VCOMM Update: Looking Good

Location: Hellbilly Home Place

I successfully uploaded a presentation to the VCOMM site, a Powerpoint slide-show of Richmond's devastating 2004 flood, when the remnants of Tropical Storm Gaston dumped 11 inches of rain on us in 5 hours.

I needed to check the "persistence" of an upload, since my last one vanished after I had uploaded it and logged off. I wanted to see how a future visitor might interact with the presenter when I was offline. For testing it under rough conditions, I called in Alphaville Herald journalist Pappy Enoch, who can break machinery by looking hard at it.

Only one issue--and it's not VCOMM's--troubles me. The transmitter controls a media stream, so the land on which it is placed must either belong to the owner of the transmitter OR it must be deeded to a group. That is a limitation that Linden Lab could change and it would help faculty who work on campus property they don't own.

I plan to test other tools soon, but it's impressive that VCOMM's system permits PPT slide-shows and Quicktime movies to be uploaded. As soon as land-rights are settled on Richmond Island, I'll either give Kevin a transmitter or set one up myself, then install several panels to run media.

Pappy's technical report follows:

That thar mersheen am working fine. I dun looked at the 2004 Richmond flood pix...still am rite sorry about yo' friend Sam's car, even if he did have to hole up in the topless club when the water rose...but that am another story :)

Tell Volker that Swiss Engineerin' am top notch, almost as good as Hillbilly work! Y'all come on by the Homeplace and see the pics Iggy dun stuck up. Then yu will know why Richmond ain't safe when the high-water comes--head for Enoch Holler an' the mountuns!

Lindens to Ban Camping Chairs

Location: Hunting Lucky-Chairs (soon, anyhow)

Linden Lab has announced that they will ban camping devices that encourage avatars to stay in place in order to collect Linden Dollars. It's a long time since I kicked up my heels at HippiePay with their manager, Twyla Tomorrow.

I've used Iggy or an alt to camp from time to time, because 1) I'm a cheapskate who cannot pass up the opportunity for a few cents and 2) If a merchant wishes to pay me, I'm glad to help out.

Camping was already on the decline before the company policy, "clarified" by Jack Linden, did nothing but stir up anger from bot-haters and campers alike. The big-camping venues like HippiePay vanished long ago. With the end of the old "Popular Places" rubrics in the SL client, it was only a matter of time. Now that traffic ratings are being gamed with camping, Linden Lab decided to clamp down again.

This hurts businesses, when a simpler--and easier to enforce--solution would be to recode the Linden Lab traffic ratings so unique visits (by IP address) or some other metric would have solved the problem.

Now small shops will have a hard time, given the utterly terrible search engine in SL, getting customers to their doors. Linden Lab needs word-string, Boolean, and other features common to other search engines, or even the Xstreetsl.com site they run. I don't know enough about traffic ratings to consider how lucky-chairs, trivia contests, or other games might lure enough visitors to increase a site's traffic rating.

It simply gets under my skin that the Lab can tell property owners--especially those with islands--what they can or cannot do with the avatars who come to their location. After all, the Lab does not crack down when sims get full for other reasons.

May Road-Trip: Performance Lag vs. Good Pix

Location: Mowry Sim

I am finding that my "old" laptop is lagging more and more. On this trip (on the bike--the car is a prim-hog) that meant that I'd either get good shots or ride: doing both was difficult. I stopped for snaps, then moved the graphics sliders down before roaring off again.

Lag or not, I love this idea of a monthly trip on SL's roads. Sitings:

• a wistful-looking couple on a bench, in a playground, watching a bunch of bugs and animals on springs, the sorts of rides you see for children in real life. But there were no children and the animals moved slightly of their own accord. This scene struck me as almost tearful, something right out of P. D. James' amazing novel The Children of Men. I rode on.

• an unpleasant surprise. I could not resist, and I came back to discover that the "playground" was not so innocent or sad. The animals had little sex-balls embedded. It's in the open, so I guess it will vanish with the new adult-zoning restrictions.

• only a few billboards, and they are smaller than those from the old days. I hate billboards so this change is fine with me.

• odd physics. I kept my cruising speed under 50 kph and looked around when I could. At sim-lines I found that creeping up was a bad idea. I'd "bounce back" as if the bike had struck a giant and invisible marshmallow. Blasting across the lines worked better as long as the bike was not going too fast. Then things got non-linear, fast.

• my horn. It plays "Dixie." I'll tell Pappy Enoch.

• a sim simply refused to load, even though it was a valid location on my map.
  

I got this effect of "the end of the road."

I'll be back in June with another road-trip! I put a few more shots on my Koinup account. Have a look and...happy motoring!

VCOMM Presenter: Beta Test for Second Life Educators

Location: Hellbilly Home Place

Today I was able to test a new presentation tool developed by Eric Gaibov, a Swiss SLer.

VCOMM's presenter permits the uploading and display of Powerpoint slide-shows, Quicktime movies, and PDFs so they can be shown in Second Life.



I've been considering a presentation tool for Richmond Island, as soon as we resolve deeding rights for a showcase-building of student projects. One must own the property (or it must be deeded to a group) to place the transmitter part of the VCOMM unit. That done, the presentation panel can be taken elsewhere to use. The limit on the transmitter is not VCOMM's doing; it comes from rights over media-streaming on a parcel (only owners can do that).

Since I own a small piece of land where Pappy Enoch and his virtual hillbilly family dwell, I used it for my testing, and Pappy was quick to help me warn off meddlers.



VCOMM's latest version is smooth and polished, and the upload of a large PPT file went without a hitch. I plan to try next with a short .mov file, so I can test audio.