Tag Archive for 'Second Life'

Schome Park the Third

(Note: This post is slightly premature, because the third phase of the project hasn’t actually ended yet – it still has another month to run. However, I don’t feel this is likely to make much difference. WordPress screwed up and wiped the second half of the post, forcing me to rewrite it. Also, it’s rather dull, as is everything I write.) 

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.

Continue reading ‘Schome Park the Third’

AjaxLife Development Progress

Coming soon, among other things:

Other changes so far include significantly improved behaviour of those text boxes on the map (they now reflect what the map thinks you want), marking of the map beacon on the minimap (as a red mark), and assorted refactoring. Wee!

Coming once I’m done adding stuffs. :P

JSON API Tweaked + example data

I’ve altered the SL Search API to always return the “url” field, and also replaced the “uuid” field for events (which returned incorrect data) with an “id” field that correctly marks the ID.

All current bugs in regards to returning blank or null fields have been fixed. In addition, I have added to the URLs for the search (actually it did this before, but I forgot to document it)

It can now accept the following format:

http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/search/(main|teen|mature)[/(all|classifieds|events|groups|people|places|wiki)]/search+term[/page-number]

The new parameter is in bold, and is entirely optional. It sets the category through which to search. Some example URLs:

http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/search/teen/test+search – A search for “test search” on the TG
http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/search/teen/groups/Group – A search for “Group” in all TG groups
http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/search/teen/places/Land/2 – Page 2 (results 11-20) of a search for “Land” in all TG places
http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/search/main/test+search – A search for “test search” on the MG
http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/search/mature/test+search – A search for “test search” on the MG, with mature results enabled.

Click here for examples of each type

JSON SL Search API

I’ve made a JSON-based interface to the new SL search, which provides access to all data available (I think).

All the methods have the base URL http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/.

Firstly, the search itself. This provides acccess to either MG or TG search, and provides information about all results on the page. It also supports specifying a page.

The format is as follows:

http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/search/(teen|main|mature)/search+string[/page-number]

The /page-number must be an integer, and is optional. If you use “teen” you get TG results, “main” gives MG results, and “mature” gives MG results with mature enabled. The output, assuming you know what JSON is, is fairly self-explanatory.

Additionally, you can access a bunch of other data:

http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/classified/required-uuid

http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/place/required-uuid

http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/resident/required-uuid

http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/region/required-uuid

http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/event/eventid

http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/group/required-uuid

Excluding events, all of the above expect a UUID in place of “required-uuid”. They can take both hyphenated and unhyphenated UUIDs. Events expect an Event ID, which are currently seven digit integers.

It can also pick out up to the top 100 popular places (I could do more – up to 50,000 – but capped it at 100 to save my server from certain death). The format for this is as follows:

http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/popular/(main|teen)/count

Using “main” gets MG data, “teen” gets TG data. “count” specifies the number of results to be returned.

Finally, as a bonus feature, if you have a key and have no idea what it’s for, put it in like this:

http://services.katharineberry.co.uk/search/unknown-uuid

This will make it search through the classifieds, parcels, residents, regions, events, groups, and textures. If it’s any of the above (except textures) it’ll return the same output as the standard services, with the added property “uuidtype” being set to one of the above. If it was a texture you only get the uuidtype. Please note that this takes several seconds to run, and is a relatively heavy job for my server.

I hope someone finds some use for this. Personally, I plan to use it in AjaxLife.

AjaxLife search

I am aware that Linden Lab have released the new search officially. As such, I will be looking into what I can do about integrating it nicely onto AjaxLife over the weekend.

I suspect my solution will involve PHP, regular expressions, and JavaScript. Although I may make this part of the executable, in order to assist those who would be trying to run AjaxLife themselves (if any are).

Edited to fix myriad typos caused by my posting this from my phone while lying in bed.

New Search and WindLight

Well, on the one hand search and WindLight, yay!

On the other, it doesn’t like me. :(

SL Search

P.S. The AjaxLife server (as in the machine) is down. Working on it.

Linden Lab acknowledge the Teen Grid

They’ve decided to hold a Town Hall on Tuesday (at 4pm PST – is this chosen specifically so everybody’s either at school or sleeping? *sigh*), and re-enabled PayPal signup. Well, if you’re in a specific subset of users, I guess. Why don’t they like me? :(

PayPal attempt
The message is even self-contradictory and false (no email was sent). And what’s “PalPal”?

Bonus points if they announce it on their blog. Even more if it actually works for me. It’d be nice if the Town Hall wasn’t at midnight too, but that’s just timezones for you.

One down, a whole load to go. Keep trying! ;)

UPDATE: The email eventually arrived, albeit very delayed. It turns out the failure message was wrong, because it actually had succeeded. Right… Anyway, yay! Now I shall instead complain that, although we still have the old (from at least 2005) Orientation Island, we get the new HUD. This is totally confusing. Two points for LL, however. They just need to fix their lying error messages.

Image2Prim success



Image on the map!, originally uploaded by Katharine Berry.

My Image2Prim experiments worked. Woo!