Recently I was reminded that Second Life …

Recently I was reminded that Second Life is still the best first experience for any teen or adult coming to virtual worlds for the first time. It came after speaking with new virtual worlders who came to OpenSim before Second Life. From their description I realized OpenSim is still far from being suitable for anyone’s first virtual world experience, unless of course that person is too young to participate in Second Life.

As long as it remains free, Second Life, even with its steep learning curve, offers more return on a beginner’s time and learning investment. Both offer about the same in terms of creativity. But Second Life offers more potential for most to make that essential connection with a real life community or interest that will hold their interest. Second Life is the yard-stick against which everything else is measured. Anyone becoming involved with virtual worlds must understand and participate in Second Life and so might as well start there.

Combine these realities with a personal goal to help the most people get the most out of their first virtual world experience and a recent influx of newcomers to SL, from work and elsewhere, as well as word of Nebraska and Linden Lab’s renewed efforts to connect with and help beginners and you will understand my decision to redirect my limited free and volunteer time from OpenSim to Second Life initiatives, more to VUC greeting, mentoring, community building, and development. Introduce Second Life first then OpenSim later for those who are ready for it.

OpenSim remains my favorite way to preview content from my desktop and participating with my kids, but Second Life has already given me years of creative outlet, real friendship, and community involvement any OpenSim could not match for some time to come, perhaps in the next few years, but even then SL will remain the best experience for any beginner provided it is a guided entry, which happens to be the focus of the renewed VUC Greeters effort.

Erica Driver posted a very positive, ind …

Erica Driver posted a very positive, independent, and interesting response about IBM’s integration of OpenSim into the Lotus product.

It has been fun working in the small way I can outside of main job priorities on these projects. I have struggled isolating the best way to contribute more than just conference room chairs, animations and various gadgets. My first planned contribution in 2009 is MoPose 5.0 with full support for OpenSim and Second Life. That will provide the basis of other work creating animations for business furniture and builds.

I was also very pleased to get an AO working on ReactionGrid and will build that into business AOs with animation as well.

I already have many of the animations necessary for gestures, a big part of participation in a business context for hand raising, hand shaking and the like. I will focus on this in the first quarter of 2009 over other work to build out prim hair, skins and other clothing, which has always been something on my TODO list for our internal IBM grid as well.

Completed MoPose 5.0 design and project …

Completed MoPose 5.0 design and project plan. Has already helped organized order of feature development and code branching at appropriate points. Here is a class diagram of the scripts, which might still undergo some consolidation and a feature breakdown, which has kept me sane and helped consolidate all the feature requests and ideas over the last year. But keeping each script as focused as possible is part of the plan. Perhaps the best thing so far to come out of going through this road map design step was realizing there are really three core scripts: Pose, MultiPose, and SequPose. I really think this is going to keep the most folks happy and enable the most use on OpenSim as well as Second Life. When complete, this suite of scripts should be available to all for free (BSD) and hopefully displace the pose/animation development kits running for as much as 14k Linden in Second Life. Pose and animation is such a basic, essential requirement for any immersive virtual world experience, this stuff should really be available to all.

More later on that, but after almost all my free time during Christmas vacation working on this, I think I get a few programming blocks, but my other skills have sure suffered for lack of practice this last month.

While cleaning out my office I find my m …

While cleaning out my office I find my mission statement, heh. Good reminder.

To show charity in all forms to all creatures;
To love and sustain my wife and children;
To find and apply truth where ever found;
To enjoy and honor the Earth and be happy in it.

Here’s to a great 2009.

Trying a new approach to personal manage …

Warning: Mostly boring personal management stuff ahead. For the more polished stuff stick with http://imohax.com.

Trying a new approach to personal management of core skills. If you don’t teach yourself ain’t nobody gonna teach you. This blog is very much a personal log above everything else, but no reason not to share. I twitter almost everything so no harm done. Don’t worry, nothing company confidential will get blogged here, just the type of work done. Goal of this blog is to

• Prove to myself that I actually am getting stuff done, even on those days it does not feel like it
• Keep me focused on core skills
• Track where time is going for regular review and assessment
• Identify skills gaps based on work that does not fall into tagged group
• Give a level of transparency to those interested in working with me
• Help in project acceptance decisions
• Serve as curriculum vitae base material later
• Provide opportunity to add comments and follow up notes later about lessons learned, etc.

Core Skills, Languages, Tools

Here are the core skills to bring to level five and maintain in order of personal priority. Most all involve the OS or SL viewer, other related tools listed:

• Programming (LSL, Mono, Ruby, Python, Shell, Java, Perl, C++)
• Animation (Poser, Blender)
• Skinning (Photoshop, Poser, Blender)
• Modeling (Blender, 3dsMax)
• Texturing (Photoshop, Blender, Max)
• Terraforming (Photoshop)
• Admin (OS, Ubuntu, Shell, Ruby, Python, REST)
• Bot (libsl, libml)
• Hosting, DJ (New Media, Streaming)
• Exploring, Events
• Mentoring (Video Tutorials, Office Hours)
• Contributing (Code, Content, Blog/Wiki Updates)

Core languages to keep fluent:

• LSL
• Mono
• Python
• Ruby
• Java
• Perl
• C++

Core toolset:

• Second Life
• OpenSim
• Photoshop
• Blender
• Poser

Tags to Match

I think I will use a strict set of tags on this blog to be able to quickly see if I am weak in a focus area just by the number of blog posts for a given tag. Those tags with two parts are actually just subcategories of the first:

• secondlife
• opensim
• programming lsl mono dotnet ruby python shell xml html rest mysql db2 postgresql cplusplus
• animation poser blender
• skinning clothing photoshop poser blender avpainter
• 3dmodeling blender 3dsmax
• texturing photoshop blender 3dsmax uvmapping bumpmapping imagemapping
• terraforming photoshop
• administering opensim secondlife ubuntu linux aix windows
• bots libsl secondlife opensim
• hosting events dj music video presentations conferences
• mentoring tutorials video officehours
• exploring locations
• contributing

And how about a few tags for posts like this one:

• personal assessments goals skills lessonslearned
• learning (goes with any others when not actually working on it)

Four Hour Time Blocks

Going to try and time blocking roughly into four hour blocks tagged as above to represent completion. Even if not all sequential, hoping that not having any post to this particular blog that does not roughly represent four hours of focus will help map out areas that need focus in the tag cloud, etc.