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My department at work held a rocket day this week, I slacked off a bit and didn’t actually make a rocket but spent my time doing a bit of filming with Hanans new video camera instead…

On a project I’m working on at the moment (Meedan) we need to be able search for content by geographic area as well as by topic …. e.g. give me all the blog articles from the Middle east that relate to the Iraq war.

Luckily we already have a means to geo-locate all this content (handy eh ? ) so we’ve assigned latitude and longitude values to each article/ blog post /conversation participant.

All thats needed then is a means to search by Geographic area.

We’re using PostgreSQL a pretty heavy weight database baring a much closer resemblance to Db2 rather than MySQL. It has some pretty neat geographic search features courtesy of the PostGIS extension. This allows you to perform searches inside lat/lon boundaries of varying complexity as well as many other neat geo functions. These boundaries are defined in a markup called Well Known Text (WKT), for our purpose we search by polygons that are made up of lat/lon points that mark out the geographic search areas, both PostGIS and DB2 spatial extender uses this format.

So that’s all the big pieces in place, the only missing piece is a set of lat/lon points that define the areas we wish to search. I may have been blind or searching for the wrong terms but i couldnt find a set of this data anywhere on the Internet (please point me to a source if you know one). As we only needed the rough continent outlines I decided it would be a fairly trivial effort to make a tool to create the sets of lat/lon points in the correct WKT format for our searches.

Basically you click around the area you want to define and the hit ‘generate polygon’ this will give a nice WKT formatted polygon ready to use in an SQL query. If you want to delete a point just click on it a second time.

At the moment you just create an area generate the polgon and do the next one.

Next up I may add some storage so that people can share these datasets with each other or come back and change them at a later date.

For now here is the mapping tool.

I could watch this all day

I went to watch the new Will Smith film I am legend on friday night at our local Odean cinema. I’m a big fan of all things post-apocalyptic, the most likely origin of my fascination being Day of theTriffids which I found resident in my parents bookshelf when i was about 11/12, this was up followed not long after with Stephen Kings the Stand and the original (?) post-apocalyptic adventure Mary Shelleys The Last Man.

After reading those titles I’ve since soaked up all manner of ‘end of the world as we know it’ books and films, most of which are very formulaic; i.e. mankind gets nasty disease and either dies out (almost entirely) or becomes a slavering zombie beast overnight. I’m not sure exactly what my attraction is to such bleak future visions, although the idea of having free reign over vast empty playground cities and countryside has something to do with it. The lack of people would get pretty sucky after a while and I can imagine the sound of moaning zombies might distract whilst im trying to tee off down the Champs-Élysées. But I think it’s OK for me to just to mull over the entertainment possibilities available granted that level of freedom, without thinking too much about the actual state of mind I would be in given that situation.

I am Legend was good, but then I have a bias opinion for the reasons listed above. Will Smith did a good job of portraying a man suffering the effects of isolation; and yet ignoring them as much as possible as he single mindedly pursues his goal of saving humanity from the plague. The Special effects were nicely done, with the city aged by a few years (although im not sure enough time had realistically passed for that much grass to start growing in time square) it certainly didn’t look the same as when i visited the city and stumbled across the film set at 5 o’clock on a Sunday morning.

The only real dissapointment I had with watching I am Legend was not the fault of the film production but the fault of the venue I chose to watch at. The main cinema near us is the Odean in Southampton, which for some reason i keep going back to, but no longer. Odean cinema seems incapable of maintaining its surround sound speaker systems, in this case the front left and right speakers were not working at all so we didnt hear any of the awesome soundtrack by James Netwon Howard. It was also a strain to catch some of the dialogue going on when the characters weren’t centre screen.

I’ve sat through at least 6 films now in Odean main screens which have on occasion only had the center speaker working, I mean what’s all that about ? You can’t watch a big Hollywood blockbuster in mono and appreciate what the director is trying to convey. I am Legend is just another one in a string of films that I’ve left thinking ‘that was good but i would have liked to hear it properly’. Seeing as DVDs have dropped so much in price now it works out far cheaper to buy it on release than paying £15 for two people to go and watch at the cinema. Other films I’ve seen at Odean in mono were The Departed, Matrix Reloaded. Kingdom of Heaven and Troy. There’s no wonder audience attendance at the cinema is dropping if this is the best viewing quality Odean can offer, the cinema was almost completely empty at 9.30pm on a friday evening I wonder why?

I’ve complained to the management there in the past and granted have received free tickets to see another film, but that doesnt really make up for losing that initial impression you get of a film when you first watch it. Time to find an alternative venue now, or just wait for films to come out on DVD.

I’ve gone into a non creative mode over the Christmas break, partly due to a busy schedule, partly due to being ill with the yearly winter flu and not feeling like expending the brain energy required to be creative. My non productive modes tend to result in lots of web surfing and a non intellectual frame of mind lends to picture gazing, in particular at the delights of artwork uploaded to the amazingly varied deviantart.com. DeviantART is a community similar to Flickr but with a much larger focus on artwork rather than photography. Here are a few beautiful samples I found today…

On the Grass by lastscionz

Train Station by hideyoshi

Dark City by Audic

The nice thing about the DeviantART site is that it allows the artists who create the work to also sell prints through the site, a feature sorely lacking in Flickr. I’ve often thought that Flickr and DeviantART should also provide a means to allow people scouting for images to put in money offers for the images commercial use, the reduced barrier to making an offer then might help prevent a lot of the unpermissioned image use that occurs. I myself recently had an image from Flickr used in a Hong Kong newspaper without my permission, I only found out due to a local HK reader spotting it and sending me a message.

Another site i frequently visit just to browse around and admire those more talented than myself is conceptArt.org. This community is the hangout of a lot of the game industries concept artists who do a good job of doling out sound advice to budding and professional artists alike, there are a lot of ‘in the works’ portfolios on display of fantastic quality. This would certainly be one of my first ports of call when hiring any concept artists for game development.

DieselPunk Car by PanzerCobra

And last but not least is a more recent discovery (for me at least the Solar Voyager site, which houses an artist community focused on producing some amazing Eve’esque space art.

Orbit by Gary Tonge

There is a very little known feature of Second Life to do with showing video in world, this is the ability to show different videos to individual avatars on the same land parcel. I’ve mentioned this to a quite a few people now and all have been in disbelief, even some of the Lindens seem to be unaware of this feature.

The method to do this however is not a hack and has in fact been documented in the LSL API for as long as I know.

The method in question can be discovered by looking at the documentation for llParcelMediaCommandList if you have a close look at the parameters there is one called

PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT

the description for which is “Applies the media command to the specified agent only.”

So lets look at a quick simple example.

We need a screen that can listen for urls over chat and then set the url for the person speaking. ( The screen must be owned by someone who has media permission on the land )

The script for the screen is …

integer listen_handle;

default
{
state_entry()
{
listen_handle = llListen(10, “”, “”, “”);
}

touch_start(integer total_number)
{
llSay(0, “talk on channel 10 to set your personal video for this land”);
}

listen( integer channel, string name, key id, string message )
{
llSay(0, “Setting Video play back to ” + message);
llParcelMediaCommandList( [
PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_URL, message,
PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT, id,
PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_TEXTURE, (key) llGetTexture(0) ] );
}

}

Here’s a quick side by side screenshot of two AVs watching a different movie at the same time on the same parcel of land.

Extra points for guessing what movie trailers they are watching

Lots of interesting news coming out of the Virtual Worlds 2007 San Jose conference…

First up it’s the announcement of a joint partnership between IBM and Linden Labs to work on VW interoperability standards and technology. The official press release can be found here.

“As the 3D Internet becomes more integrated with the current Web, we see users demanding more from these environments and desiring virtual worlds that are fit for business,” said Colin Parris, vice president, Digital Convergence, IBM. “IBM and Linden Lab’s working together can help accelerate the use and further development of common standards and tools that will contribute to this new environment.”

The second piece of news that caught my attention was the upcoming release of a custom SecondLife client from The Electric Sheep Company. Who have tied in the release of their viewer to a cross-platform initiative around CSI: New York.

Usability of the current SL client has long been an issue and is one of the factors blamed by many for the high attrition rate of new users to SL.

The SL client has actually been open sourced for a number of months now, so it might be surprising to some that the release of an alternative or modified client has taken so long. However when more closely examined the reason is fairly simple, the open source client base has been a moving target for the OS development community with Linden making changes to the underlying network protocol used. This has now changed and the protocol template is now static, hopefully allowing alternate client developments to proceed with more confidence. Thats not to say the OS community haven’t made some fantastic contributions to the client, mainly in the areas of bug fixing and stability.

Now that the SL protocols are more stable and OS efforts such as the client, libsl and opensim are gathering momentum we’ll start to see some real progress towards a more cohesive story for VWs. The main thing now is to try and reduce the barriers to entry, and that means easy installs, better UIs and better integration with web browsers; so who’s going to be first to create a VW client running in a browser plugin ? Metaplace seem to be taking up that mantle currently.

I just received this email from one of the two OpenID providers I signed up with

This is a notice that [XXXXXX] will be having a maintenance
outage starting at 08:00 on 2007/09/12, Pacific Time.
The outage may last as long as 60 minutes, but is expected
to be considerably shorter.

The reason for this outage is:

     Database upgrade

During the outage, the [XXXXXX]website may be unavailable or
unresponsive, and users will be unable log into OpenID-enabled
websites using their [XXXXXX]accounts.  The latest information about
this and other [XXXXXX]vents can always be found on....

I know it’s early days on the OpenID front, but this does illustrate a prime limitation that has to be addressed carefully. If a large percentage of sites adopted the OpenID scheme without an alternative means of authentication then a few well placed DDOS attacks on registrars could essentially block out access to thosuands of sites.

Proceed with caution and make sure you allow users to login to your site with a secret stored locally if you’re implementing OpenID.

Just back from a lovely trip to the Dordogne region of France, more castles than you can shake a stick at out here. Weather was for the most part gorgeous Sun, with one or two cloudy/misty day exceptions

The shot above is of Chateau de Beynac which perches high on a hill overlooking the Dordoigne river and is often shrowded in mist which rises from the surrounding forest.

John Tolva let out a quick request the other week on twitter for a Flickr photostream timeline, it sounded like a quick hack was possible using Simile and the Flickr API; both of which I wanted to have a play with for investigative purposes. It turned out to be nice and straightforward, the Simile API from MIT is flexible and simple to use, so much so that I should really spend a bit more tweaking my Flickr timeline to make it look prettier, but hey this is just a quickie