Yeah. I... yeah.

Technology is awesome.

(Thanks to I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER for the above image. All the fun of caturday with none of the hell of /b/!)

So, um, hi.

You're probably wondering where day 4 was. And possibly where day 5 is. And if day 6 is coming.

Yeah.

About that.

So in the 2+ years I've spent being an amateur blogger, I have never, ever, on any blog, been able to do daily posts. Why I thought this month, where I have things happening constantly would be any different, was beyond me.

So, the 29 days may just not be, you know, consecutive anymore. Which kinda sucks, since all sorts of odd parts of the blogosphere has picked up on it. Then again, I've also got some toy manufacturers threatening to break my kneecaps if I don't finally post about the lovely things they've sent me. And even though I can only play two levels of Every Extend until I either break down and buy a PSP or wait for it to hit XBLA in August, I'm still trying to beat the high scores.

However, I've got a ton of email with lots of links that I'll be picking through, and it looks like things have already taken a life of their own on the message boards here, so you might want to have a look over there.

Oh yeah, and to everyone saying that I've ditched Second Life: Come the fuck on, people. Go back and read that first post, please. The whole thing. You'll be quizzed on it this time.

Remember, between my old http setup and the release of the Drmn' Trance Vibe, you can do this stuff in SL /right now/. And, if you're an SL developer looking for help on implementing interaction with the TranceVibe, just ping our tips email or hit up the message boards.

Or hell, someone has even meshed together an unholy amalgamation of LSL, JS, and Smalltalk to make a SL/Croquet/Whatever else will talk of HTTP bridge, which was going to be part of my project. This could also be an interesting idea for tying different pieces of software into virtual worlds using HTTP streams.

But more on that somewhere else. I have cubes to explode. I mean, articles to write. I mean, emails to reply to. I mean, cubes to explode.

yes.

Well, they say one is the loneliest number...

But zero is really fucking depressing. So depressing that I'm gonna go play Peggle now.

Intermission

God damn that motherfucking horse and his motherfucking brightly colored pegs. Anyways.

Tonight was research night here in Croquet land. Time to strike out and see what other brave adventurers had established on the wild planes of P2P worlds. The answer seems to be... not much.

The image above was taken from the University of Minnesota's "Public Croquet Spaces Directory", which, according to the screenshots on the Croquet Current Projects page, seems to at one point have had at least 2 things on it. But, no more. It is sad and lonely. Doing more googling on "public croquet servers" did me no good, other than finding what seems to be a fairly defunct blog. Last posting was about SL going open source. I wonder if the client source ate the author.

It has big teeth.

Alas, this is a journey I will begin alone, which totally makes it like some awesome anime type shit, and since it's a virtual world, I can TOTALLY have a big sword, like, all Berserk style and stuff. However, right now, I'm still stuck being a bunny on a sailboat right now.

Of course, this is starting to make me question my own project in general, 'cause there's probably something going on... It's most likely an amalgamation of these 3, at least, in my head.

• (a) - There just hasn't been enough publicity. Totally feasible. Most of the press is still cleaning out their pants so they can shit them all over again about Second Life.

• (b) - Croquet is gonna be REALLY HARD to use. It seems like there's a lot of cool stuff being built on top of Croquet which people are then using for creative purposes, but the innards are pretty daunting. Just check the description of TeaTime in the Croquet Wikipedia Article (The amount of stuff built into the base object structure makes the embedded engineer in me go into seizures, but I do understand why it's there.). Now, I can come up with a paragraph just as eye crossing about the internals of SL, but it seems like it's a lot more prevalent that you know this stuff before nosing down to the dev grindstone on Croquet. But, hey, they're 1.0 as of like, last Tuesday.

• (c) - I'm most likely using this in ways that, though they've been mentioned, probably weren't planned on seeing daylight until maybe, I dunno, 1 year after version 1 came out, not 1 week**

In all of the Sex in Games talks, one of us always says "As long as there's a world with two people in it, there will be sex". I realize we're totally doing an "OMGZ FIRST POST" version of cybersex with new virtual worlds, but if being the first at something totally attention whorish isn't what the internet is about, I don't know what is.

And hey! It inherently supports BVH animations, which means moving already created assets (for SL, which uses the same for its animation uploads before they get mangled into its own format), so direct importation is possible and has already been done almost a year ago (before the Beta 1.0 SDK even!).

So, the research tonight did lead to a couple of useful blogs, too:

Julian Lombardi - Chairman of the Board (of Croquet), wearer of shades

Croquet-Bento - The Blog of Mark McCahill, one of the lead designers on Croquet and head of a lot of the projects happening with it. Also helped design Gopher. God damn.

So there, some good for background reading on what's been happening with Croquet so far. Looks like the use getting the most attention right now is Qwak, who are working on a business collaboration product called Qwak Forums. If you want more info, go check out 3PointD or something, 'cause that's like, their thing, not mine.

Tomorrow: I start the tutorial, which is about the only one I could find. This shit is all sorts of MS-Paint core. Can't freakin' wait.

Well, it's downloaded! The first step has been taken! Of course, it's been downloaded on my newly christened and otherwise bare Macbook, so it's been an evening of trying to get everything in working order, not just Croquet.

So, in the words of Bill Murray from What About Bob...

Iiiiiiiiiiii'm SAAAAAAILLLLLINNNNNGGGGGGG!

But really, that's about it. Mostly making sure things work tonight. More progress tomorrow I hope.

It's pretty easy to get confirmation of how completely fucking random my brain is. Just ask anyone who's met me. I have problems keeping on a subject for more than 2 minutes, much less months at a time.

