to sell a product and get a nice pastel color not look like neon. This is a sticky problem I’m not sure how they are not going to get around. Color is not a simple problem.

The previous client had a very primitive and simple color model. Now that it is getting more realistic, color is going to get complicated. I think the reason the Windlight enhanced viewer was pulled was they had not figured all this out yet. They - okay Torley - has been talking more about it recently, so I suspect they are going to be putting Windlight back into play again soon.

Should be interesting, and of course, controversial.

-Veyron