Communication

Well, I did say that I would release the thing, and so I have. In practice I decided to charge the princely sum of L$0 for it, including two sets of appropriate official flags; anyone wishing to leave a donation to offset my Uploading Charges is more than welcome, but I dare say they will not bankrupt me.

The Semaphore Animation Device is available from my Caledon shop of course, and also from ShopOnRez. (I am afraid that I do not have the patience these days to list items on SLExchange, certainly not ones from which I gain no monetary reward.)

A lengthy page of instructions is available for the benefit of insomniacs, and for those who are still not asleep, the main script itself is also viewable.

The item itself is not transferrable. Whilst regular readers will be aware that I am not the most assiduous in pursuing Resellers of my Free Items, counting it as one of the consequences of releasing items that are both Copiable and Transferrable, that is not to say that I like it when some reprobate grabs things which I set out and re-packages them as part of some godawful “Business In A Box”. In actual fact I do not object too much if a New Resident decides to scour the Grid for free items for which he or she may con some Even Newer Resident out of a few coppers - at least some effort goes into that practice, and it may be said that they perform a service - but the industrial reselling of Free Items is something which annoys me somewhat.

Furthermore, this morning, when I approached someone in their appallingly-textured shop and politely requested that they cease selling my Grid Crash Protection Box for monetary gain (I have no illusions that such action is technically punishable by what Laws of the Land exist, very little is, but as a Free Citizen I am quite at liberty to make that sort of request with ethical justification, particularly as there are clear notices indicating that these things are Not For Resale) I was treated to a dull little lecture about how “we don’t own anything therefore I can sell anything” and how I should read the Terms Of Service, as if I had not read them enough times to be able to repeat them verbatim.

This annoyed me, even though said seller did in the end remove my products - apparently customers had been complaining that the Grid Crash Protection Box did not actually protect them! perish the thought - and thus I am disinclined at this time to offer copiable and transferrable items, even though many fine folk would find this convenient.

I do apologise for this tangent.

Well, it seems that “Voice” is present across the Grid now, at least for those who care to Download the newest Viewer, and it is on as standard across Caledon. Those of you who wish to partake in the receiving of other-worldly voices - and coughs, and feedback, and the sounds of errant other-world children, and so on and so on ad nauseam - may do so widely, without even having to pay any sort of Pharmacist for this Altering of the Mind.

You will not be able to do so in any parcels over which I have control, though - I have taken the liberty of disabling said function, lest visitors have the impression that they can ask me questions using it, and I will respond. I will not hear them in the first place, let alone be able to speak back in this arcane fashion.

I do, to be honest, feel a little guilty for preventing my customers from engaging in discussion in their chosen form whilst I am not there. For the moment I shall be leaving this particular option unworking, but perhaps a sign somewhere saying “Ordinal Will Not Hear You” would be more appropriate. As soon as I have developed such a thing I will try its use, and if it turns out to be ineffective, well, back to the blanket forbiddance.

My views on the whole situation have not changed from the last time I pontificated regarding it, by the way.

~*~

As a more serious point: I am able, in the current environment of Second Life, to reject the use of voice, and yet still have people willing to entertain my preferences, as (I believe) I have proved that I am capable of Scripting and Doing Other Things.

It does concern me that those younger than I, with less of a Reputation, will not have that option. I am not concerned for myself, I am awkward and difficult and have no intention of budging, but others in a less fortunate position, I would not like to see disadvantaged, and I do worry about them.

Suffice to say that anyone who wishes to converse on Scripting Matters via the medium of the written word will always be able to do so with me, and with any of the people whom I respect.

~*~

Oh, and by the way - whilst at the moment the service is free, and a relief that must be for Island Owners who were considering having to pay a Hundred American Dollars Extra per Month, this will not remain the case indefinitely, according to the Voice FAQ at this time:

Island Owners will have voice for their land at no cost until the end of the 2007 calendar year. After this, Island Owners will be asked to pay a monthly fee for voice if they are not already at new pricing that includes voice.

Said fee not being explicitly detailed, though, one presumes, it will be less than a hundred dollars.

I flatter myself to think that I am at least known as someone of mostly Phlegmatic Temperament, even when peculiarities of Second Life are concerned. I am, I believe, reasonable tolerant of Flaws, even if I will occasionally make squawks of protest; these are mostly due to surprise.

There are some things, however, up with which I will not put.

