My Second Life

 The project update Well, the update is that there is no update. The bot has been on vacation for a while... well, ever since I got the issue of the bot attempting to re-enter the same parcel repeatedly after being evicted.  It's not that it's  a hard to fix problem, it's that I didn't really have time to look into it.   That's ok, it will get there when the time is right.  Survey I have sent out a small survey to some people I've encountered in SL. It's a short thing, 20 questions or so. It's free text, so I wouldn't put all the results verbatim anywhere, but I might put a compiled version of the answers, paraphrasing as needed.   I just need to wait for the results to come in. There was no timeline with that, so it could be quick, or it could take a while, or answers might never come.  It's mostly behavioral types of questions.  I'll post the questions when I start getting some answers back.  New look I'm still learning or in some cases

 Scanning progress The scanning has slowed down considerably this week, but for a few good reasons. I still am in the process of rewriting the whole thing as a regular app instead of console, as discussed in the previous blog.  But to speed things up a little in it's current form, I broke down the information gathering in small sections, so that if, for example, we meet someone we have met before, we can scan only for missing info. For example, let's say the avatar on file does not have a profile picture, but when we come across the profile again, it has one now, then only the new picture gathering is done instead of re-processing the entire avatar  as if it was new.  This has speed up the process tremendously as it seems that we are starting to see a lot of people we have seen before.  I had to add a few fields on the information being gathered, so splitting the process in small chunks was very beneficial. As an example, I never captured the avatar rez-date before. But I thoug

 But first... Latest updates on "the project".  I might just have to rewrite the whole thing...  When I originally wrote this, I didn't think I would ever need a UI for this, so it has been written as a console application.  No that does not mean Xbox or PS5, it means, it runs in a command prompt box, text  only, no buttons to click.  And to be perfectly honest, it does work as intended.  The challenge is to find a way to display its current status without having to use external application, such as a web browser, or a SQL management app, to pull queries from the database.  So, it might be rewritten as a full form app.  The other reason for wanting to rewrite this is that as it goes along, I can think of other interesting ways I could do this. For instance, if I wanted to have the bot do a specific thing and then resume operations, I cannot do that. The only way I could is to stop it from running, update the code, and run it again. It works, but it's definitely not ef

 Hello worldly people, There has been a few updates to the bot these past few days, and I'm still chasing a not very important small bug, but a fairly annoying one. But first the updates. Old Look, new look If you were lucky enough to notice Urma's visit, you might have seen her old avi. She recently got improved, on the looks side of it. This was her looks at launch. I sat at launch  because she did have a few different looks over the years, mainly when I was experimenting with the skeleton code. Eventually, I ended up with this look:   And this is her new look: I wish I could take the credit, but I've had a lot of help.. and we had a questionable start at best, so I think overall, she's great. Additional Information In addition to the gathered information described in the earlier post, we are now also gathering group info. Not membership, (I have no need to know who is in which group) but things such as group name, description, cost if any.  So if I was looking for a

Preamble I was chatting with a good friend of mine online yesterday. The details of the conversations are irrelevant to this topic, except for the fact that we were talking about money, in world shopping and the value of things. (Would this be worth 1000$L to you?) That got me thinking... Linden Labs (Second Life owner) has an in-world currency, referred to as "Linden Dollars" or "Linden Currency" or L$ for short.  There is a real life money cost to that.  At the time of this writing, you can buy 1000$L for $5.62 USD The dilemma I think it is fair to say that most people, in world, think in terms of L$ and not in terms of USD, CAD, Pesos or whatever your local currency is. No. In world, we tend to forget that L$ have a real life financial impact.  Sure, you go to the marketplace, you can buy an entire furnished house for 200$L.  So you get the illusion that things are cheap, and you can afford just about anything. So when you acquire something in-world, or pay someo

 What is this project all about? So, I have eluded to a particular project I am working on.  This is actually not new, I started on this many years ago when I was more active on SL.  Then it got dropped during the hiatus, and now that I'm back and motivated again, I've pulled it out of the ashes. If you've done any type of development, you're probably familiar with the feeling of  "how the heck does this work again?"  Well, I've had a few of those moments in the past week, as I'm getting reacquainted with not only the code I wrote, but how some of the things changed over the years, making some of that code unusable.  So I'm still in the "fix the code" mode until I can make more progress. All that being said, here's what it does in a nutshell: I have a controllable avi (sometimes referred to as a bot) that wanders around in the SL world, and gathers some information.  That's it, that's all it does. Exciting is it not? More deta