Wh1tf1eld's Weblog

Off-topic.

wh1tf1eld — Sat, 24 May 2008 22:15:30 +0000

This is usually a blog to document things happening to the avatar Olof Whitfield in Second Life ® but, as the 3D software Blender is no stranger to the content creators of this virtual world, I think, this post is not too far off-topic.

Today I got my DVD edition of the new, second open movie of the blender foundation called “Big Buck Bunny” or “BBB” for short. I pre-ordered that DVD to contribute to the project and to enable it because pre-ordering means financing the entire thing. They wrote “Everyone who orders and pays the DVD before october 1st will get a discount and his/her name credited in the movie credit roll!”. Of course, I immediately checked the movie, the DVD itself and the included data files (it is an open movie, that means you get all the scene files, the textures, etc. to rebuild the movie from the first to the last frame) and, guess what? I was not mentioned, although I ordered the DVD one day after the start of the pre-order campaign, that means several decades befor october 1st! Scandal!

Ok, there will be a third open movie (knowledge taken from the first interviews after the premiere of BBB) and there will be again a pre-order by me and I will again hope to get mentioned in the credit roll. I will make it on that damn credit roll!

Second Life ® trademark policy – little casulty

wh1tf1eld — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:26:09 +0000

As an obedient resident of Second Life ® and maintainer of our shop’s update blog, I immediately updated our blog’s category name to reflect the new rules – I added an “®” to it. (How that is expected to look like has been outlined here!) The technique used to do that is called a named entity, that is you add an “&”, followed by “reg” and a semicolon into the HTML source code of your post or – in my case – in the category name. A web browser will later automagically expand that code to an “®”.

However, that turned out to be an not so clever step as my favorite feed reader can not read our blog posts anymore! That particular feed reader – FeedReader3 – is usually a very handy piece of software (and it’s free!) which does not make any problems, but in this case it just says:

Parser error ———-
Line:2
Reason:Reference to undefined entity ‘reg’.

Ok, there is always an alternative (isn’t it?) and so I tried the next entity by replacing “reg” by “#174″. And now, it seems to work. (Well, I had to save some of the blog’s post after updating the category’s name and had to update the feed in the reader…)

This was my little report on consequences of the new trademark policies, not as spectacular as exptected elsewhere, but hey, I did not even had my first “rezday”, so my problems need not be big ones!

Just to let you know…

wh1tf1eld — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:57:37 +0000

I am still alive! RL takes almost all of my time, so the SL suffers from a hiatus that hopefully will end in a short time. I keep my fingers crossed.

Point of no return

wh1tf1eld — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 22:22:32 +0000

We got mentioned in the current AvaStar #45! On page 29 Petronilla Paperdoll reviews our halloween freebie and writes:

[...] try the amazing free Halloween witch outfit by Manya McMahon and other avatars (Blackmount 6, 113, 707). It is a fat pack, including clothes, a nice flexi cap with sculpted collar and boots, as well as a sculpted witch hat, a red hairdo and two amazing ravens – one for your shoulder and one for your arm. You can feed them with herbs hidden in the sculpted bags hanging to your belt.

This also means, that we reached “the point of no return”, until now, the shop has been a rather secret place with one or two visitors a day, but now, the coordinates are known and published. Now, we have to get this thing up and running.

Need to leet

wh1tf1eld — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 12:25:30 +0000

I am usually not able (or willing) to decode leetspeek, a written argot used primarily on the Internet, but in this case, in the case of choosing this blog’s name, I had to make an exception: The blog “whitfield.wordpress.com” had already been a created, albeit not frequently (as of today, approximately one year after its birth) used by someone else. So, I replaced all occurences of “i” by “1″ (one) in “whitfield” and found a name not taken. It does not look very nice but since this is my avatar’s name and I have not found something more intelligent or funny, it will remain.

Coming back to SL:

Created a first set of clock scripts, not fully convincing, next version will fix several issues.
Have to replace the teleporter script in the “down” direction as it still requires to select the target. Background: There is only one reasonable target to choose.
Our shop vendor script is still lacking one functionality: Although it looks cool, it cannot sell things. Obviously a point of minor relevance for a vendor.

Ok, all for now, I have to get rid of tons of old files on this machine’s harddisks to gain the space to install tons of tools to create, manipulate and texture things. Most probably I will install a couple of Petabytes of tools and scripts and code to produce bitmaps of only 1024×1024 pixels (or less, see here). Strange. It is like breaking a butterfly on a wheel.

The shop is not running…

wh1tf1eld — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:59:27 +0000

… but we managed to get a halloween freebie out. We still have some teleport issues, the shop flies at about 700m because the ground was rather crowded when we began building it. Currently there is more space on the ground than up there in the sky. A small sign indicates the way to the shop and the freebie which has also been put on SLX.

(The green thing actually is our teleporter, no, not the final design, but pointing in the right direction.)

Next required thing done today: Updated the profile’s “2nd Life” and “Picks” tab.

The first, non-automatic entry.

wh1tf1eld — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:47:50 +0000

I got the impression that you have not really arrived in SecondLife without having setup a weblog to report all strange, interesting, fascinating, thrilling, boring, annoying, beautiful, and challenging things you found there, “inworld”. Here I am. This is my blog. And it is a friendly one, it smiles. Did you see it? There, in the top-right corner of your screen? Here is a snapshot:

Smiling back: