Danton's Real Life User Guide

It seems that I've given up on my series of posts about the meetings of the Confederation of Democratic Simulators. My disappointment at the failure of the merger of CDS with Al Andalus obviously has something to do with it. For the moment I've turned my attention to another project: Danton's Real Life User Guide.

In fact, Danton's Real Life User Guide has been online for a while - but until recently it contained only a single article. Before that, I used that same website, with its bizarre URL "vwiki.ouvaton.org," for various experimental projects, which I subsequently moved to other Mediawiki websites with more appropriate URLs. At the moment I'm too buzy to make another site with a better URL, so Danton's Real Life User Guide will stay at http://vwiki.ouvaton.org.

One of the previous projects developed at that URL and then moved elsewhere was Danton's Second Life User Guide. I had lots of fun fleshing out that site, but that Second Life User Guide was overly ambitious, and I stopped working on it when it was less than half-baked.

A mental toolkit

With "vwiki.ouvaton.org" standing empty, I came up with a new experiment for it. For years I've been turning over the idea of developing some sort of mental toolkit for popular consumption. As I explain on the website: "A mental toolkit is a collection of conceptual schemes which, by reflecting how the world works, help the person carry out individual and collective projects." The mental toolkit project is closely related to my interest in convivial tools - but it would take us off the track if I tried to explain that now.

The political dimension

The mental toolkit includes pages containing various practical tips on subjects that seem to me to be particularly important or useful. But it quickly became evident that there is a political dimension to this project. The very idea of disseminating a mental toolkit is rooted in a larger project of trying to distribute personal power more equally to all members of society.

So this website has also become the place where Danton explains his politics. Danton, who was more radical in his youth, now espouses moderate socialism, meaning: "limited socialism under a democratic political regime with a free market economy." This is explained in more detail on the website.

I find it a relief to be able to set out my political position, for the record. I've always been a bit of an anarchist, but at the same time some sort of socialist. In the years since the fall of communism (which I refer to as the "failure of Marxist governments"), the principal form of socialism has become social democracy. This just means a certain dose of distributive socialism within a democratic regime: all developed nations are in fact already social-democratic, including Western Europe of course, but also including the United States itself (progressive income tax, social security and welfare are "socialist" mechanisms).

This explanation of my view of socialism might also serve as a reply to John Carter McNight, who in a comment on his own blog, described "social democracy, Marxism and the US Democratic Party, all … as being sides in a war long over, products of a world that hasn’t existed since the fall of Reagan, Thatcher and the Berlin Wall." I understand his preference for a "techno-libertarian/anarcho-capitalist" viewpoint, but I think he's wrong to consider that social-democracy is a thing of the past. I would say instead that moderate socialism is the most favorable framework for the development of a techno-libertarian and anarcho-capitalist lifestyle. READ MORE...

Danton's Second Life User Guide

It's time for me to go public with my Second Life User Guide website.

I'm announcing this User Guide website even though it is still Under Construction. The site is about 50% complete with respect to what I originally thought it should cover. But it is only about 5% complete with respect to what I now realize should go into it.

So why am I jumping the gun and announcing a very-partially completed User Guide? In fact, why am I even trying to make a new Second Life User Guide?

New User Guide or new User Interface?

More than a year ago, I maintained that Linden Help needs help. I was responding to Wagner James Au's blog post Is Second Life's User Interface Cursed by Knowledge? Wagner suggested, as have many others, that the user experience might be improved by redesigning the Second Life interface.

Public opinion has generally followed Wagner Au in focusing on the User Interface. In June of 2008 Dusan Writer announced an 800,000 L Viewer Interface Contest. In July Dusan posted the designs of the contest finalists. And on August 12th he announced at a Metanomics event that the first place winner was the User Interface design submitted by Rheta Shan.

Linden Lab has also focused on the User Interface. In September 2008 M Linden announced that they would hire an interactive design firm to create a viewer that is "new user friendly." In November Tateru interviewed Benjamin Linden about the redesign being carried by the chosen firm, Big Spaceship. By June 2009 Tateru got her hands on an early build of the new viewer, and posted a Sneak Peek at the New User Interface. Tateru found this new viewer to be quite a change and called it "fascinating." But Lowell Cremorne writing for the Metaverse Journal found the changes to reflect overly "safe" choices, and even in some cases to be disappointing, such as the disappearance of the pie menus.

(Then there are the latest alternative viewers, such as Jacek's Imprudence viewer or the Meerkat viewer - but this subject would require a whole separate blog post.)

I remain sceptical about the extent to which a new viewer can improve the newbie experience. In my opinion nothing replaces an online help in text format.

Online Second Life Help

Linden Lab has made definite progress with their Second Life Support Center. More than a year ago, when I first tried to consult what was then called the "Second Life Knowledge Base," I had a hard time even finding it. Starting from their Support page I had to follow a long train of links (I think I even had to log in at some point).

The information in the Support Center has been organized into rational categories, and greatly extended. But it is still very hard to find the information you are looking for in it. You have to wade through long pages of questions, as on any FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). When you find a question that seems relevant, you open the page and browse through it. However, there may be many questions on the same topic, and you may read through them all without finding what you want.

Linden Lab now also provides a short Quick Start guide, which is a good idea, but too brief to take the newbie very far.

The secret weapon of the Second Life Support Center seems to be support videos. More precisely, the secret weapon seems to be Torley Linden himself and his long series of Second Life support videos. These videos are certainly most helpful, but they are for those who have the time and discipline to sit through the equivalent of an online course. Again, when I personally want help with some particular problem, I look for text.

Which brings us to the various online tutorials in text format that Second Life residents have already created. If you do a Google search for Second Life tutorial, you will find that they are legion. But most of them are aimed at experienced Second Life users, and concern more advanced skills such as building, creating clothing or scripting.

Some residents have created single help pages aimed at newbies, such as
Gwyneth Llewelyn's First Ever Questions or Olila's newbie tutorial (both of which, although high in the Google listings, are by now out-of-date). Some Universities have also posted good one-page introductions, such as this one from the State University on New York. But the single-page format is limited in terms of the information it can convey.

Help!

Thus I perceive a real need for something like my planned Second Life User Guide website for newbies who are struggling up the steep part of the Second Life learning curve.

The shortcomings of the newbie experience in Second Life are well known. For example, when M Linden announced in September 2009 that viewer improvements would be outsourced, he also mentioned the need to "reinvent" what is called the "first hour experience."

A good example of a disgusted newbie was given recently by Grace McDunnough. She was curious about why Jeff Jarvis had said: "Second Life is the most overhyped alleged phenom of the century, so far." Grace studied Jarvis's blog, and found at least part of the answer. Jarvis says about Second Life in one post: "John Markoff admits that he hasn’t gotten past the opening and I admit I have not either." And in another: "I tried hard but just couldn’t get into the thing or figure it out." Taking these statements at face value, the real reason for Markoff's sentiment that Second Life is "overhyped" is that he just simply couldn't get past the opening.

I first went through the newbie experience in November 2007. At that time Orientation Island was made up of a central hub, surrounded by four regions, in each of which the new user followed a path between a series of learning stations. The experience was moderately confusing. I remember standing in a stairway repeatedly clicking on a panel that said "click here" but where nothing happened. However, when I had finished the entire route (it took me more than the "first hour") I had learned quite a few skills in the comfortable presence of similar newbies.

I tried the newbie experience for the second time six months ago, when I created my first alt. I found it worse than before. There was nothing very useful at all on Orientation Island. I stood in front of a few of the large tutorial panels, which I found hard to read and even harder to capture (with a screen capture), and which covered topics such as a description of the different prims, which is hardly what the newbie first needs to know. Large signs everywhere incited me to go inworld at once, in an implicit recognition that this Orientation Island was a waste of time. The only new element that I found useful was the set of tutorial notecards. But why require newbies to download these notecards one by one, when they could just be placed in the Library?

When I went inworld, the experience was worse. I found myself in one of the new demonstration avatars, which I preceived to be very ugly, and which had a body which I was totally unable to edit, because none of the sliders worked. I struggled with this for a long time, becoming increasingly frustrated – and remember that I had already been using Second Life for more than year! I went to an information hub and found someone who was acting as a mentor, but all they could tell me was to go to a such-and-such shop and buy another avatar.