“Twitterbox say”? Have I accidentally entered the Pre-Teen Grid? Or perhaps we are expected now to write in “lolcode“? I believe that I do take some Care in the composition of Prose, and even if that is not the general perception, I am certainly sensitive to errors in this regard, even if at times I am known to play with them; the improper conjugation of verbs is as the squeaking of the brakes of a Hansom cab, or the squealing of a Guinea-Pig. I constantly have objects telling me things and this will drive me absolutely potty.

Natural Language Generation is a complex area of study, and even identifying a plural noun can be rather tricky; it appears that in this instance that has not even been attempted. For heaven’s sake, if conjugation is impossible, stick to the colon. Everything else uses the colon in any case; this offence against all civilised mores only occurs when llOwnerSay is used.

It really does feel as if some Linden or other has decided to repeatedly poke me on the nose. Stop it. I am aware that my nose is quite sizeable, it does not need poking.

The Jira issue is here: Fix the legibility and grammar/consistency of the new llOwnerSay implementation. Vote, and vote again.

Whilst I am waiting for the latest working version of the econd Life Client Thing to squeeze itself through the Aethernetical Pipes and plop onto my desk, I suppose that I might as well write a little about my experiments with automated photography, mentioned previously.

It has been said by myself (and, to be fair, others) many times that there is no way for a Script to take a Picture, and this is, speaking strictly literally, true. Scripts cannot take Photographs. However, there are ways of getting around this issue, as I have found recently.

The procedure at base works along the following lines: a script, as is generally known, can send a message to an outside Aethernet Server. That server can retain the message that is sent (”take a picture please”). One’s own personal Engine can also receive messages from the same Server, and one’s own Engine is furthermore capable of taking pictures - at least, of the current screen, not nearly as good as the in-world photography tool but hey ho.

To this effect I have an attachment which, at regular intervals, sends off a message to my own Server containing my current whereabouts. I also have a small program running on my own Engine, which contacts my Server regularly and says “are there any messages waiting?” If so, it downloads the information, takes a picture of my current screen, resizes it to appropriately small dimensions and writes my location onto a little bar at the top (also disguising the ugly top-of-the-window part of said screenshot). Since the aim here is to create a record of my activities for my own enlightenment, it also saves the location and a few other data to a daily log.

The time delay between the making of the request and the taking of the screenshot is less than ten seconds, which is not too bad, though it does mean that my precise location is not precisely appropriate to the screenshot, but, well, hey ho again. More rapid polling of the server would help to eliminate this. Oh - the attachment that I wear can be turned on and off, as well. After it sends my location to the Server and my Engine receives it and takes a shot, that information is then deleted from the Server, so when information stops being sent no pictures are taken.

Finally, when all is done with, the pictures are thrown together in a pile and turned into a piece of Cinema, which speeds up my activities dramatically, one minute becoming one second of time. Here, for instance, one might see me building things, then being unsatisfied with them and deleting them (a common pastime):

SLifelog 2007-06-24 - building things and deleting them from Ordinal Malaprop

For technical types, the script on my own Engine is written in Perl, using curl to access a page on ordinalmalaprop.com, then using the OS X utility screencapture (helpfully pointed out to me by Mr Westbrook of the Electric Sheep) to, er, capture the screen. The ridiculously cryptic yet powerful program mencoder is used to compile a video for the day. Should I have the time it would be more efficient for the thing to run using cron or launchd or some such but to be fair, I am not terribly good with these particular tools and have concentrated more on getting it to work in the first place. Addendum: In practice, to produce the above, I actually used ffmpeg, which has options to pad the pictures to the correct size, and may switch to the use of that tool in general.

Ah - I see that the older client is sitting on my desk as I write this, wailing away in its birth throes, and I must attend. Actual scripts etc to follow.

A perpetual problem of mine is that I am unable to concentrate on one thing for more than about, oh, an afternoon, leading to the unfortunate situation where possible projects and Matters Upon Which To Write flare brightly and then burn out within moments, like phosphorus sparrows. No sooner do I plan to write a Definitive Article upon some subject, which must be Gotten Right, than some new shiny object appears and drives the original one completely away from my attention.

The result of this is that I am rather poor at actually writing anything, as perfectionism restrains me from making an entry on something incomplete, yet I do not have the urge to complete it, and it is only when I reach a level of self-disgust at this that I throw out whatever peculiar half-finished objects that remain in my mind into this Journal, often in the form of Bullet Points. I believe that it was easier in my earlier days, when I was rarely thinking about more than three things at one time.

