Having written a , for me, quite deep expression of my experience with the Regina Specktor album pre-release by Warner it has been great to see all the coverage and postive bloggage about Ethan Kaplan ‘blackrim glasses’ at gnomedex. He is a person who ‘gets it’. The people writing about him ‘get it’ such as Eric Rice and the people I meet in Second Life and related places all seem to have the same approach and same ideas. Not identical, but birds of a feather. It is important, as Eric writes, that we still work with the rest of the world. No technology or social change just happens overnight. I think that they guys and I here in Hursley have both a creative and future looking point of view, but mix that with practical uses. So it feels like the Metaverse is the place to express this and make a serious and innovative contribution.
Category Archives: Life
Amazonians push the envelope
3pointD are reporting on the recent news from Supernova 2006 about pioneering ‘Amazonians’. Some Second Life users, who also happen to be Amazon employees, are exploring the potential of “a bridge between Amazon Web services and Second Life so you can go into Second Life and actually try things on there and buy them”. Interesting news indeed.
I have been wondering for a while which existing major online brand will be the first to make the move from e-business to v-business. American Apparel recently announced its virtual store, but if the Amazonians can get their company’s support might Amazon be the first company to really start the blur the boundaries between the real, the online and the virtual marketplace?
The fact that it’s “not being done under the auspices of the company” is not necessarily a bad sign either. The need for early-adopter employees to try some things out before their employer really ‘gets’ something (or can feels it can support it) is something most bleeding edge types can probably relate to.
A tool for browsing and choosing items to be sent to your home in meatspace would be the next baby step for online shopping. At its most basic, using a virtual world to act as a store and shopping cart for existing real life goods will be a refreshing change from current online shopping models, and provides some pretty interesting possibilities for a richer user experience too. In the same way that some booksellers already offer a PDF download while the dead tree is in the post, I wonder how long before Cafepress (or one of their competitors) offers avatarwear as an option for its user-designed products. Here’s my design. I need that on a T-shirt, a cap, oh and something off-the-shoulder for my avatar while I’m waiting.
Gradually, the metaverse matures.
My latest Second Life toy – a Last.fm player
I’ve been a fan of Last.fm for a while, and a really big fan ever since I noticed that Matt Biddulph, while he still worked at the BBC, pulled a very nice hack to update his ‘sekrit’ user every time Radio 6 plays a song.
Anyone following Eightbar in the last few months can’t have failed to notice that we’re getting pretty interested in virtual worlds and the metaverse. Second Life is not the only virtual world out there, but it’s a popular one. Since it makes it fairly easy to build things, and now lets you make HTTP requests from within scripted objects, it’s a pretty handy environment for knocking up 3D artifacts which render web data in slightly more interesting ways than, say, the average RSS reader.
In between enjoying Second Life’s third birthday celebrations, I created this ugly beast. My Last.fm feed watcher (despite its similarity to a squashed fly – those are supposed to remind you of speakers rather then eyes) displays the title and artist of the last song I listened to. Eventually it might provide a more complete interface to show more information about my listening habits, but for now I’m happy to keep it simple.
ThinkPad tilting revisited
Back in March we started talking about some hacks which demonstrate the coolness that can be achieved using the accelerometer inside the ThinkPad (the ‘Active Protection System’).
Thanks to Steve Farrell for pointing me at something which Mark Smith (of IBM’s research center in Almaden) has been working on; a modified version of SDL (the Simple DirectMedia Library) which supports the ThinkPad accelerometer in any game (on Windows or Linux) which uses the SDL to provide input. Using Mark’s modified library means you can tilt your way to a high score on all these games and more.
Ever wanted to work at Hursley?
If you’ve been following our adventures here on eightbar for a while and have always wondered what it’s really like to work at IBM Hursley, now may be your chance to find out. Hursley is hiring. Current job openings in research and development include…
- Message Broker testing and development
- Java developers and C/C++ developers for Application Integration Middleware
- SOA Information Developer for a service registry product
- WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus tester
The above list is not exhaustive; several more openings are listed at the Jobs at IBM Career Center too.