So I searched through the Second Life Support Center, reading up, and wrote this page about how to edit your avatar. If you gave a newbie the url for this page, they would at least be informed of all the options available to them, and could for example easily switch to a default avatar in order to have a first experience in the use of the sliders.

Many residents have made proposals for improving the newbie experience. For example, Prokofy Neva wrote this long post on the subject. Grace McDunnough offers her own solution which she sums up as follows: "The Second Life interface and attendant new resident churn problems can be solved using Artificial Intelligence and bots."

My own proposal is more modest. I'm ready to let Linden Lab fool around as they will with new configurations for Orientation Island, or alternative solutions, paying large sums to external consultants, and coming up with what may likely be little better than what they had before. I'd rather try to give newbies direct access to a more usable online help.

Better Early than Never

Now that I've explained why I am making a new Second Life User Guide, I'm back to the initial question. Why am I announcing this only very-partially completed User Guide?

First, I think that even in its rudimentary state, full of red links as it is, it could be of some use to newbies - and maybe even other users.

And second, I may never get much further with it. I hope to keep working on it, but I have noticed that online projects tend to grow sporadically, slipping easily into extended periods of hibernation. So I may as well try to publicise this one now, instead of waiting until it has advanced much further. The wait could be a long one. READ MORE...

Bing Fail

For my first experience with Microsoft's new search engine Bing, I decided to look for - what else? - "Danton Sideways".

(I always put quotation marks around the name, in order to find only articles where the first and last names are together. I thereby avoid articles containing sentences such as: "Danton looked sideways at Robespierre…".)

The results of my Bing search were pretty disappointing.

I look up Danton Sideways on Google from time to time, and I'm used to seeing the present blog as the first search result, up at the top of the first page of results. Which is logical, since this is my main blog, on which I've posted numerous articles over the past year and half, several of which have been widely cited in other blogs.

But when I search for Danton Sideways on Bing, the present blog fails to show up at all on the first page of results. Down in the middle of the second page of results there is a single link to one article from the blog – and nothing more thereafter.

Moreover, it is instructive to compare the simple number of search results. The Google search gives 649 results for "Danton Sideways", while the Bing search gives – a measly 153 (only about a fourth as many).

The explanation for this relative poverty of search results may have been given by one of the Mashable bloggers. On first trying Bing, this British blogger discovered that the results were exactly the same as those given by the British Live.com, just with a different presentation. (However, it appears that there were significant differences between results shown on the U.S. Bing.com as compared to the U.K. Bing.com.) Microsoft quickly redirected all traffic from Live.com to Bing.com, so the experiment could not be repeated. But this strongly suggests that all of the novelty in Bing is in the presentation, and that Microsoft is still serving up basically the same data and algorithms as was in their Live Search engine.

But there may be even more sinister reasons to explain why this blog is low in the Bing listings. Rather than allowing the algorithms to produce objective rankings, Microsoft seems to be manipulating certain search results. As TechCrunch noted recently, the Bing search results for "Linux" are suspiciously scanty:

"Using Google, you get much better results for this query, period. Google lists at least five very relevant links (Kernel.org, Debian.org, RedHat.com, LinuxJournal.com and LI.org) that you will not find in the first 15 search results on Bing. No nifty sidebars, nor any amount of spot-on similar results will help Microsoft here."

Could it be that Bing deliberately downgrades blogs that run on Blogger (such as this one), knowing that Blogger is owned and operated by Google? Or on the contrary, has Google favored my Blogger blog, in order to promote Blogger?

It occurred to me that I could put this question to a test by trying yet another search engine. So I looked up Danton Sideways on Yahoo. The present blog showed up in second place in the Yahoo results for "Danton Sideways", just after my other blog, which deals with OpenSim. (I might note in passing that Yahoo returns 831 search results for "Danton Sideways" – even more than Google.)

So there is reason to think that Bing is deliberately under-ranking Blogger blogs. This is just a supposition, but one that becomes credible in the light of everything we know about Microsoft's long-standing monopolistic practices. (Added note: this supposition would seem to be stretching things - see my Comment below.)

For a pertinent commentary on Microsoft's reputation among internet developers, see this recent post about Why Karma Matters. The author of the post notably states: "Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything."

Another good example of the Microsoft approach was noted by TechCrunch: Bing automatically became the default search engine on Internet Explorer 6, whether the user wanted it or not. This was quickly explained by Microsoft as a "bug" which they claimed to have already fixed. But it is hard to believe that this was a mere accident, given that Microsoft has aggressively employed similar tactics for decades.

It may turn out that Bing is more hype than a real innovation on the search engine market. The statistics seem to show that users are unconvinced. TechCrunch reports that the flurry of media attention focused on Bing led to a sharp upward spike in use, which lasted… exactly one day. For twenty-four hours Bing shot ahead of Yahoo and captured part of Google's market share, only to fall promptly back down. Karma? Or just an offering that fails to satisfy the demand?

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The Road to Illich

During the past two weeks I was on vacation in Italy with my wife and daughters. We spent a few days in Naples, and then went to the Amalfi Coast, where medieval towns with tourist-packed beaches sit nestled between cliffs soaring above the blue Mediterranean.

Before leaving France we took the risk of reserving an apartment by Internet. Arriving in Amalfi we discovered that our lodgings were several kilometers out of town and perched high above the sea, with no less than 700 steps to walk down to get to the beach – and to climb back up again. We learned to take the local bus to get around, and enjoyed the majestic view from our villa.

I brought along my Asus 3e computer, which belongs to the genus subnotebook and the species netbook. The cluster of apartments was equipped with wifi, but it took me a while to figure out how to get the Internet connection. So I had a few days of down-time in which to reflect on my main internet project, which involves making technology more accessible to everyone.

I've been long searching for a way to promote the ideas that Ivan Illich set out in his book Tools for Conviviality. I once began discussing lllich in an earlier post on this blog, titled Fools for Tools, but then I got sidetracked into Second Life obsessions such as CDS politics and OpenSim.

A Digression about Social Justice

I finally got back to Illich during the journey in Southern Italy. As I mentioned above, the first stage of our trip was a few days in Naples, a city which most tourists flee, stopping there only long enough to visit the archeological museum with its collection of ancient relics. But I had my own particular motives for wanting to spend a bit of time there. I'm fond of Baroque architecture, and Naples is full of run-down examples thereof. Also, my leftist sympathies for the downtrodden masses drew me to this bustling southern port, teaming with poor workers, street peddlers and immigrants. And then Naples was the home of one of my favorite authors, Giambattista Vico, an eighteenth-century philologist who revolutionized the study of history and initiated modern hermaneutics.

Through meticulous analysis of ancient texts, Vico showed that most Greek and Roman myths were thinly-disguised allegories of class struggle. For example, he wrote that the western dragon generally represents the laboured earth, the dragon’s scales being rocks in the fields, and the fiery breath an allusion to the agricultural practice of using fire to clear land. By extension, the dragon also represents the peasant class that labours the earth, and the Herculean hero or medieval knight that kills the dragon represents a leader of aristocratic land-owners who crushes a peasant revolt.

In the modern industrial welfare-state, popular myths take other forms, such as glamorous stories of stars, champions and popular idols, but the basic theme is the same. Our myths still generally celebrate the victory of the strong over the weak, and thereby justify the monopolization of wealth and power by an elite minority.

When I was younger I embraced the goal of an egalitarian society. I've since become convinced that strict social equality is a totalitarian ideal. I now prefer the liberal philosophy of John Rawls, who developed a more subtle Theory of Justice which takes into account the economic need to reward personal initiative. Rawls' theory says that we should accept inequality as long as the gains of the wealthy bring benefits for the least-advantaged members of society.

Musings about Convivial Tools

But let me get back to Illich. In Amalfi when I finally got hold of the wifi code and tried to connect to the Internet, my Asus kept giving me failure messages. I eventually figured out that it takes the Asus about ten minutes to establish the wifi connection, and I wasn't waiting long enough. Now each time I encounter some such technical failure, I think of Illich and his theory of convivial tools, because I believe we could design a new type of tools that would minimise the occurrence of user helplessness. A "convivial" tool empowers the user, by providing a friendly interface and a useful help function, but also by allowing the user to tinker with its inner workings, and thus fix – or at least clearly identify – what is broken. The wifi function of the Asus 3e failed on these counts, despite the fact that my Asus has a Linux operating system.

Way back in the early nineteen-seventies, Ivan Illich described a process whereby tools would be developed by a community of users. Such a participative process can nowadays be seen at work in open source software development. But few people realize that the first personal computers were also created through a process of community tool development. Illich's vision of a community of do-it-yourself tool developers was taken up by pc pioneer Lee Felsenstein, and provided the explicit model for the Homebrew Computer Club, whose members made the first functional personal computers, including the first Apple computer.

The thirty years that separate us from the invention of the personal computer have brought exponential growth in all aspects of computing: capacity of chips and storage, the web, search engines, high bandwidth, collaborative sites including wikis and social software, and open source software. The type of collaborative tool envisaged by Illich has become so widespread that Illich himself might now seem irrelevant.

But as the tools and systems become more complex, the need to render the tools more accessible to the average user becomes all the more pressing. (Note also the direct connection between the theory of social justice mentioned above, which aims to help the less advantaged members of society, and the convivial approach to technology, which seeks to help the average user, rather than experts and power users – who can take care of themselves.)

My personal concern is less with ensuring user participation in tool development, than with ensuring that the user has easy access to the inner workings of tools, and can tinker with and fix them. For software tools, such access is best provided by making programs open source. For other types of tools, access to the inner workings can be provided by designing the tools such that the user can easily disassemble and reassemble them. I'll wait for another occasion to explain why it is revolutionary to design tools that can be easily disassembled. For the moment, let me describe how I plan to use Second Life to promote convivial tools.

Danton’s Tools House

I'm currently setting up shop in a small street going North from the main plaza of the Colonia Nova sim. However, the shop, which I've called Danton's Tools House, is still rather empty. In the eight months since I discovered Second Life, I've been too busy with Second Life blogs, CDS, Twitter, Plurk and OpenSim to learn well the rudiments of building, let alone scripting, baking textures, or making animations. So far I’ve made a wall with a doorway in it, at the entrance to my shop, and an upper floor that serves as Danton's Workshop - which is the closest thing I've got to a sandbox. My goal is to fill this non-profit storefront with exhibits related to in-world tools, but so far I've little to show.

The Tools House Website

The shop is also supposed to present a sign with a link to the Danton's Tools House Website. I installed the Joomla website package on a hosted server, but I must learn to use Joomla before I can announce the link to the site. At present I'm trying to figure out how to put an image into the default Joomla page header. There is a new version of Joomla that makes this easier, but I want to learn how to use the older version, so that I will understand how the Joomla pages are constructed.

The initial idea for the Tools House Website was to present tools and other resources for residents of Second Life. This would include tutorials, lists of useful links, recommended places to visit, and so on. Such sites already exist, and would be linked to, but the Tools House site would aim to be a showcase for a specifically Illichian approach to providing open source access to Second Life tools and resources. The problem of course is how I will find the time to assemble all that information.

Tools and More Tools

I would ultimately want to go beyond tools for Second Life, and present information on the website about all sorts of other tools. I might assemble hints and useful links about using social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and so on. Then there is the idea of providing help and information about using the main open source software packages. You can download the software from sites such as Sourceforge, and find detailed information about the programs on Wikipedia, specialized sites or, in the last resort, on various forums. But Wikipedia strives for objectivity and exhaustiveness, which prevents subjective presentation of useful, targeted advice. And the specialized sites for specific software packages tend to be oriented to users who are already experts. So there is still a need for general resource sites aimed at the average software user.

Going still further abroad in the realm of tools, beyond software and the Internet, there is the vast domain of physical tools and machines. I've long dreamed of promoting a selection of easy-to-repair household appliances. These appliances would be designed to last as long as possible, with a guaranteed supply of spare parts easily ordered by Internet. They would also be designed for easy disassembly by the user, for easy repair by the user during the machine's useful life, and for recycling of the components at the end of the life cycle. Such appliances would probably cost more than the disposable type, but should appeal to a minority of do-it-yourself and environmentally conscious consumers, like myself.

Ideas can also be considered to be a form of tools. Another of my projects was to promote the design of "open-source idea systems," assemblies of concepts that could be adapted and maintained in the same manner as other convivial tools. The personal vision that lies behind this particular project is hard to explain, but it is another application of the general idea of conviviality.

Doing My Thing

As noted above, these various ambitious projects far surpass my individual capacities. An appropriate format for these projects might seem to be a collaborative website such as a wiki. But a wiki implies a group, and at present I am still alone. Moreover, wikis are susceptible to a variety of problems, such as weak editorial direction, spamming, trolling and self-serving promotion of products or websites. It thus seems preferable to find some other format, collaborative if possible, which would permit the development of a clear editorial line oriented towards Illichian conviviality.

What I am really looking for is some way to work with others. But as Billy Holiday sang: "God bless the child that's got his own." Balanced collaboration results when each participant has their own garden to cultivate. So I'll keep on doing my own thing, hoping that someday I can find a way to do it with a group. READ MORE...

Danton goes Open Source

About a year and half ago I embarked on a voyage of discovery through Cyberspace. I had been just another average internet user until one winter day early in 2007, when I said to myself: "I'm finally going to create that website I've been talking about."

The creation of my first website became a long saga. A friend had advised me to use a software package for dynamic websites, which turned out to be way over my head. I spent weeks struggling to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of HTML, PHP, MySQL, DNS and
web hosting, when I could have had a free hosted blog up and running in a matter of minutes. But I wanted a "real website."

I finally got a few websites running, which lead me to branch out further. I began exploring the blogosphere in greater depth. Then I created my own user page on Wikipedia, under the name of Redeyed Treefrog. And in late November of 2007 I joined Second Life. A few weeks later I created this Second Life blog, which rapidly acquired a larger audience than all of my other websites taken together.

Through my involvement in Second Life, and in particular through reading Prokofy Neva, I began to investigate social software. I would have hesitated to join most social sites using my real name, but I found it easy to sign up as Danton Sideways. Thus Danton is now present on Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, FriendFeed and several other such sites, where my "friends" are for the most part other Second Life avatars. I've become an Early Adopter. Now I'm taking what for me is the next logical step: I'm going Open Source. And I've created for the occasion a separate Open Source blog.

I've mentioned in a previous post on this blog my interest in the approaches to tools developed by counter-culture philosophers such as Ivan Illich and Stewart Brand. I've also stated that I consider free software guru Richard Stallman to be a saint, and Microsoft to be The Beast. So of course Prokofy Neva's continual diatribes against Open Source leave me unswayed. I am personally convinced that Open Source can stand up against the criticism that is directed against it on economic, legal or moral grounds. But I would prefer to leave the polemics to others. Instead of spending my time and energy arguing about Open Source, I'd rather just put Open Source to use.

I recently took a tour of several new grids that use OpenSim, which is the Open Source version of Second Life. OpenSim was created through reverse engineering of the Second Life software. At the risk of skirting the type of polemics I want to avoid, I might observe that reverse engineering is one of the grey areas of Open Source practice. In some cases it clearly involves infringement of Intellectual Property rights, but in other cases Open Source is more a matter of legitimate establishment of universal compatibility through open standards. Thus the IBM PC became the main international standard for PC computer hardware, because so many companies could easily make IBM clones. A rather different case is OpenOffice, the open source office suite released by Sun Microsystems, which provides a legitimate alternative to the detestable monopoly of Microsoft (the latter still uses every trick in the book to subvert the establishment of universal standards in this domain). And the benign, or at the least neutral, attitude of Second Life towards OpenSim has been explained as a form of enlightened self-interest: if the Second Life software becomes the basis of a new widely-used standard, this could reinforce the position of Second Life with respect to its competitors.

After taking my tour of the OpenSim grids, I wanted to learn more about the OpenSim software. I had to learn to use IRC, so that I could follow the discussions on the #opensim channel on freenode. I downloaded the IRC software program XCHAT, and on June 3d I connected to the #opensim channel as user "Danton." I got chatting with someone called "nebadon," and gave him the link to my blog post about the OpenSim grids.

That evening I learned from the #opensim channel that there was a meeting inworld on the OSGrid to discuss OpenSim. I logged into the Wright Plaza sim and found about 30 avatars standing around, talking about technical problems. Most of them appeared in the default Ruth avatar, but some had elaborate avatars, and a few were dancing wildly. Nebadon suggested I give everyone the link to my post, which several had already read and found well-written. After a few minutes the public chat went strangely silent, but the dancing avatars were still prancing madly about. I went back to the IRC chat, where I was informed that the sim had crashed. In Second Life I have had my viewer crash, but have never experienced the crash of a whole sim, so I failed to understand that the avatar dance scripts keep on going in one's viewer, long after the sim itself has crashed.

I started trying to fool around with the OpenSim software itself. I downloaded a binary version, and got it running in standalone mode on my home computer. Around that time I discovered that Ugo Trade has written a series of fascinating posts about OpenSim on her blog, including one that gives a list of OpenSim blogs, and another that introduced me to TribalNet.

As I tumbled further down the rabbit hole into the subterranean depths of OpenSim, I began to conceive of writing a series of blog posts describing what I found. But the present blog is devoted to the adventures of Danton Sideways in Second Life. I therefore reactivated an unused blog for Danton Sideways that I had created several months ago, as described here. I gave that blog a new name referring to "Open Source", and have already posted on it an article describing how I got OpenSim running in standalone mode on my PC.

News about Danton Sideways in Second Life will continue to appear here on the present blog. Henceforth, news about Danton Sideways in OpenSim will be given on Danton's Open Source Blog. How many separate lives can one little avatar have?
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Alternate Second Life Viewers

After finishing my last post, about the open source grids operating under OpenSim software, I started studying alternate Second Life viewers. (The viewer, also called the "client," is the part of the Second Life software that you download onto your hard disk, and that enables your computer to communicate with the distant Second Life servers.)

Most, but not all, of the alternative viewers are open source, and some are still in early stages of development. All of them work with the Second Life grid, and many also work with the open source grids. This capacity of the same viewer to communicate indifferently with the Second Life grid or with the Open Sim grids is particularly interesting, since it prefigures the "3D web." Imagine a viewer that allows you to teleport from one virtual world to the next, almost easily as we now click from one webpage to another. Such a "3D web" may be just around the corner.


The official Second Life viewer

Before looking at the alternative viewers, it may be worth saying a word or two about the official viewer. The viewer must be downloaded and installed on your hard drive before you can connect to the Second Life servers, so the newbie experience generally starts at the official viewer download page . This download page also gives a definition of the various categories of Test Viewers (Release Candidate Viewers, First Look Viewers and Beta Viewers).

The current viewer is Version Number 1.19.1.4, which is what I have on my computer. The entire list of versions is given here. It can be seen that Linden Lab is currently up to Release Candidate 1.20.8.

I will definitely avoid using the latest Release Candidate myself, because my computer is a few years old, and is already stressed out by version 1.19.1.4. I would have willingly stayed with an older version but, one day a few months ago when I tried to log on to Second Life, the system forced me to switch to the new viewer. The new viewer produced weird and undesired visual effects, in the form of shifting triangles of colored light streaming from my avatar. Using Google I found a post on the JIRA which linked this problem to my graphics card, which is an ATI Radeon X300/X550. I followed the advice someone posted on the JIRA, and installed an older version of the driver for my graphics card, since the most recent driver is incompatible with the current viewer. Using the older graphics driver solved the problem of the colored-triangles. However, to adjust to my downgraded graphics driver, Second Life automatically set my draw distance to 64 meters, so my avatar is now myopic. A great many residents seem to be having similar problems, which shows how critical viewer issues can be.

As I told in my previous post, the official Second Life viewer has gone open source. You can even try to compile it yourself, if you want to. First you download the source code, and then you follow the elaborate instructions, which start here and, for windows users, continue here. I tried to follow these instructions, as told in a post on my other blog, but I got overwhelmed by all of the other programs that I had to install to make this work, and gave up about half-way through.


Alternative open source viewers

The official Second Life wiki has a long page on alternate viewers. This list includes several open source modifications of the official viewer (such the Able, Dale Glass and Nicholaz editions), one closed source modification (Onrez), one extensively rewritten open source viewer (RealXtend), and a number of miscellaneous other viewers. A curiosity is the Marine Edition, codename "RestrainedLife," which is a viewer designed to enhance the BDSM experience, in conjunction with simple scripts to make attached objects undetachable, prevent chat and otherwise restrain one's consenting BDSM partner.

The main open source modifications of the official viewer were described by Caleb Booker in a post from September 2007. The Able Edition, made by Able Whitman, works just like the main viewer but adds visual muting, thereby blocking out ad farms and other visual annoyances. The Dale Glass Edition (see also the Dale Glass blog) adds a number experimental features for dealing with griefers. These include a proximity detector which shows the names of other avatars in the area, as well as the avatar age and whether there is any payment information on file, and a detector indicating the source of particles and sounds.

The Nicholaz viewer was built by Nicholaz Beresford with a focus on stability, usability and performance. I've heard residents say that the Nicholaz viewer helps reduce frequent crashing and similar problems with the official viewer. The Nicholaz release called EyeCandy is to be used together with version 1.19.1.4 of the official viewer. Since I am using that official viewer, I installed EyeCandy, which involves simply copying the executable (".exe") file and three small XLM files into the same program directory where your Second Life viewer is already installed. Then instead of launching the Second Life viewer you simply launch the Nicholaz executable file (I put a shortcut to this on my desktop). It is easy to launch either the official viewer, or the Nicholaz viewer, as you wish. I found the Nicholaz viewer to be pretty much the same as the official viewer, the most noticeable difference being a button that says "release keys," to use when a script has taken control of your keys.

The Kirstens viewers are compiled for high end intel based machines for best performance or to fix specific problems, and have proved very stable. The instructions say to copy the executable file into your Second Life directory, as for the Nicholaz viewer. I did not try the Kirstens viewer, but it of special interest because the OpenLife website proposes a download of a modified Kirstens viewer (see below)


The realXtend viewer

The realXtend viewer is part of an open source virtual world platform that was discretely developed during several months by two companies, Admino and Ludocraft, before they suddenly revealed it to a group of OpenSim developers that they invited to Finland in January 2008. Sakai Openlife, of the OpenLife grid, who was among the guests, describes this event as follows:


"Friday morning we all met. Firstly wow, it was great to meet most of the others from the OpenSimulator project, I don't think it had been done before, and whilst things may have started quiet it didn't take long for us all to Gel together and get talking! And then we met the guys under the banner 'RealXtend', this was interesting why had I flown more than 14,000km across the planet? Who were they and what had they been doing? Questions were flying in everyone's minds and we started to get some information. 2 Companies Admino & Ludocraft had been working furiously in the background over the past 4 months, 'extending' the function of the OpenSimulator Project, they had done this with the afforded generosity of Juha Hulkko.

So what did they want global domination? No. Were they Anti-Linden? No (actually Chris Collins from Linden Labs was there too). Did they want to take over the OpenSimulator Project? No.

They wanted to move forward, extend as the name suggests features & methods for greater user function and versatility of the code & it's application."


After the participants in the Finnish meeting returned home, floods of information about realXtend starting showing up on various blogs. The realXtend platform is made up of two parts, which are:

* realXtend viewer, an open source browser for virtual worlds,
* realXtend server, an open source server based on OpenSim.

The realXtend viewer, based on the Ogre 3D engine, allows the use of meshes in place of primitives. As explained by Ugo Trade, a prim is a solid, while a mesh is a series of triangles in 3D which can make any arbitrary surface. Prims are more compact and lower cost to render, but most 3D programs build meshes by default, in order to support proper 3D models. And since one mesh can replace many prims, the difference in computing cost between meshes and prims is smaller than one would think.

