Tender and alive

Cat Boccaccio har a new exhibit at Galerie 17.  It is called "tender", and consists of several works showing love in female - female relationships.

I find these images hard to describe, or at least describe why they leave the impression they do.  The thought that yet again is foremost in my mind is "how does Cat manages to convey true emotions from avatars?"

These images are strong and touching. They tell a story that is both human but also deeply connected to the social structure of Second Life.  Also, the quality of the images are superb.

Do take a look at these pics.

And yes, I am still alive.  Actually, my RL is more alive than for a long time; perhaps that's why my SL suffers gravely, as this blog is a silent vitness of.  But I have not let go, and I probably never will:-)

Kindle, Light My Words With Fire

I have just got a new toy: An Amazon Kindle. Its a really nice device, even though the GUI is rather old-fashioned compared to modern pads. No touch-screen.  No colours.  But the features that are there are well thought out and works flawlessly.

I like it so much I thought my avatar would want one too.  So I quickly buildt one. Now he can sit and read The Times like an old-school british gent, even if its a modern variety:

I have previously blogged about the PC version and the Kindle Store so I won't repeat that; it's enough to say that my Kindle has 3G access to more books than I could ever read almost whereever I am.


And even if I am out in the sun, its a joy to read because of it's electronic inc screen.  It really looks like paper, and there is no glare or reflection.  One cool feature of e-ink screens is that they only uses power when changing content.  Amazon has made use of this and made a feature that displays an image on the screen whenever you turn if off.  The image is choosen randomly from a set, and it just stays there. 

Interestingly enough, I think I like the thing precisely because it is rather limited.  When reading a book one does not get tempted to surf facebook and read email at the same time, because that's just not possible (or at least too cumbersome, LOL).  Instead, I fall into this state of natural relaxation that I get when reading an old-fashioned book printed on paper. 

And if I do sit down with the thing just to play, I end up reading much more text than I would normally do when just spending some free time on the web. 

And it got me wondering: Second Life is a highly graphical environment.  State-of-the-art 3D moving graphics and animations.  But would that be enough to make me stay and spend as much time and money inworld as I do?  Actually, the answer is simply no.  If I could not spend lots of my SL time "talking" to people, that is, creating written words and stories, I would not have found the motivation to stay. 

So, words are important, and words with people even more so.  In a world where pad-and-phone makers are duelling for the nicest icons and the most vivid pictures, it's good that someone still focuses on the words.  They make my day and my life, and I so look forward to both read and write a lot more.

How to protect yourselves against RedZone and other IP tracing technologies

RedZone was a tool for banning potential content thiefs and griefers, including known alts of known perpetrators.  It could also warn you if someone in the vincinity was a know alt.

The question is: How did RedZone know about your alt accounts?  The answer is that the RedZone servers used a loophole in SL to track the IP adress of the users computer, and when it discovered multiple accounts using the same PC it was fair to suspect they where alt accounts.

As you may know, your IP adress is also quite useful for tracking down your RL location and identity, so the privacy issues here goes far beyond alt tracking.

RedZone is now banned from SL, but the basic technology loophole that can be used to track down your IP adresses is still available.  In other words, nothing can stop other people from doing the same thing.

The problem is the handling of media and HTML in the SL client.  Whenever the viewer plays media or shows a web site, it will contact the media or web server directly.  So if you walk into a store with a music URL, media URL or HTML on a prim, your viewer will get the URL from Linden Labs servers, but will proceed to call that URL directly.

Now, whenever you contact a server, that server will know your IP adress.  So the following sequence may happen:

1. You walk onto someones land
2. The parcel have a music URL pointing to the land owners home server
3. Your PC will call that server and dutifully tell it your IP adress
4. The land owner have a visitor scanner that will know your Second Life name
5. The visitor scanner will send your second life name to the same server that serves the Music URL
6. That server will log that your SL avatar walked onto the parcel at the same time as your PC requested the music URL.  

It's a no-brainer to deduce that the two are connected, and your IP is busted.

How can you protect your IP adress?  The simple answer is: Don't play media or music unless you trust the owner of the thing.

The following setting should do:

That is, remove the check from "Allow Media to auto-play" and "Play media attached to other avatars".

Update: I guess you should also remove the check from Streaming music: Enabled" (forgot that one).

