Featured this on the cover (well, minus an H):

And this inside:

We could model the compounds in chocolate,
Trace the genomes in any bouquet,
Or offer a market assessment
Of the future of Valentine’s day

We could fill both your ears with the music of spheres,
And we would, if it helped us to say
That we love MIT with a passion
And we hope that you’ll join us some day.

Congratulations and welcome to MIT!

Is this typical in the US? Seems kinda odd. I liked it though! I’ve never received any Valentine’s anythings, even if identical ones were sent to a couple thousand other people. It was signed though.

There will, of course, now be at least two hits for this on Google…

I have spent the last day and a half or so working on a new website, http://megaprim.sl. It is a megaprim search engine – essentially, enter the required size and it’ll show you the best matches and send you one of your choice. It also does a couple of neat things like allowing greater/less than searches, skipping axes, and searching various permutations that might match better than those you actually entered. Additionally, for more for show than anything else, it renders previews of all the prims. Because it can.

Example search: Any prim with one side of 100m (when would that be useful? No idea!)

Hopefully someone will find this vaguely useful. Comments would be appreciated!

You can use Twitterbot by visiting its Plurk profile and adding it as a friend (not by being its fan). Within a couple of minutes it will request your Twitter name and password. Once these are provided, it will poll your Twitter account periodically for tweets to plurk.

You can shut it off by de-friending it, which will cause it to destroy all data it holds on you within a couple of minutes.

If you wish to use this, however, a few words of advice:

• You will, for all intents and purposes, be following everyone you follow on Twitter on Plurk. If you have thousands (or even a few hundred) of people you follow, you may find it difficult/impossible to keep your Plurk timeline reasonable. Twitterbot is not very helpful in this case.
• Capacity is limited. No idea how limited, but it’s limited, and further access will be forbidden once the limit is reached until it can be raised.
• There is a delay of up to two minutes before it notices you sending a plurk or friend request, and up to five minutes between receiving new tweets from Twitter.

Be productive adds a new entry to the top toolbar, which when clicked can block you from Plurk for any number of minutes. Any attempt to use it will result in a block screen until the time elapses. It also disables my Plurk notification script. The script’s a little ugly, by the way.

Force Qualifier Language forces all qualifiers to be in the same language as the rest of your profile, including those set to be something different for whatever reason (e.g. from someone who uses the Thai interface they’ll be in Thai, even if the message is not). Note that it has no effect on the pages for individual plurks, only on the timeline.

Both of these call on or alter various internal Plurk JavaScript functions (as do my other scripts). These scripts work with both GreaseKit and Greasemonkey

Hello, potentially non-existent readers! This blog shall briefly show signs of life!

On the topic, I have created three userscripts for use with Plurk. Two will work with Greasemonkey and GreaseKit, whilst one will only work in a Fluid SSB.

Collapsible Dashboard

This script will collapse Plurk’s dashboard to save space, and will additionally remove the footer links. The dashboard can be expanded by clicking “? Expand dashboard”, and collapsed again by clicking “? Collapse dashboard”. It’s useful on screens that aren’t very tall. The collapsed dashboard will still respect the CSS style of the dashboard in question.

You may find this script here.

Reply blocker

This script adds another entry to the menu you get when you click the arrow by someone’s name, labelled “Block from replies.” Clicking this button will result in replies from the plurker in question being hidden. This functionality is, for some reason, not provided by Plurk.

To unblock a user, click the “Block from replies” button again (it currently reads “Block” and not “Unblock” even if they’re already blocked). Note you’ll have to use a plurk from them to do so – e.g. on their timeline, or on your timeline if you follow them.

The list of people to block is kept in a cookie, and thus is not shared across computers. Also note that, although any replies by these people will not be visible to you, they will still count as unread (there’s no good way to determine who made a reply until it’s loaded, so this is unfixable).

As a final warning, this script alters the Plurks.renderPlurk function. This shouldn’t be a problem, but if your timeline suddenly starts coming up blank, try removing this script.

You can find this script here.

Plurk Notifier (Fluid only)

This script, which is for Fluid only, will add a badge to your dock showing the number of unread and new plurks. Additionally, a growl notification will be given whenever there is a new plurk indicating the content of the plurk. Screenshots:

Growl notifications:

This one alters the Poll.showUpdates function, so in the unlikely event that the notifications in the bottom left stop showing, this may well be to blame.

You may find this script here.

All of the above are used at your own risk and so on. The latter two have some comments at the end noting what the Plurk functions used are for.

Oh yes, and I’m Katharine on Plurk, but I tend to reject friend requests from people I’ve never heard of.

See there for AjaxLife development and stuff.

Here’s the new feature list:

• Group list in the IM window
• Group IMs work correctly – including joining, leaving, starting and conversing.
• The position of the map beacon is shown on the minimap if applicable
• You can now change inventory item permissions and descriptions via their properties (right click on the item and pick “Properties” from the menu.)

Additionally, the following was fixed without fanfare in a minor patch to 0.3.1:

• Issue 10: No Way to Scroll Down Friends List.

So, after leaving, returning, leaving, returning, leaving, and returning to/from this project, it seems that it has finally decided to die. By which I mean that all attempts to obtain funding have failed, they’re running out, and they can’t afford staff. I can’t say I’m going to miss it much. In all honesty, the project didn’t die because of a lack of funding – instead, it died due to the lack (or, more accurately, the ignorance) of a coherent vision. This is a problem for a project with the stated intent of trying to work out how to make an idea work – so far, all it has to show for it is that it doesn’t, mostly because the management over-compromise to make their vision fit in.

The third phase of the project was, apparently, formed with the purpose of discovering what happens when you add school to the mix – a mix with the slogan “not school – not home – schome.” You basically get school. In fact, that’s exactly what you get. Complete with deadlines, grades, pressure from teachers, and rushed homeworks.