On the server side, reports Adam Frisby of OpenSim, realXtend adds features such as Python scripting support, and a new server called the ‘Avatar Server,’ which allows transporting your avatar's appearance from one OpenSim simulator to a completely different one, without any shared grid infrastructure.

I downloaded version 0.21 of the realXtend viewer from the realXtend download page, and installed it with no problem. To my surprise it worked fine for connecting to Second Life, but not for OpenLife. When I type the OpenLife URI (http://logingrid.net:8002) into the "Connect to" box, realXtend first takes a very long time to get past "Initializing World", then hangs permanently on "Connecting to Region." However, the OpenLife website offers a download of a special RealXtend Openlife Edition Viewer v0.2. That might work better for OpenLife than the standard version of realXtend, but I would have to uninstall the version I currently have, so I've left it at that. The OpenLife website also offers a download of a special OpenLife version of the Kirstens viewer (see above), but I have not yet tried that either.


The Onrez Viewer

The Onrez Viewer is a closed-source viewer originally created by the Electric Sheep Company to be used with the CSI New York Virtual Experience. The viewer's name also recalls the Onrez website which provides online shopping for Second Life items.

When the Onrez viewer was introduced in October 2007, Hamlet Au noted that its main innovation was to allow in-world web browsing (supporting html, but not plugins such as Flash). I installed the Onrez viewer easily, and when I connected to Second Life I found a special window open in the middle of the Second Life view, displaying a website called The Loop . At first there was no browser line in this window, so I was stuck on that page, but I closed the special window and then opened it up again by clicking on the button saying "The Loop," at top right of the screen, , and the browser line appeared.

What I disliked about the Onrez viewer was that the menu layout is rather different from that of the official viewer, and is thus hard to find one's way around in. Also, every time I log out the viewer crashes and my system gives me an error message.


Lite viewers

In July 2007 a UK teen student called Katharine Berry announced on her blog that she was developing an ajax-based client for Second Life, which she called Ajaxlife. The story was picked up by Hamlet Au, who got the tip from Gwyneth Llewelyn.

This client only permits a limited set of functions, such as local chat, instant messages and a basic map, and thus removes the need for a powerful graphics card. But as noted by Hamlet, Ajaxlife also allows you to connect to Second Life without even downloading and installing the viewer. The user instead logs on to the Ajaxlife website, which in turn logs the user into Second Life. This allows users to get past corporate or academic firewalls, which may block access to heavily interactive websites. Hamlet reported that Katharine was thinking of making a version that can run on the user's own machine, but in that case the firewall problem remains.

As Katharine explained to Hamlet Au, Ajaxlife uses JavaScript to handle the User Interface. The connection to Second Life is handled by a C# program running on Katharine's server, which uses libsecondlife to deal with SL connections. AjaxLife handles maps with an entirely separate system: once a day a libsecondlife bot of Katherine's logs into Second Life, downloads all the map images, and saves a copy to her server, so that they can be called up as needed.

Katharine at first announced that Ajaxlife would be open source, but there are no currently available downloads of the source code. In March 2008 she released a version that added the ability to delete inventory items, which Hamlet Au called the Ajaxlife Killer Application. A few weeks ago, on May 18th, Katharine announced on the Ajaxlife blog implementation of version 0.3.3.

I tried AjaxLife for the first time a few weeks ago, as way to connect to Second Life using my newly-purchased Asus eee, which is a tiny, low-cost netbook, with a low-performance graphics card. Logging on to Ajaxlife, I was able to use IM, to open inventory directories, and to edit saved notecards, but the group functions only allowed me to IM the entire group, without giving me the list of members. I was also able to log on with no problem through my firewall at work. But the last few times I tried to log in, I got error messages.

In October 2008, a few months after Katharine's initial announcement, a Japanese company called 3Di introduced the MovableLife website, which likewise promised access to Second Life "using only a web browser." I logged in to MovableLife and tried to IM a friend, but while the friend could read everything I wrote (as I learned later), all I could see was their first reply repeating endlessly. My reaction, besides finding the site useless, was to think "OMG I've just entered my Second Life password onto this site." The MovableLife page says somewhere in small print: "We do not store your Second Life account information on our servers, it is transferred directly to the Second Life servers." I sure hope that is true.

Web-based access through a third party site remains an interesting solution for those who want to connect to Second Life through firewalls. But in order to overcome the worry about password theft, the easiest solution would be for Linden Lab to provide such an interface themselves.

Similar in many ways to Ajaxlife is the Sleek viewer, which was released in July 2007, just after Katharine Berry's initial announcement. According to a comment by Oz Spade, Sleek had actually been around since 2006, and was developed using libsecondlife not by a company, but by one person.

The Sleek viewer is a light-weight viewer that allows access to Second Life for a reduced set of functions such as sending IMs. Reasons for using it include having a low-power graphics card or wanting to multi-task on older machines, as mentioned by this user, who compares it to an old-fashioned multi-user dungeon.

The Sleek download is a zip file, from which you extract 12 files into one directory. To launch the viewer you just click on the executable file. After logging in to Second Life, I was able to see which of my friends were online, send IMs and see resident profiles. I was even able to use search to find residents by name. However, the inventory function did nothing more than show me inventory directories: when I tried to open them they appeared empty. And when I tried to use Sleek at work, the firewall blocked it.

On April 1st 2008 the Sleek blog announced that Sleek had been bought by Microsoft, but the date would make one somewhat skeptical of that announcement.
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Touring the Open Source Grids

After about 6 months in Second Life I mustered the courage to try one of the alternative open source grids. Having seen the term OpenSim on various Second Life blogs, I Googled that, and found the OpenSim website. At the top of the page was a link to the Grid List, which names a surprising number of public grids, listed in order of their initial appearance. The oldest was DeepGrid, which began operations in June 2007, followed by Open Source Grid (OSGrid) which began in July 2007, and OpenLife which began in October 2007.

I decided to start with OpenLife. I connected to the OpenLife website, and after a bit of searching found the OpenLife Wiki and a page that tells how to get started.

The wiki says that you can use either the RealXtend Viewer or the SecondLife Viewer, but the RealXtend Viewer failed to start for me. So I followed the instructions on how to create a shortcut to OpenLife for the SecondLife Viewer. I opened an account with the avatar name Danton Sideways, and launched the viewer.

I found myself on a rather barren island, in the default female avatar called "Ruth." I tried to edit my appearance, but nothing happened. I looked into my inventory, and found it to be completely empty. I then flew over a few adjoining sims, which were vast stretches of terraformed land with nothing on them. I also tried to use Search to find people, but the Search function gave no results whatsoever. My initial reaction was: "Is this a joke?"

I came away from that initial OpenSim experience thinking that all I could do was fly over an empty terraformed wasteland in the Ruth avatar, looking for other avatars who were not there. On the next try, however, things got better. But before I go on with my story, let us take a glance backwards, to survey the origins of the open source alternatives to Second Life.


How Second Life went Open Source

Back in 2005 Gwyneth Llewelyn presented in her blog post on Expanding Second Life an early vision of how Second Life could be spread across a system of decentralized servers. Gwyneth suggested that Linden Lab could set up a system whereby anyone could run their own sim with their own asset server (which implied making the software open source), but would need to pay Linden Lab for an encrypted certificate in order to connect to the main grid. Gwyneth envisaged a system with many sim operators, each having their own users, as follows:

"When 'your' user logs in at your own sim, the UUID which is generated is encrypted with a key which has been provided by LL. If you don’t use that key, well, you may register with an 'isolated sim' and have your fun there. But you won’t be able to access any content on the main grid, nor be able to export your content there."

Gwyneth thus proposed a way for Linden Labs to go open source but still remain profitable by using encrypted keys. Linden Labs was slow to respond to this challenge. Meanwhile, a low-profile group of non-Linden programmers had already begun reverse engineering the Second Life protocol.