So, even though I've got ton of backed up projects and writing (hi audio vibe people and fucktube people! I swear I'm working on it!), why not jump in and start a new one... Right now? Unfortunately, there's only one way to do this pure, and that's by starting it the second it hits my brain.

So. Croquet. I have chosen what is possibly the most unhelpful image ever to illustrate this because that is how I roll.

Croquet is a 3D collaborative development environment written by some very smart people. Very, very, very smart people. However, in easier to understand terms, think of it like Second Life (and if you don't know what Second Life is, um... shit.), except the major differences are:

• Everything is open source

• versus just Second Life's client being open source. For now. Gonna change. At some point.

• You run your own server and host everything

• versus Linden Lab running and maintaining all of the servers

• and running your own isn't necessarily a good thing. Do you know how much bandwidth this shit takes? Well, you'll find out. Remember to dip your TiSP lines in some crisco to make things faster!

• Everything is written on top of the Squeak platform, which is pretty much Smalltalk "with benefits" (well, benefits like pretty much being an operating system. I think I'll start calling these 'emacs benefits')

• versus Second Life's C++ core with LSL language on top of it

And there's a whole bunch of lower level architecture issues, too, but if you care about those... Well, god, I wish there was an article I could point you at, but on initial google, there doesn't really seem to be a "This is Croquet, This is SL, this is the apples, these are the oranges" type deal. It's all "(Croquet/SL) (is/is not) an (operating system/true open source/the next big thing/dessert topping/floor cleaner)". At this point, I don't have enough information to say anything, either.

The question remains, what the fuck does this have to do with Slashdong? Well, the idea is pretty simple.

Don't get me wrong. I loves me some Second Life. And not just because they, you know, pay me and let me make virtual worlds all damn day. Which is totally fucking sweet, let me tell you (Hell, come work for Linden Lab! Did I mention the awesomeisity of it? 'cause, really, it is.). But really, there's some ways that SL works you just can't change (and should never be changed, 'cause the idea works for what it's supposed to do, but more on that in a later post), mainly that whole "LL serves up everything" deal (Ok, so this /is/ slated to change at some point in the future, but bear with me for the moment). This is fine and dandy if you can drop the 16 or so Benjamins on an island of your own then sell your virtual (or real) body on the real (or virtual) street to keep up the maintenance fees. It also means you've got a built in user base of something like a bazillion people (plus or minus a hojillion. Yeah, go ahead and hump those numbers 'til they bleed, blogosphere) of people who might be (and I 100% guarantee a few that ARE) into whatever it is you're into.

But, not everyone has the $tack$ needed to roll on virtual dub$ of Second Life. More importantly, not everyone wants their business happening in public, or even the "private but not totally private" that is owning your own SL region. If you're still completely clueless of who I'm referring to here, just read this article and focus on the shouldn't part. Now, of course, even peer to peer, someone could be sitting outside your window (network) with a camera (packet sniffer or maybe some actually totally awesome scifi movie shit where it renders out all your network traffic into really neat graphs and pictures which make for a great show on a 30" LCD. But most likely, packet sniffer.), so the usual "I don't care how many Tor hops your going through, this shit ain't private" rules apply. But still, there's levels. Second Life gives you one of them, and it's great for many, many people. There's others that want different things, though. Thus, we arrive at the apartment model.

The apartment model is my term for a virtual, collaborative 3d environment that allows pure, peer-to-peer connections. Sure, you can join nets or meshes or grids or whatever, but if you want, you can also just hook up person to person (or person to machine to person to machine or...) and go about your business.

Funny enough, Playstation Home runs this sort of model. As far as I understand it, you will host your own apartment, and other people will come visit and completely stomp the shit out of your tiny little cable modem pipe 'cause you're hostin' it all! (ever wonder why they're not allowing user created content?). Not to mention, assuming you're one of the majority, you most likely don't have a PS3, nor do you have any plan to buy one any time soon. So that's just right out, anyways.

However, Croquet is totally like "Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades" and will let you render anything you damn well please (even if it does mean slicing your face off). They have VNC, web browsing, all sorts of crazy shit. I bet there's totally a ninja in there somewhere. Waiting to slice your face off. Because that's what they do.

Obviously, this is HUGE for the kind of things that, um, well, I do, and this project is all about me doin' my thing.

Back in July of 2005, I managed to get a full hardware and software interface together for Second Life in a concentrated total of 3 days from starting my first account (I think I actually took a day off work, even). For this one, since the platform is a little bit more daunting and I'm starting from scratch (well, almost, I did play with one of the beta builds for a while well over a year ago), I'm giving myself a month. I'll be blogging on my progress daily (Woooooooooooooo a full month of content! That'll be a first!), as well as rethinking my interface for Second Life, and, god (or whatever the hell deity it is that puts this shit in my head) willing, by May 1st, I'll have a Second Life to Croquet bridge.

Along the way, I'll be blurting out my thoughts on Croquet, SL (which, having now spent 10 months in the prim mines, I think I kinda maybe sorta get like, a little), Squeak, virtual worlds, programming, the internet, and anything else I feel like rambling about.

You'll also get a look inside my head during my development process of things like this. If that doesn't send you running away, you should have your fight or flight response tuned post-haste.

It'll be a fun ride. Or at least, a ride. Or hell, it could be a total failure. But I try to keep negativity out until day 2. Wanna help out? Join our message boards and tell me what the hell I'm doing wrong, then tell others what they're doing wrong in telling me what I'm doing wrong! Viva Open Source Community!

And BTW: Alan Kay, if you're reading this... Can I have your autograph? Object Orientation is, like, totally, hella awesome.

Oh yeah. And, um, sorry in advance.