2008 August | Torley Lives

Torley Lives

I amplify your awesome.

2008-08-27
Communication mmmm followup!

Push it to the limit awwww yeah! Time to go for a ride…

Like I promised earlier, more details on what's been happening with my communications at Linden Lab, specifically concerning Resident aka Community Enlightenment and Video Tutorials.

Robin Linden posted "Linden Lab Blog Changes to Give Residents More Choices", and Katt's been pointing people that way too. Read it, and particularly give your attention to this:

The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.

Cool yes?

When that happens, I'll be one of the "topic experts". I won't necessarily be following up in the forums (keep reading). As we've seen in the "How to report abuse" with GTeam video, I'll be collaborating with fellow domain gurus to bring you useful + fun knowledge in a way I earnestly hope is more focused and frequent than what we've had before. Tentatively, this includes laser-beaming with our Documentation Team.

Mini-self-constructed-FAQ follows, ask me in the comments for further followup…

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Here is flooded

Here is flooded

In other news today, Here island in the wonderful world of Second Life was flooded, landmasses swept into the pixelsea and a floating island detaching itself from a craggy peak to rest in the air, defiantly thumbing gravity.

8-bit ultrastar Megaman and voice of Unicron, Orson Welles, were spotted on-scene, getting habituated to their new surroundings.

Glimpses of a feminine form with a chibi cat head and oversized ribbon could be spotted. Eyewitnesses noticed she traipsed with an orbular stick in hand, calling forth enhancements and suggesting she might be (partially) responsible.

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Throwing a Disqus

Earlier, I was trying the Disqus commenting service but it played badly with my blog: it didn't match the CSS and it also spewed out duplicate comments.

To their credit, Disqus was extremely fast in replying to my help email — thanks guys! — and I did a reset on the dupes and uninstalled Disqus for the time being. That cleared up most of it.

However, there's now bizarre wonkiness in my land o' blog, including wrong comment counts on some (but not all) posts — workaround for that appears to simply make a new comment.

There may be other residual oddities and I'll have a closer look later. In the meantime, pardon for the rift in time and space…

Photosynth + Second Life yields beautiful but awkward results

I was impressed by the earlier Photosynth demos, which showed how 100s, even 1,000s of 2D pictures could be mapped for 3D navigation, with the process of doing so resembling wandering through an electronic dream: shards of imagery appearing all around, points of light denoting matches between pictures.

After Chaos Mohr let me know about his experiment following Photosynth's public unveiling, I gave it a go for myself with the same pictures used for the Here panorama. Alas, results are mixed: as you can see from the grid view above, it didn't recognize 15 images out of a set of 50, and thus, only 35 are part of a cohesive, 3D set. That's awkward and annoying, considering my panoramic software stitched those together just fine.

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