On May 12, 2006 John Hurliman registered, on the Gna! free software development platform, a new open source project called libsecondlife. The registration post defined libsecondlife as "an open source library to allow software to access the Second Life world." Hurliman announced that "we have a complete protocol description", and explained:

"Our goal is to create a multi-threaded, object-oriented library to write a Second Life client of any complexity. We currently do not have any source code, as it's still in the design and planning phase."

Libsecondlife has been described as "a BSD open source library for creating custom clients that could connect to Second Life". A technical description of the libsecondlife project is given on the Second Life Wikia. Development of libsecondlife is still ongoing, as can be seen on the libsecondlife wiki, where most of the articles are signed by Baba Yamamoto.

Libsecondlife however soon generated a major scandal with its derivative CopyBot programme. CopyBot was originally created as a debugging tool by the libsecondlife development team, who had in mind using it to be able to backup one's own created content on one's own hard drive, or to be able to export one's own intellectual property to other environments. But since it was open source, CopyBot was quickly modified by unscrupulous hackers who recompiled it as a tool to replicate objects and avatar appearances without permission. Angry Second Life residents met with Linden Lab on November 13, 2006 to discuss the Copybot problem, and then organized a series of virtual protests, as described by Reuters and Hamlet Au. The outcry led Linden Lab on 14 November 2007 to declare that the use of CopyBot was a TOS violation.

Less than two months after the CopyBot scandal, on 8 January 2007, Phoenix Linden announced on the official Second Life Blog that the source code would be released for the Second Life viewer. It thus seems that libsecondlife and CopyBot were the catalysts for prompting Linden Lab to go open source themselves, in order to maintain control over a development which appeared inevitable.

However, in January 2007 Linden Lab only released the source code for the Second Life viewer, also called the "client," which is the software that the user installs on their own computer in order to access Second Life. There remained the software that runs Second Life itself on the Linden Lab servers, storing and retrieving all of the data about the sims and the users' assets, and implementing the virtual world in real time.

Various attempts had already been made to create an open source virtual world server, but had floundered in face of the massive task of writing both the server and the client at the same time. It was now no longer necessary to write the client, since Linden Lab had released the source code for the official Second Life viewer, and the libsecondlife library was available for creating other custom clients that could connect to Second Life. So in that same month of January 2007, Darren Guard (also known as MV) founded the OpenSim project, to concentrate on developing on open source virtual world server that the Second Life client could connect to. As explained in the Wikipedia OpenSim article, OpenSim uses libsecondlife to handle communication between the client and the server.

Then in April 2007 Linden Lab announced that they planned to release the Second Life server source code (or at least parts of it). But while Linden Lab was still just thinking of releasing parts of the server source code, the first public open source grids, based on OpenSim, started operating. DeepGrid began in June 2007, followed by OSGrid in July. One of the participants gives this description of the first day of DeepGrid:

"There was a sim, its name was "Mortville" and a half-dozen crazed programmers were jumping around on a little island, flying into the ground, all chat was showing up twice, IM crashed the sim, all objects were phantom, no trees, no nothing, but it was wondrous. Within a couple of weeks there were a dozen sims on Deepgrid."

Linden Lab struggled to keep up. On 13 September 2007, as explained in a page on the Second Life Grid website, Linden Lab kicked off a public planning process for "designing protocols for virtual world software interoperability," which led to the formation of the Architecture Working Group (AWG). One of the stated goals of the AWG is to "enable third parties to run servers that connect to the Second Life Grid platform." In other words, since the development of open source grids is inevitable, Linden Lab wants to enable third parties to connect their own sims to Second Life, for a fee. Which is pretty much what Gwyneth Llewelyn was talking about back in 2005.

The latest development in this direction is an announced plan for IBM to hold Second Life grid servers on their private corporate network, behind the firewall, but with enough network access to communicate with the central services on the Second Life grid. This project is further described on the blog of Zha Ewry (David Levine) of IBM. Zha Ewry is also the head of the Linden-sponsored Architecture Working Group, and IBM runs its own private sims using OpenSim software. One of these is the Shengri La sim, built by Shenlei Winkler of the Fashion Research Institute, as can be seen here.


My Further Adventures on the Open Source Grids

As I've told above, my initial experience in OpenLife was a total disappointment. I did nothing but fly over barren terraformed sims in the Ruth avatar, with no inventory and no search function. So I decided to try CentralGrid to see if that was any better.

On the CentralGrid website I found a link to the CentralGrid forum, with a page that tells how to log on. Following these instructions, I created a shortcut to the Second Life viewer, in exactly the same way as for OpenLife. Once logged in, I found myself in an identical Ruth avatar with an identically empty inventory. The only difference was that the entry sim was somewhat more built up, with a few blocks of empty streets and wide-spaced, sterile buildings all in the same modern style. And my feet didn't sink a few inches into the earth, as they tended to do in OpenLife. But the search function was equally unusable. What I understood later is that all of these open source grids are just picking up the latest version of the OpenSim software, and tweaking it, so they can only offer the functions which have already been developed for OpenSim.

In both OpenLife and CentralGrid, the main activity seems to be selling entire sims. Some of the open source grids allow users to connect their own servers, but these two seem to require you to rent the servers from them. There is no official way to rent just a plot of land (though one could always rent a plot by making a private deal with a sim owner). Few of the grids have any plans to create an in-world currency, though CentralGrid is reportedly working on it. People buy these sims knowing that the software is still under development, and that there is no in-world economy, thus no possible return-on-investment, so of course the prices are lower than for sims on Second Life.

Some days later I decided to try again. I went back to the OpenLife website and logged onto the chatroom. One nifty feature of OpenLife is this chatroom, which can be joined easily by anyone, without having to know how to use IRC channels. There is nearly always someone on line to whom you can ask questions. I found online Sakai OpenLife himself, the founder of OpenLife, and asked why I was unable to edit my appearance. He replied that it was explained on the wiki. So I went back to the wiki and found that there was indeed a page about editing appearance. You must go into your inventory, click on Body Parts, right click to get "create new," and then wear the new object to edit it. I thus created and edited four body parts (body, skin, hair, eyes) and three pieces of clothing (shirt, trousers and shoes). I tried to get the same look as for Danton Sideways in Second Life, but the result was rather far from the mark. And I was unable to grow a beard, because while my chin puffed out into a beard shape, I had no appropriate texture colour to add, so I reverted to a clean-shaven look.

Remaining in-world on the dreary welcome island, I changed windows to go to the chat room, and asked where I might find a more lively sim. Someone suggested I try Electron, which is the sim of Gobi Greenwood (correction: Electron is actually owned by Gumby Roffo). Electron is rather nicely built up, including a stage and screen that streams a video clip. On my next visit I went to Quartz, another of Gobi's sims, where he is setting up a freebie store. It is a several story building which for the moment is totally empty. I also went to the Renegade sim, where I met Josh Noonan inside a fancy temple build. He proposed to rent me a plot via an external payment using paypall. I said I was interested, but I have to go back to discuss this further.

I then returned to CentralGrid. I set the destination sim to CentralGrid Home, but had a problem logging in. The error message said something about waiting for a handshake, and the forum instructions for dealing with this were rather complicated. So I just tried a different destination (Central Grid Sandbox), and that worked. I edited my avatar exactly as on OpenLife – the underlying OpenSim software is identical – but the result was again disappointing. You would have trouble recognizing that it is supposed to the same Danton Sideways as is in Second Life.

I tried teleporting in CentralGrid, and arrived in the Moonbeam sim, where I was surprised to actually see another avatar on line, hanging in the air. Then I crashed. When I logged back in I was Ruth again, and had to open my inventory and put on all of my edited body parts and clothing items one by one. When I was dressed I looked for the avatar I had seen, and found Happi Homewood, working on his multi-story shopping center in the Moonbeam sim. He explained that he was getting ready for when CentralGrid would implement an in-world currency. I sent him a friend request, so that I could find him easily in-world, and he accepted it. That was my last act so far in CentralGrid.