Chain of events, links and circumstances. Regina Spektor in SL
OK, Regina Spektor has, with Warner Brothers previewed her album in Second Life. (She also uses Myspace for such things). Now, I had not actually come to this a fan. Not becauase its not very good, but just because I had not heard her work. Bear that in mind as I gush forth with a tale of serendipity.
So being into all things SL I had noticed some blog entries about the upcoming album in SL event from a major artist, it was on my list of things to do but I had not until tonight been. It only happened a few days ago BTW!
Chain of events….. My Flickr RSS feed for the second life pool had some pictures from Pathfinder Linden (who is Community manager/Rep for Linden Labs). So I saw the photos, clicked on the tiny url which led me to the SLURL. This sparked up my second life client and ported me straight to the location. A small New York style loft apartment. A really nice build by Aimee Weber. Taking up a suprisingly small amount of real estate.
A reel to reel was playing very high quality music that instantly caught my attention.
So I am sitting in a loft apartment in New York, which is effectively a 3D album cover listening to an album preview.
That would have been enough, yet somehow the words of the song playing were so spooky that it is untrue. Song 4 – “On the radio”. The lyric being something like “On the radio we heard November Rain, that solo is really long but is sounds pretty nice. We listened to it twice, cos the DJ was asleep”
November rain (Guns and roses) is my Wife and I’s “song” we had it played for the first dance at our wedding. She is away this weekend doing a charity walk so the whole thing brought a lump to my throat. Soppy I know.
Anyway, Advertising works but not always on me, but if we could bottle these sort of connections and make it seem like fate or somehow personal. Well……?
So I will be buying the album, just I am not sure. Do I download it for my iPod, order the CD on Amazon, Walk around town and enjoy the experience of shopping for it?
BTW I just noticed that the album on the table in the apartment is clickable, it opens up the album sleeve, click once more and it flips it to show the lyrics. Beautiful.
One thousand paintings
I recently discovered One thousand paintings, a project with the aim of selling 1000 paintings of the numbers 1 to 1000. The pricing model is quite interesting:
Generally, the value of a number is defined by the number itself, in the following way: value = 1000 – number. However, this is only the maximum price. Initially, a discount of 90% applies. This discount will decrease by an absolute 10% for every hundred paintings that are sold (for example, after 300 sold paintings, the discount will be 60%)
I thought the whole thing was quite cool. Having showed it to my wife (who is herself an artist), we quickly started looking for numbers that were still available. Many of the likely choices had already gone (including my preference, 404) but she pointed out that 365 was still up for grabs (yes, yes.. we should have got 366 as well, for leap years). Before long, we’d ordered it, happy to support a cool project and wondering where we’d hang our unique 12″ x 12″ painting.
It doesn’t seem so long ago that the Million Dollar Homepage was taking off. Ian, while wondering whether gullibility was a pre-requisite for early adopter status, bought an ad for eightbar, which I notice still manages to bring us in over 30 clicks per month. While these are undeniably different projects, it’s hard not to compare them.
When Mrs Roo and I bought 365, it was the 98th painting sold (handily just within the maximum discount). Today, having been linked from boing boing and other prominent blogs, he’s already sold 144 225 and rising very fast. Surely mainstream media attention can’t be far behind.
Tilting at ThinkPads
The ThinkPad range of laptops is famous for being droppable, partly because they seem to be able to withstand frightening events. Many IBMers have stories of a friend who dropped, or drove over a ThinkPad. One or two even claim to have survived theirs being oven baked. Ever since the T42, many ThinkPads have been equipped with the Active Protection System, which “can detect sudden changes in motion and temporarily stop the hard drive”. A nice feature, and one that was crying out to be re-purposed for something a little more… well… fun.