Enough of this preambling though; I will do my best to clear the decks. The subject of this entry is something that I call the Twitterbomb, though really it isn’t much of a bomb, unless one considers very slow-moving fragments that are in any case phantom to be dangerous. This was actually mentioned previously by Nick Wilson writing in Metaversed as he is a proper journalist who investigates things and writes about them, whereas I am no such thing and do not even have a picture of my own creation at the time of writing.

The Twitterbomb, as Mr Wilson says and as I mention in the comment section there, is a device for the Visualisation of timed and differently-authored data; the Twitter friends timeline is the easiest to work with, as it collects data into a single feed, but I suppose RSS feeds and such could be used. There is a central “bomb”, which reads in Twitter data via a proxy (a stripped-down version of the Twitterbox one) throws out differently-coloured “fragments” - the angle of movement and colour of these fragments is individual to each different author, thus each person’s output is represented by a line of tweets stretching out from the centre. Each fragment’s size is proportional to the number of letters in the tweet.

The fragments move outwards at a constant speed, with their distance from the bomb being a function of their age. There is a configurable maximum age, with fragments disappearing once they reach this. (Once rezzed, the fragments are independent, and with a busy friends timeline this could result in an awful lot of prims being around, thus best to use this in a fairly empty lot.)

I confess to not having a specific target to achieve here, but it is a toy that enables one to play with the possibilities of visualising data in Three Dimensional Form. One can look at the fragments produced and see, say, how active an individual is and their “rhythm” by observing the “clumping” and size of clumps produced; a wordy but regular poster will have fat fragments evenly spaced, someone who posts in bursts of short pieces will have thin lines separated by empty space and so on. A particularly significant event for one’s friends will be marked by a “shell” of tweets all appearing at the same time and expanding outwards. Changes could certainly be made to the way the fragments are emitted to test different concepts of visualisation.

I say all this, but actually, in practice I have Given Up on the Twitterbomb for the moment - which is likely to mean forever - since Twitter has taken to caching my requests and not giving me recent updates reliably at all. This is odd, since the Twitterbox seems to be working perfectly well, or at least is when both Twitter and SL are working at the same time (a combination of reliabilities that one is not advised to bet one’s life or significant bodily organs upon). With this in mind, once I am able to return to the world I shall be sure to post the relevant Code here.

Well, that is over with in any case. Next, something else, I believe.

Another one of my rambling jotting type entries I fear. For any of you mad enough to find these interesting, my “Tumblr” thing, Ordinal’s Cabinet of Ephemera, contains these in even more abbreviated form, though it is not quite so trivial as my Twitter stream of consciousness, which contain such fascinating details as when I have to take the washing inside because it has started raining. There is really a strict hierarchy here which I suppose one might graph, with axes of Triviality and Connection-With-The-Grid; this Journal is moderate on the former and highish on the latter, the Cabinet is higher and lower respectively and Twitter at the upper and lower extremes of both.

Alas, I have been looking upon some of the products of the East (or West, or perhaps North or even South depending on your exact location) this evening, deriving from the place known as Samurai Island, and they are extremely impressive in appearance; all particles aside, I felt rather ashamed of the relatively static and staid motions connected to my own products. But then we cannot all work in the same styles - acrobatics and such would really be a little too demonstrative for me in general I feel - and whilst I am improving in my skill with animations I am not by any means a mistress of them as yet.

Still, I plan at some point to pay a visit to said Island, and look utterly ridiculous no doubt bearing blades as tall as I am, as part of my research into weapons of Close Combat upon the Grid. Herein I post a few pictures taken in the bowels of New Babbage of the latest product upon which I have been working, very close to release; a Knife-Pistol, slightly more advanced than the usual flintlocks in that it is a five-shot automatic, but still I am pleased with the design.

In other brief news, I have also been working on a system whereby customers might automatically receive the latest updates to products that they have bought - this is both useful for them, clearly, and also may mean that I am not quite so hampered by the idea of only releasing things when I am utterly sure of their perfection or more likely when I cannot stand the sight of them any longer, which slows one down and is also always doomed to failure in any case.

Given my stated convictions relating to the privacy of one’s data, the thing is entirely “opt-in”, and sends not a peep out to my server without you first activating it; you are also quite able to remove it entirely. It is not, as yet, an entirely generic system for use by anyone, but I think that I will throw the code up here once I have tested it a little more for the perusal of interested parties.