And last but not least, I made one in-world visit to the Open Source Grid. I found the OS Grid website, and a link on the site to the OS Grid forum, which is obviously used by a fairly large and active community. Creating as usual a new shortcut for the Second Life viewer, I logged in as Danton Sideways, and landed in Wright Plaza. I took a moment to quickly run through the habitual OpenSim avatar editing process, putting on my standard 4 body parts and 3 pieces of clothing, and then explored the sim

I was pleased to find a fairly intricate, colorful build, with lots of vegetation, typical of what one finds in Second Life. And there were several avatars roaming around in just that one sim. I went up to a certain Paulie Femto, and chatted a while. He said I could use the sandbox if I wanted to on his Cameo Beach sim, which is actually run from his home computer, connected to OS Grid. He said he tried to keep it operating 24/7. He also told me about the freenode IRC channel for OS Grid. That definitely got my interest. After all these years of hearing about them, I've never actually had the occasion to use an IRC channel. This may be my big chance! READ MORE...

Linden Help Needs Help

Second Life journalist Wagner James Au recently wrote a blog post asking: Is Second Life's User Interface Cursed by Knowledge? He was referring to an inevitable Curse of Knowledge which affects experts in any field, preventing them from imagining what it is like to be a newcomer to that field. Wagner James Au suggests that the main reason Second Life loses so many new users is that the user interface is overly complex and confusing. But he doubts that either Linden Labs, or any developers working for them, will be able to improve the interface, because the curse of knowledge prevents them from understanding why the interface is hard for beginners to use.

As a beginner in Second Life, my initial reaction was somewhat different from what Wagner James Au describes. The interface struck me as being on a par with most software interfaces, neither better nor worse. What intimidated me more was to find myself suddenly immersed in a new public space, inhabited by other avatars, before I knew how to use the interface. I found Orientation Island poorly conceived, and struggled much longer than necessary "to get even minimally proficient," as Au puts it. But by far the greatest obstacle that I experienced had nothing to do with either the user interface or Orientation Island. What horrified me the most was to discover how useless the official Second Life tutorials and support systems are.

Consider the typical path a beginner might take in searching for written help. The natural place to start is the Second Life website. At the top of the main page are five headings, one of which is "support." The beginner thus clicks on "support" to open the Support Page.

This link takes a long time to open. When the support page finally comes up, one finds a central heading called "Locations for Support Information," under which is a promising link called "Knowledge Base and Solution Finder." Clicking on this link merely expands a paragraph that begins "We've created an extensive (and frequently updated) set of articles about Second Life," and ends with "You can log into this system by visiting the login form at the bottom of this page."

Wipe-out! Nothing drives a web surfer away like the requirement to login before you can read a page. Most surfers have to really, really want to read a page before they will take the time to fill out a login form. So you've lost most of them already.

Let us suppose that the user is sufficiently motivated to fill out this login form. Submitting the form opens a page which contains a number of links, including one called "Knowledge Base." Clicking on "Knowledge Base" opens a new window which is a marvel of poor design. I had to study this window for a long time before I discovered the drop-down menu hiding at the far left of the screen. When I finally got the knowledge base open, I found a sub-heading called "Controls and Getting Around," which seems aimed at beginners. Opening this sub-heading gives a three-page list of questions, of which the first ten questions are:

*Animation Guide
*Are you with CSI?
*Assorted Tips & Tricks - Video Tutorial
*How can I find a combat region?
*How do I change the time of day to something like sundown? It's a little too bright.
*How do I fly higher? I want to see what's on top of this building.
*How do I get the Near Me tab in the Communicate window to reappear if I delete it accidentally?
*How do I look at something from a different angle?
*How do I make it brighter? It's so dark I can't see anything.
*How do I open the Client (or Server) menu?

This is just a disorganized grab-bag of miscellaneous questions assembled in a haphazard fashion. I glanced at a few of them, and decided I was wasting my time. I moved off of the page in disgust, in search of something that might resemble a real tutorial.

Let's go back to the Second Life main page. At the bottom of this page there are numerous additional links. Those which seem possibly helpful to a beginner include: "FAQ," "Second Life Wiki," and "Tutorials." The FAQ are too short, and the Tutorials link goes to a set of videos. These videos may be of interest, but I skipped them as too time consuming. I'm looking for text I can navigate through quickly. So I went to the wiki.

The Main Page of the Official Second Life Wiki says nothing about tutorials. In boxes on the right-hand side of the page, however, the following two links caught my eye:

*LSL Portal - A (soon-to-be) complete reference guide to the LSL language.
*Creation Portal - Information about building and designing in Second Life.

It was too early for me to start building and designing: I just wanted basic information on using the interface. So I tried clicking on the LSL Portal. Fortunately I already knew that LSL means Linden Scripting Language - the LSL Portal page nowhere says what LSL means! The second paragraph on the LSL Portal page says:

"Want to learn LSL? Try one of the LSL Tutorials."

On the off-chance that I might find a beginner's guide there, I clicked on the link to open the LSL Tutorials page. On this page, at the top of the list of LSL tutorials, I finally found what seems to be a tutorial for beginning Second Life users, called Getting Ready to learn LSL. However, a quick glance reveals how inadequate this strange document is. Consider for example the text of section 3, "Learn how to really move around," which goes as follows:

"Learn how to really move around. We next learned how to 'walk', to 'sit', to 'stand up', to 'fly'. We learned how to 'search' for 'places' and how to 'teleport'. That was learning enough to begin exploring. We also learned how to use vehicles and drive around."

The above paragraph apparently describes the training that the new avatar goes through on Orientation Island. It thus makes no pretence to serve as an actual tutorial.

Let's go back once more to the Main Page of the Second Life Website. Looking again at the links at the top of the page, this time we will select the link called "Community." On the Community Page, in the vertical menu running down the left side of the page, is a link to the forum. The beginner clicks on the link to open the forum page, and finds this message: "You must log in to view the Second Life forums."

You must log in just to read the forums! Why is this? I can understand having to log in to contribute to the forums. But what sensitive confidential information do the forums contain that must be hidden from the public eye?

Oh well, the beginner says, let me log in so I can read the forums. But when I logged in to Second Life, and tried again to look at the forums, I still got the page with the following message:

"If you receive this error after successfully logging in to other parts of the Second Life website, please make sure that:
*You have logged in to Second Life at least once with your account.
*You have valid payment info on file for your account, if your account was created after August 20, 2006. You can update your payment information here. You don't need to have a Premium account."

In fact, to get permission to look at the forum, I had to send an email to the support team. I received from them a special password to open my access. A few days after launching the request, I was finally able to search the forums. But a forum is probably the least efficient of all possible ways to find a useful response to a specific question. People search through forums when all else has failed, because sometimes, after great expenditure of time and effort, you may finally find what you were looking for. But anyone who has ever searched for help on a forum knows that a forum is no substitute for a tutorial or an on-line help.

There remains In-World Help. The user interface includes a drop-down Help menu. The first item on this menu, "Second Life Help/F1," only sends you to the support website mentioned above. The second item, "In-World Help," opens a little window that says "For instant help on dozens of topics, simply press the F1 key!" It also suggests visiting Orientation Island and Help Island. But whenever you touch the F1 key, you just get sent back to the hopeless support website.

There is however a nifty feature in the In-World Help window. If you click on the "Home" button, you get - Google in an in-world window! I was thrilled to discover this way of consulting internet from within Second Life. But by sending us to Google, the Linden Labs Help function seems to be admitting that, to find help with Second Life, the best bet is - to look elsewhere.
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Fools for Tools

What project will Danton Sideways develop in Second Life? I thought I might go into business, or get involved in CDS politics. But a bit of soul searching has revealed that the Real Danton is above all interested in putting into practice Ivan Illich's theory of convivial tools.

In Tekki-Wiki Social Club I touched briefly on the subject of tools, in a discussion about wikis, drawing a pertinent comment from Prokofy Neva. Prokofy has presented his own take on the use of the word "tools" by Linden Labs in his Life Among the Lindens post, as follows:

"Tools! My God, I should have realized long ago that they picked up this rhetoric from Stewart Brand *slaps head* -- the old Whole Earth Catalogue had tools for living, as they called it, and we used to spend hours poring over its pages, reading about old-fashioned ice picks that were actually the perfect thing to use on stubborn weeds in your garden - or whatever. It was even more dorky than the LL Bean Catalogue. It was always about drying and grinding millet seeds and making millet loafs (whenever I think of that era of the 1960s and all that Whole Earth stuff, I think of millet loafs, and how goddamn hard they were to eat, with like 92 different grains and raw vegetables in them, and how we used to force them down anyway; in fact, what they did was make food taste like a tool...)"