The drawback is that you have to press Play in the viewer whenever you really want to listen to the music or watch the HTML-On-A-Prim thing, but that may be a small price to pay to keep your RL identity safe.

New SL Hardware

One of the things that has made me so tired of SL lately is a steadily decline in performance from the laptop I use most often for SL. The way my friends list is just full of "loading".  The way it slows down to a crawl.

So this week I rezzed a new graphics card for my desktop computer, and now I am testing out different OS-es and viewers.  Fun really!  I hope that I soon will be ready to really explore SL again!

I started out with Ubuntu 32 bits, but as I had some crashes when flying over sim crossings in my beloved but oh so demanding estate of Winterfell (well, not really mine, I just live there...), I switched to Windows 7.  Same shit.  So now, the 64 bit version of Ubuntu is wading into the hard drive, and I am kind of excited about how that will work!

When testing, I was kind of impressed by Kirstens latest viewer.  It's got the viewer2 GUI with some twists, so it works a lot better.  The dreaded sidebar and all the GUI windows are transparent, for instance.  And I love the slider at the top of the window that controls your draw distance without the need to open the Settings dialog.

Anyway, the card gives some awesome pictures of the world on the 24" screen, so it's a lot of fun!  Stay tuned!

45 of 52 - Linden Lab and Moore: Do they keep up?

In 1965, Intel Co-funder Gordon E. Moore formulated what has later been known as Moore's Law:  The number of transistors we manage to squeeze into an integrated circuit doubles each year.  In 1975 he amended it a bit, reducing the growth rate to a doubling in two years.  A colleague of his factored in the performance gain made from this, and predicted that the performance of computer components doubles every 18 months.

In practical terms, it means that if you buy a new computer every 3rd year, you would expect a 4-times increase in performance if you run the same programs.  Often enough, you don't, because the new computer comes with a new version of Windows that consumes even more of the machines resources, but that's another story LOL.

I've been in SL for 3 years now.  And I wonder: Has Linden Lab kept up with Moore's Law?  Have Second Life performance doubled twice the last 3 years?

It's easy to forget how bad things where in "the good old days".  I could never expect to be able to be online for more than an hour at a time without crashing.  Several times a month, the whole grid would be down because of unexpected or (sometimes) planned maintenance.   Remember the pictures of the monkeys:  Clearly inspired by the novel 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke, it was clear to all that Linden Lab was run by cool people who also knew their sci-fi literature.  It kind of made us all happy to feel that we lived in a world where our creators was still busy shaping it.

I have not seen this picture for ages.  One reason might be that the grid is almost never down anymore; clearly a performance increase we all love, even if it is seldom prised.  And when we talk about performance: It's now generally possible to walk around a dense club with 40 other avatars with no problems.  In short, a SIM mostly just works.  I remember my first beach party; we where about 15-20 people, and everyone was happy about how smooth things worked:  Somehow, 20 people in a sim was a great feat!  Sure, nowadays we complain when 80 people tries to get all their attachment in at the same time, and long for the day when technology will allow 40.000 people in one place, but the hard fact is that NO VIRTUAL WORLD IN EXISTENCE TODAY OUTPERFORMS SL.  So yes, actual capacity has at least doubled.

When I joined SL, median concurrency was around 30.000.  During the next 18 month, that figure doubled to more than 60.000.  So, at least during that time, Moore's law held true.

Since then, concurrency have flattened, to say it nicely, but somehow I feel that technology is not to blame for that.

A more important reason for the absence of the monkeys, however, is that the Lab has somehow "grown up", no longer profiling themselves with these kinds of images.  And it seems to me that this is what the long-term residents and bloggers miss the most: The feeling of being "pioneers", of being loved by the kings and the queens and the demigods that used to be around.

Now, we have a world with a few well-defined options for server space rentals; options that has mostly remained stable during the three years I've been in SL.  As we are used to when we order a web hotel or a virtual server on the net, we use automated systems that fixes everything, and have no rational need for a spike-haired arch-angel to show us around or care deeply about what we do.

Is that the simple reason while SL is not growing anymore?  Because we just miss the monkeys and the punkhead CEO and the magic bean plants growing outside Gov' Lindens mansion?

Whatever, in 3 years I expect to be able to invite at least 160 people to my 6-years day!