The example that shall be used for the purposes of this post, simply for being the worst, is one “Noel” (real name unknown) – who apparently teaches technology at an arts school in LA. Unfortunately, it appears that she is incapable of teaching anything beyond technology – where technology appears to mean “how to browse the internet and use Second Life.” As such, her use of the resources of the Schome Park Project was for the sole purpose of teaching this. Unfortunately, the way in which she went about doing this completely missed the point. The only time Noel has shown interest in the “schome ethos,” as she calls it, was when defending herself. During this defence, she picked two phrases from it, and thus decided she had the right to do whatever he wanted, and that nobody else should have a say. Furthermore, the grades his students are worrying about have nothing to do with the “Knowledge/Information Age skills” (and both of those names suck, by the way) – they’re based on, according to Noel’s students, the quality of the buildings – and anything else is worth exactly zero. Okay, that’s all very well. Please go to the Second Life class run by Linden Lab. Come back when you have some interest in what goes on here. In another example from Noel, shortly after she joined, she set her students a homework in which they had to answer some questions. One of them asked the rest of us – which is perfectly acceptable. However, Noel objected that he hadn’t learnt how to use the wiki to find answers – in fact, given how hard it is to navigate the wiki, I’m unclear on how this is really a major failing. What Noel didn’t seem to realise that the rest did, is that asking for help was perfectly acceptable (and, indeed, is encouraged) – and he shouldn’t have set the homework in the first place. Evidently, he still hasn’t realised this.

However, Peter (who runs the project, and is responsible for its general existence) is very insistent that it’s okay. Phase 3 was, in fact, designed to, err, “discover the tensions” caused by having schools involved in something with is very explicitly not school. Or, as I would interpret it, phase 3 was designed to fail miserably, and the aim was to discover just how miserably. My answer, as given in assorted forum posts, was “catastrophically” – the only benefit from the addition of the schools was an increase in the number of people involved (which doesn’t require schools, just an easier-to-initiate signup process that doesn’t require you to write two essays read by several hundred people before they’ll even notice you wanting to take a look.) In return for this increase, the community paid the price of some of its freedom – which I don’t think was worthwhile. There are better ways (for proof, consider that nobody in the first two phases was signed up as part of a school class.)

Apart from the mess that was Noel, however, the project is slowly attempting to get things in order. There are now attempts to get something done. This attempts have, thus far, had a tendency to fail miserably, but something things do happen. For instance, the “My Schome” newsletter (was that the name?) was due to be published a while back. Due to lack of interest, it was pushed back. Once there were finally some actual articles, it appears to have been postponed indefinitely for no particular reason. This is not the only time that has happened. However, these failures are of limited consequence to the rest of the community. Whilst a project dying due to disinterest affects the person who was trying to run it, the rest of the community is unlikely to really care, or even notice the project’s demise – after all, if they were uninterested while it was alive, there’s no reason for them to care hugely after it’s fizzled out.

On the other hand, the old “strand” system has been partially revived – and where the strands have actually been run, they have been highly successful. For example, the “Time Explorers” (who look at archeology and history) have had multiple sessions, which have been attended, and evidently productive. This is in contrast to Noel’s approach of invalidating any work which was performed by the community as a whole. Right. So much for the “schome ethos” then. What’s more, in these History and Archeology sessions, the learning has been twofold – both about history and such, and also the leadership/discussion skills. This, I believe, is the idea of being in Schome Park. Not, as some people (like, say, Noel) believe, for the purpose of learning how to use Second Life. “Knowledge Age” skills come into play here in some way – as far as I am aware, “Ability to construct buildings in Second Life” is not one, whilst “ability to lead, discuss, etc.” is.

From the above, it appears that the major problems in Schome Park are all caused by bad decisions on the part of the staff. I believe there are two reasons for this: firstly, the majority of the staff rarely actually participate in Schome Park itself – which results in an interesting disconnect between what is believed to be going on and what is actually going on. This appears to be because they have noticed that, although they’ve spent a huge amount of time gathering data, they have yet to actually write any papers about Schome Park, and are thus appearing to be lazy and unproductive. So they’ve gone off to be productive. The second reason is that because Schome Park is a research project, and we’re all guinea pigs who have been made to feel otherwise, there will be frequent decisions that are not in our interests, but are made due to the need to “see what happens” – which, in some cases, means “see just how badly things go wrong,” in cases where the member of staff responsible for the decision (that is, Peter) already knew that it was a bad idea.

So, as it stands, Schome Park’s funding has almost dried up. This is, at least partly, because it stands in an interesting position whereby it’s both an educational and research project, and thus manages to exclude itself from those funding either one (but not both) of those categories. This is largely insoluble, given the Schome Park Project’s given aims.

As such, my solution is as follows:

1. Kick out all the school teachers (but leave the pupils)
2. Cease to be part of the OU
3. Provide clear and easy joining instructions on the schome.ac.uk page.
4. Less paranoia – I can fake the information and verification you demand so easily it’s not worth it to ask in the first place.
5. Fully community-oriented moderation, with the only activity of, say, one or two staff members being to help resolve disputes that are too serious or too complex to be resolved by the community.

By doing this, you can keep schome as what it is, whilst helping to drastically expand the community. Of course, having done this, the project will have lost the ability to send letters to schools requesting they get their pupils to join – but, on the other hand, they tried this, and it didn’t really work anyway.

Oh, and one last point: They had me make some stuff for them and then decided to replace it with inferior other stuffs because they couldn’t be bothered to come up with a solution that worked. This irritates me.

You have reached the end of the ramble. Well done!

Going to add the ability to start your own group IMs tomorrow (hopefully), among other things.