Good old Prok – always ready to pop your balloon for you. Prokofy's role, as I see it, is to challenge our habitual ways of thinking, to act as a gadfly to force us to reflect more deeply. Prokofy is the sort of opponent who, if properly listened to, teaches you more than your friends ever will.

Because of course the Whole Earth Catalog was mother's milk to Danton Sideways. The Whole Earth Catalog came first, and Ivan Illich only became important to me later, in the nineteen-eighties, when I learned how Illich's theory of convivial tools had influenced personal computer pioneer Lee Felsenstein.

Why do I now refer to Ivan Illich more than to Stewart Brand? One reason is that Illich provides a specific theory about tools, while Brand has always focused on practice (albeit a practice of spreading new theories). But there are also basic differences between the approach theorized by Illich, and the approach put into practice by Brand. I will try to show that these two approaches are complementary.

The key difference is that Brandian practice is implicitly elitist, while Illichian theory is explicitly anti-elitist. The Brandian approach has always relied on a new Promethean elite, supposedly wiser than the traditional unenlightened elite, which is to bring "alternative" tools to the citizen. Thus the Whole Earth Catalog was produced by a team of specialists (and even those who contributed simply by writing letters to the editor formed a sort of elite), the CoEvolution Quarterly presented articles written by experts, the participants at the first Hackers Conference were hand-picked, and the Global Business Network assembles a stellar cast.

Illich, on the contrary, persistently criticized professional elites. The recurring theme throughout his books is that the professionalization of knowledge tends to disempower the average citizen. In Deschooling Society he demonstrates how professional teachers can prevent learning, in Tools for Conviviality he demonstrates how professional technologists can prevent community appropriation of tools, and in Medical Nemesis he demonstrates how professional doctors can prevent self-healing. The basic thrust of Illich's thought is to encourage individuals and communities to take back the control of knowledge which has been monopolized by professionals.

Thus, with respect to tools, Illich's proposed solution is community appropriation of technology. Stewart Brand has of course always been concerned with community. But Brand tends to see the tools coming to the community from the outside. The right tools are supposed to empower the citizen, without there being a need for citizens themselves to be involved in tool development. For Illich, the community only really appropriates the tool when the community itself participates in developing the tool.

A case study of the Illichian model of community tool development is found in the history of the personal computer. In the early nineteen-seventies Lee Felsenstein was working in San Francisco as chief engineer for the non-profit organisation Resource One, which had obtained the donation of an obsolete XDS 940 time-sharing computer. At a time when the Internet was no more than a research network linking a handful of campuses, Resource One set up a few public terminals at community gathering places around the SF Bay Area, to serve as electronic bulletin boards. In 1974 they installed a showcase connection at the Whole Earth Access store on Shattuck Avenue, using a fancy Hazeltine 1500 CRT terminal, which they leased with a service contract. One day the service technician working on it dropped the circuit board for the keyboard, breaking the ceramic pack on one of the chips. That experience started Felsenstein thinking about how to make such a system survive in a public access environment.

Felsenstein had just read Ivan Illich’s book "Tools for Conviviality," and was impressed by Illich's description of how radios were repaired in the jungles of Central America. The radio technology was sufficiently accessible to peasant users and brought out their inherent tendencies to learn. If you tried to fool with a radio, the tube might overheat, but it would survive and give you some warning that you had done something wrong. The radio could thus be used in the jungle environment because it "grew up" a cohort of people around it who knew how to maintain it.

To transpose such a model to computers, which require perfect reliability at every clock cycle, was particularly challenging. Felsenstein nonetheless convened a discussion group around the concept of a convivial computer, on the hypothesis that a new type of computer could only survive if it grew a computer club around itself. Among the subjects discussed by the small group (which soon fizzled out) was Don Lancaster's article in Radio Electronics magazine, telling how to build a "TV Typewriter," which did nothing more than print characters on a home TV screen. Felsenstein was interested in this possibility of constructing a little box, for about a hundred dollars worth of parts, which you could connect to a TV set to make a rudimentary terminal. He worked on developing an improved version that used random access memory chips. Felsenstein realised that if you installed the random access memory in a simple computer, you could then use that same memory to run the terminal. He therefore defined a terminal that used a three card set: a memory card, a card to put data into the memory, and a card to get information out of the memory and put it to the screen. To connect the three cards he defined a 44-pin bus structure that used cheap Vector connectors. He has suggested that this was the genesis of the architecture of the personal computer.

But to carry our story forward, a few months later, in January 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 hobby kit was advertised in Popular Electronics magazine. That advertisement catalyzed a meeting of computer enthusiasts grouped around the People’s Computer Center in Menlo Park. The meeting was attended by Lee Felsenstein, Steve Wozniak and many others who went on to play key roles in the development of the personal computer. The Altair is considered to have been the first "microcomputer," but it was in fact little more than a microcomputer chip inside a box. Those at the meeting soon realized that they, as a group, probably possessed more computer knowledge than the team that had thrown together the Altair. This group, which later called itself the Homebrew Computer Club, met regularly over the next year or so to carry on informal discussions of how to construct personal computing devices, in a collegial atmosphere of shared enthusiasm, rather than commercial interest. The very name suggests the extent to which this group embodied Felsenstein's original Illichian idea of a "computer club" to "grow up" a new type of computer – which is precisely what the Homebrew group did.

The Homebrew Computer Club was in fact a cross between the Brandian Promethean approach and the Illichian participatory approach, since it brought together an elite, but working on a participatory model. This is one way that the two approaches can be complementary. Another way is for a Promethean elite to bring new tools to a community, and for the community to then appropriate the tools and participate in their further development. This is essentially how things happen with free and open source software. Highly specialised programmers develop a software package, and then turn the source code over to a community of users, who participate in further development by finding bugs and adding new functionalities. Going a step further, when the Promethean elite deliberately sets out to design tools that can be easily modified and appropriated by the users, the two approaches fuse together into a new paradigm.

Another of Illich's key contributions is his use of the word "tool" to refer to all sorts of human constructs, rather than just physical instruments. The Whole Earth Catalog had already used the word "tool" in a very wide sense – more than half of the items in the Catalog were in fact books. But Illich makes this extension of meaning explicit, building on a tradition exemplified by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, who in the early nineteen-fifties used the word "technique" to include all of the various administrative methods used by modern state bureaucracies. Illich for example specifically calls legal mechanisms "tools." Certain other thinkers even refer to ideas as a type of tools: see for example Daniel Dennett's paper on Making Tools for Thinking.

Which brings us back to Prokofy Neva. If the word "tool" referred only to physical instruments, it would be hard to refute this argument from his Life Among the Lindens post:

"The tool thing is loosely based on that old idea of 'give a man a fish, and you have fed him for one day; teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime'. The problem with this facile adage of Western do-goodism is that people in civil war in Africa have a different problem. My God, they know how to fish, if they even have fish (a lot of them are in the desert). The problem is their kleptocratic governments steal their poles or poison the waters or chase them off their land with fratricidal wars. A man in Darfur needs a fish, not a pole, and somebody should attend to the larger problem of all the well-poisoning and cattle-slaughtering and compensate the villages for that destruction."

Prokofy's point is conclusive if by tools we mean only physical instruments such as fishing poles. The first need of poor people in many countries is not for material tools, but to be liberated from the corruption and repression of their own governments. But the question is how to achieve that. The international community can play a role, on the Promethean model of bringing help from without. But it remains critically important for such communities to develop their own internal capacity to struggle for democracy. Thus the pertinence of the Illichian model of development by the community of its own "tools" in the largest sense, including the types of associations, organisations and thought-models that can enhance empowerment in the local context.

How does all of this apply to Second Life? For more on that, tune in next week, same time, same URL…
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