Update on Second Life IM and N810

Rodney Lee asked if I had any luck porting Second Life to Nokia internet tablets. I had mixed results, initially things went smooth but later on I met problems that I could not avoid.

The project

I got a N810 last february. It is great for instant messaging and casual browsing when you can’t be bothered to wait for your real computer to boot. Ever since, I wanted a Second Life instant messenger cum inventory manager for it.

The strategy

My initial idea was to use libsecondlife to write a new backend for telepathy, the instant messaging framework that power N810’s default IM program.

The problems

Using libsecondlife meant using mono for maemo, which does run but it’s highly experimental. I hoped that it would catch up and get more stable over time. It is plagued with long startup times.

I tested libsecondlife writing some command line bots, but as soon as I hit the inventory things got very, very slow. The ARM processor that powers the N810 is no match for its desktop counterparts, missing or duplicate packets were hogging the processor badly or causing my inventory not to load properly. That is a big issue because I planned to use the messenger while I am on the road through a 3G connection, which often drops packets.

What’s next?

Second Life itself seems to be a little less bothered by missing or duplicate packets. If SLIM is just a few weeks away and is opensource, I will may consider ditching mono/libsecondlife and work on porting SLIM to ARM and maemo instead.

If it’s not, I’ll try to solve the networking issues by trading some functionality (i.e. inventory access) for stability. In that case, I may drop libsecondlife and mono altogether if HTTP-based capabilities system are enough to login, send and receive messages (I haven’t studied them in detail yet).

U.S. Military creates flying dildo for urban surveillance tasks

I just saw this video about a flying spy drone, aptly called Voyer, and I can’t but think that it just look like a giant dildo:

I wonder if they made it like that so it hides in sex shops… U.S. is going to invade Amsterdam ;-)

Damn, I can’t have my own Bugs…

If you’re a programmer, bugs are things that you’d rather go without than crave… unless we’re talking about Buglabs’ bugs. They’re basically linux-powered blocks that you can assemble to prototype mobile devices and applications. There’s a base unit that is a portable mobile computer and you can connect to up to four peripheral blocks such as LCD screens, motion detection accelerometers, GPS receivers or 2 megapixels cameras.

The problem is that they don’t ship outside US yet, so I won’t have a bug in my bloody hands anytime soon. That’s a shame. I want to build one with two cameras to make a portable stereo camcorder to record 3D video.

Un-innovative patents

Regarding Apple’s pending patent on “multitasking touch-screens”:

The system works be categorizing touch inputs and routing the data to the appropriate application — a simple tap might go to the game, while a longer press might be sent to the media player.

Am I the only one that fails to see the innovative bit in this patent? Can you really patent long taps/clicks? I am pretty sure some of the palmtop devices that I have been using over the years did use long taps for right clicks. Reframing their use for multitasking in a gaming situation isn’t so innovative in my humble opinion.

Mobile phone viewer for Second Life | VintFalken.com

Impressive, on a FOMA SH903i – non-Japanese product information on this beast, anyone? – Kimidora runs a mobile phone Second Life client. Planned for an official release in december, it does already look impressive. Kimidora says it’s slow, even in minimal quality mode, but none the less, the viewer is already vewwy vewwy impressive.

The mobile phone viewer for Second Life was created by Sun Inc and shall be officially released on December 15th.

There will be two versions:

A free, basic version of this Second Life viewer for mobile phones that allows you to browse the Second Life map, (limited?) teleport, search and walking around in-world. It could be that with the free version you’ll also get some banner ads in the future. ;)

Paying a monthly fee of 315 Yen – which is two euro’s – will get you the ability to chat, manage your inventory, change appearance, buy things and a monthly stipend of 300 L$. I think you also get a Tokyo Zero Street appartement and 3D-blog. Although I do not have the slightest clue what it is, I now want a 3D blog!!! 2D just sounds so passé. ;)

Mobile phone viewer for Second Life | VintFalken.com

A Japanese company made a Second Life client for mobile phones, to be officially released on December 15th.

Nokia better speed up and send me my N810, so I can start banging at the thing and make a mobile client for their tablets :)

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Second Life and Nokia N810

Nokia recently released its 3rd generation Internet tablet, the N810. A device based on Nokia’s mobile flavour of Debian GNU/Linux, called Maemo. I am pretty excited about its features and I feel that mobile devices are going to become big in the next year or so.

The most interesting bits about Nokia’s tablets is its openness. The Nokia N810 is pretty much the perfect portable device for geeks and hackers on the road.

So, where is the link between Second Life and Nokia N810? I am one of the applicants to the N810 maemo device program. I will receive an N810 at a sizeable discount in exchange of my commitment for a project that brings value to the maemo platform. I bet you already guessed that my project involves making Second Life accessible from one of these nice devices. I am not aiming at creating a full 3D client, I will focus instead on the social bits of SL: instant messaging, chat, perhaps inventory tools.

You can see the N810 in action on these videos on YouTube:

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Got a new notebook

Falling prey to my Compulsive Geekness Disorder, I bought a new notebook yesterday. A MacBook.

I have owned a MacMini G4 in the past, so I know MacOS X and I like the operating system a lot.

This machine do have a few drawbacks however:

• The lack of USB ports on the right or back side. That’s totally inconvenient. How am I supposed to connect a mouse? Wait. I know. They want me to buy a bluetooth Mighty Mouse.
• Completely white, it’s a dust magnet.
• I fear the built-in graphic card, which has just 64MB shared memory, won’t be able to cope with Second Life too well. That may be a problem when I am on the road.

Folding@Home Petaflop Initiative

Folding@Home Petaflop Initiative

Thus, armed with this new technology, we are setting out on a new initiative to take Folding@Home to even greater heights. By combining merely 10,000 computers (each with some sort of streaming processor), we could perform calculations on the Petaflop scale (1,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second) – a level of performance currently unmatched even by the fastest supercomputers. As Folding@Home currently consists of approximately 200,000 actively processing computers, we expect that as this hardware becomes more common, we would easily surpass the 10 Petaflop level.

The new Folding@Home client uses a supercluster of computers around the world to study protein folding. With just 10,000 clients, about the same size as the active users of SecondLife, they can reach petaflops of performances. As I said earlier, we’ll soon see GPUs used for distributed simulations in MMORPG, MMOG and virtual worlds.

FEEE – Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering and Electronics: [template_tochead.html]

FEEE – Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering and Electronics: [template_tochead.html] (thru MAKE:blog)

Free e-book for hardware enthusiasts and students. I am not really an hardware geek, but sometimes it’s useful to have a reference handy on your notebook.

Buffalo’s Wiimote knockoff: the BOMU-W24A/BL spatial mouse – Engadget

Buffalo’s Wiimote knockoff: the BOMU-W24A/BL spatial mouse – Engadget

“Aside from sporting the usual assortment of mouse buttons and a scroll wheel, this critter boasts an internal gyro sensor that allows the cursor to move with the flick (or twist) of your wrist. In case all that twirling gets a bit tiresome, it also packs a standard optical sensor for “normal use,” and offers six programmable buttons all around the enclosure.”

It would be intresting to hook up this gyroscope-equipped mouse to SecondLife and provide a much more intuitive camera control system.