As a further note, as I mentioned I have been doing research into Combat Systems recently, and there are a few simple tips for the designers of weapons for use in “roleplay” sims that use either the “DCS” or “CCS” that I would also like to write up. My notes on this are in a parlous state at the moment and I have been promising to do this forever it seems, but really, truly, I will. Very soon.

Finally, I was recently informed by Mr Deanfred Brandeis that the latest design of the Reuters HUD has been released - one may visit the Reuters Island to obtain one. I have used it myself and I must say, it is a fine piece of work - those readers who have been looking for a device which provides easy access to feeds in the RSS format will be pleased, as one may configure it to read from a number or even ones entirely of one’s own choosing. I spy a slight omission in the list of available bl*gs though.

It has long been frustrating to me that, when we are upon the Grid, everything that we hear appears in that damnable green or that damnable white. Surely something better could be arranged, so that one might more easily distinguish between speakers, or simply between speakers that one wishes to hear from and those which one does not, without muting the latter? If you are sympathetic to this, I would appreciate it if you would consider voting for this proposal and perhaps even drumming up a little support for it yourself. Thank you.

Whilst those of us who were unable to attend the Town Hall Meeting today will no doubt be thankful for the provision of a transcript of questions and answers on the Official Laboratoire Court Circular - and it is, certainly, an informative document - I thought that it might also be appropriate to publish an unedited version including the interventions of attendees, which I was passed just now by Mr Simon Pulford. (It does not cover the whole thing, I admit.)

~ please see this record of the Town Hall ~
(as I seem to be prevented from posting the whole lot here)

NB: the appearance of this transcript was created using my chat log colourising thing, a free service.

Concerns of Lag and Presence have been frustrating me a little when it comes to Building of recent days, but I have been able at least to achieve a few things.

The first is yet another one of my Aethernetical Nonsense Works - a little thing which I call “Eventcal“. As you will know, Great and Terrible Lab has blessed us all with a little shared Diary of Events, in which anyone may place items and which anyone may read; it is, however, a bit tricky to use at times, and some of us would wish to use it in concert with our own Diaries (Aethernetical or Otherwise) more easily.

At the moment one may view these Events outside of the Grid, but I have found it more convenient to view and note them using such other things as “Google Calendar”. With this in mind I produced a minor Aethernet Automaton which, when asked, rifles through the afore-linked section for all of the events assigned to a particular category occurring in the next seven days and gives them to you in a format that is generally Machine-Legible (named “iCal”).

The upshot of all of this is that this thing allows one to subscribe to a particular Events category with Google Calendar, the Apple program iCal, Outlook (I believe - I have not tried this) or in fact anything which understands this widely-accepted way of sharing calendars. If this sounds like something of interest to you, please visit the Eventcal page for more information as to how to use it yourself.

The second is a more general project; my experiences with constructing my Galvanic Swordstick recently, and certain issues arising regarding our Regrettably Inevitable Conflict (mostly Standards) left me wishing that I - and others - were able to simply use some form of Generally Compatible System of Personal Combat. When I speak of this I am really talking about something along the lines of the systems mentioned in my Standards post, in other words, a script which anyone might drop into a hand or other weapon, control via Link Messages and use to Engage others similarly equipped.

I considered a wide-scale, “persistent” system of some sort, which would keep details on one’s health and injuries and so on in an Aethernet Data Archive tied to one’s identity, but this struck me as missing the point somewhat - whilst it would be an interesting system and likely diverting in the long term for a certain subset of duellists (and perhaps something I might work on out of interest’s sake) the sort of communities where this is useful are fairly uncommon, usually have their own systems already and are not ones in which I live.

For most potential combatants it is quite enough to have the ability to have occasional battles with similarly-equipped people, without having to either have the power to create, or risk entering, a Combat Zone. Furthermore, a persistent system might give the wrong impression of Caledon, which is a mostly very peaceful place; I do not wish to have random folk accosting me for martial purposes, myself.

At the moment, the system works on a sensor and chat basis, with a central script in each weapon that, when activated:

1. announces when the wearer has activated or deactivated the system;
2. receives requests via link message to strike with a certain force - each one has an appropriate time delay, so that one may launch many quick but light attacks, or one slow but very dangerous one, or something in-between;
3. senses when a target should be hit on such an attack, and broadcasts a message saying that an appropriate hit has been scored;
4. receives hit messages and depletes health accordingly;
5. when the wearer’s health has been depleted to zero, stops itself working for a certain time and holds the wearer to their position (also starting an appropriate “fall down and do not move” animation) until such time as they have recovered, currently thirty seconds.