When I heard that a colleague had already worked out how to get the values out of the on-board accelerometers, I knew that it needed a quick front-end to show off the movement. I whisked up something using Ajax techniques to get the readings into Firefox and update some SVG in a very simple web page. The demo, although somewhat basic, certainly shows how intuitive tilting a laptop can feel, and could easily form the basis of a simple game. Thanks to Darren, who filmed me showing it off on Friday, the results are now online.
I’m emerging
For the past couple of years I’ve been working in the Pervasive Messaging Technologies team. This has been a great time for me, for so many reasons. The team is fantastic and my manager (who recently posted here himself) is not only a great boss but also a Master Inventor. What a title! It is refreshing, in a company where you can describe your cupboard as a TSU and most people will know what you’re talking about (and many will not assume you are joking), to work in Pervasive Messaging Technologies – one of the few departments which did not reduce itself to an acronym.
Recently, and very suddenly, I was invited to participate in a twelve month job-swap with Martin Gale from Emerging Technology Services. Despite being insanely happy where I was, it seemed to good an offer to pass up. Having moved in, met new friends and learned more about old friends, posted on the department’s wiki and blog and had a crack at a couple of rather fun demos (which I’ll to post more about one day) I’m now three weeks in. Here are some observations on the move.
- ‘Upstairs’ in Pervasive Messaging, people went for coffee. ‘Downstairs’ in ETS people go for a tea. I assume this is because of the relative proximities of the coffee bar and the Cha Bar. I have finally discovered a taste for tea without sugar.
- The S in ETS stands for Services, and being a services team has meant I get to see more customers in the flesh. This is a good thing by the way. Being close to our customers and personally understanding what they want and need is not only essential but fun. I’m averaging over one customer meeting per week already, and I’ve barely started yet.
- The E and T stand for Emerging Technology. This means we’re interested in new, cutting edge, innovative things. And everyone really is interested in these things. People ‘get it’, where it can be anything from how to make this server perform better to why tagging is more powerful than catagorising and why AJAX, despite being an overused buzzword, is important and useful. Hobbies and work time overlap pleasingly in an environment where today’s part-time project could be part of tomorrow’s customer demo.
So I’m enjoying it. I feel at home. The only worry so far has been this falling clock.
Fortunately Ian and I were safely in the lab at the end of the hall, but the noise of crashing metal and breaking glass was impressive.
– Roo Reynolds (Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)
Update: comments closed due to oddly high levels of spam on this particular post.
Go with the flow
Last night the BBC child of our time programme started. It is about the lives of a set of kids that the BBC are following/stalking throgh their lives from birth. The kids are now 5 or 6 years old. The programme itself is fascinating, especially having a 2 1/2 year old and seeing where things are heading.
However the phrase that struck me was about “Flow”. They were trying to measure the kids various amounts of “Flow”. I had not realized this was a psychologists term, though I am well aware of the principle. Flow is what happens when your mind is challenged by something and you are so engaged in the activity that time passes and you dont want to stop. We all need an activity to get Flow. Hobbies are usually what we consider as a way to get Flow, but for many of us in this sort of techland our jobs also give us Flow. For the programmers/hackers amongst us do you get ‘Flow’ when you are solving a problem, and you just “get in the zone”, “focus”. I find it also happens when I enthuse to customers and collegues
For me the emerging tech stuff, and all things around this business catch my interest and make it less of a job. Obviously video games also have the same effect on me.
I have recently been introduced to an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) called perplexcity thanks Gareth! This game you buy/trade puzzle cards, each card is a simple or very very complex puzzle, it mixes web, with pen and paper and the different styles of puzzle means that different thought styles are needed. My wife and I have realize that this has given us a combined “flow” as (apart from the BBC programme mentioned) we had the telly off and were trying to solve some of our puzzles. You start at 8 pm and before you know it it’s midnight.
So for me go with the flow used to mean not bothering and meandering along, not it means find a challenge and loose yourself in it as that feels great, either work or home.
I am not sure whether the nature of the tech industry attracts a certain type of person with a certain amount of “Flow”. The eclectic mix of technologies and the art of putting it all together, tinkering with settings, producing complex technical architectures all have a fascination for many of us in Hursley.