One thing which is also a possibility is that it will be able to affect inanimate objects containing appropriate scripts; something which I find useful during the testing period.

I shall be experimenting further with this, and releasing it for general use once things have been completed. Unfortunately, to prevent Cheating and Skullduggery, the script must remain Un-Modifiable (though free to copy and transfer) but the basic principles will certainly be outlined for those wishing to learn from my poor efforts.

For what it is worth, I have finally gotten around to releasing the latest version of the Twitterbox, which includes a number of new features and is generally a bit more reliable. Of course, at this time the Grid is… well, it is a Wednesday.

If you wish to view a list of changes from the previous version, by all means read on, and do excuse the scrappiness of my list-making.

Now, hopefully, I might be able to work on, you know, a thing, rather than a succession of ephemeral seance devices. Something which exists in its own right, and allows one to do something upon the Grid itself which one previously could not. Alas, the fractious nature of reality is making this just a tad tricky, with some of my best works now appearing foolish and error-ridden, but the time will come I’m sure when events do not just occur in random orders.

Read the rest of this entry »

Of little interest to those not inclined to develop Twittery Things, but proposals have emerged for those creating Clients (such as the Twitterbox) to be able to identify their Device to the Twitterverse. Apparently the latest proposals can be found here, and involve setting values for the following headers:

X-Twitter-Client
X-Twitter-Client-URL
X-Twitter-Client-Version

I have modified my own control script for Twitterbox 0.3 to include these - fear not, no action is required on the part of any users.
Thank you for whatever attention you have seen fit to pay to this entry.

Oh my giddy aunt, I forgot entirely to announce the release of version 0.3 of the Twitterbox before retiring the previous night.

Well, version 0.3 of the Twitterbox has been released. It is fairly similar to the previous version, as one might expect, with the addition of the ability to automatically post the URL of the latest entry in an “RSS” or “Atom” “feed”. Say, for instance, one places a photograph of one’s surroundings on Snapzilla - with proper configuration and a Twitterbox, one might include the word SNAPZILLA (or, depending on one’s preferences, ZILLA, SNAP, PHOTO, PORCUPINE or pretty much anything) in one’s twitterings and have it replaced with a conveniently-bijou tinyurl leading to the photograph. The same goes for a journal entry, or a phonographic recording, or, well, I am sure others are more inventive than I. (You may see a more full description in the “keywords” section of the main Twitter page.) Personally speaking I find it very convenient when combined with the Applescriptery mentioned in my previous entry.

I might also mention that I tidied up the reporting-of-errors function a little, so that it does not throw a whole mess of nonsense into one’s face whenever it is unable to locate something. This is a common enough wrinkle of the Aethernet for nonsense-mess-throwing to not be particularly desirable.

As usual, the Twitterbox can be found at my Caledon shop, or, shortly at SLExchange and SLBoutique. Similarly as usual, full details are on the main Twitterbox page.

I mentioned in my last Twitter-related post of inordinate length that it might be possible to set a Folder Action on the Apple Platform which would automatically upload full-sized snapshots to Flickr, although dealing with Applescript was like having porcupines in one’s socks. The porcupines have turned out not to be quite as troublesome as I first thought, and I have managed to squash together two existing Applescripts in order to make this possible. Do note that this is of no use to any reader whose Own Engine is not compatible with the “OS X” System, and I have no inclination, or indeed idea of how, to make such a thing work on other Systems.

Here is the code for the Folder Action:

• convert-flickr-send-folder-action.scpt

The exact details of how to set a folder action on a folder are a little beyond the explanatory power of this Journal, but I would advise anyone not familiar with the procedure to inspect the Apple Company’s own pages on the matter.

Firstly, create a folder to which you will be saving your pictures - I have one on my Desktop called “Send To Flickr”, but it could really be anywhere. Save the script above somewhere, edit it to include your own Email Address and your own personal Email Address For Sending Things To Flickr With (see here if not aware of this), then assign it as a Folder Action. The script itself includes detailed directions as to where you might stick your Email Addresses.

Once this has been done and one enters Second Life, the first snapshot that is saved to disc will have to be saved specifically to the folder which you created. You should, really, be able to remember its location. After that, any snapshot you take and save there - or in fact any that you move to that folder by hand, as it were - will be converted to the JPEG format, and then sent to Flickr. A simple “CTRL-” will be sufficient to publicly record your immediate surroundings, as long, of course, as you are a user of the Apple Company’s Mail.app device. And with Twitterbox 0.3 you will be able to swiftly send this picture to the world, or at least the Twitterworld, a dark and drunken hive of scum and villainy if you ask me.

As an addition, I have designed an icon appropriate for a Flickr-uploading folder which you are very welcome to use, until such time as Lawyers force me to remove it, which I hope they will not. “Flickr” is a trademark of somebody or something, and no infringement is meant blah-de-blah.

Next, we shall examine methods of forcing Second Life to make one tea and toast. Or perhaps some other subject will arise.

I had decided that the next iteration of the Twitterbox (note that the official spelling has now been set as the previous, rather than “TwitterBox”, for reasons of idleness quite honestly) - which will be 0.3 - should incorporate some form of support for images. As is my wont, I am mostly interested in an client for Twitter in the respect that it can be individual to, and send data regarding one’s activities in, Second Life itself - otherwise, why not simply use one of the other excellent methods of communicating with it?

I find the Twitterbox very convenient for taking notes of travels and the locations of things, somewhat in the same way as my existing Slurlblogger, but more immediate and clearly more fashionable; the automatic “tinyslurl” function in version 0.2 has the intention of making this even easier. (I find the tinyurl function provided by Twitter a little unreliable and unpredictable, and would rather do it all myself.) Clearly what readers really desire from a travelogue is photography, though. Twitter is not capable of delivering actual pictures, but is perfectly capable of providing links to pictures stored outside of it, on Aethernet sites such as Flickr and Snapzilla.

It is at this point that one starts to butt against the limitations of (L)SL. It is currently impossible to have a script take a picture. The only way to extract images from the Grid is for one to do it manually oneself with the “snapshot” function; this can then be saved to one’s own Machine (quickest, but not terribly useful) or sent elsewhere as a rather decorated Email, or Postcard. As many will be aware, it is possible to send images directly via Email to Flickr, but Flickr considers the Postcards sent to be too confusing to manage and refuses to accept them. Snapzilla is specialised for the receipt of Postcards (and will even cross-post them to Flickr if properly instructed) but unfortunately I am having… issues with Snapzilla with which I will not bore you but which are currently preventing me from taking advantage of its existence. In either case, sending Postcards still takes a little time, and is not nearly as convenient as typing in a line of text to twitter.

Not for socks.

Ironically the only way that automated picture-taking-and-uploading may be implemented at the present time that I know of is to modify one’s own client or use an Automaton, an early example of which was Destroy Television. From that piece of November 2006 we see the following:

Jerry Paffendorf, the Sheep’s resident futurist, is hot on the idea of Destroy TV as it relates to lifelogging. He imagines residents of virtual worlds traveling around with a similar service attached to them, Flickring every moment of their virtual lives.

A noble imagining, Mr Paffendorf, and one which corresponds somewhat to my own desires here, though I have a feeling that Flickring every moment of their lives might not be universally popular with residents. However, I podo not personally have the time or quite frankly ability to modify clients to do this, and would much prefer if they were included for all to use within LSL. A thought has occurred just the moment that it might be possible for me to write some sort of Applescript which would react to the process of Second Life taking and saving pictures to one’s (Apple) Machine - in other words, it throws a huge bitmap onto one’s desktop - by converting the picture and sending it off to Flickr, so that just one keypress would result in an uploading… but I heartily despise Applescript and the experience for me would be rather like having a porcupine take refuge in my sock. I shall take a look to see whether it works out to be a Simple Task, but I warn you that I will not be suffering quills under the toenails for long.

I seem to have digressed somewhat from discussion of the Twitterbox here, as usual, and should return to my original point for this post before I wander completely off the face of the Grid. Sending picture links via Twitter, yes, that was it, pay attention Ordinal.

So. Last night I was thinking: how could one’s Twitterbox actually find the URL of an appropriate picture to display? Well, I could have a system which received Postcards, sent them to Flickr, and then made a Twitter entry about them, but (a) I do not have the time (b) I do not have the energy (c) other people have done things like that already, for instance Kisa Naumova, which look far better than any poor effort I might be able to knock up and (d) it would result in the Twitterbox code ending up hideously bloated and unreadable, which I submit is not really the point of it. I wish to keep the thing relatively lightweight and able to be read easily by Scripters of PHP and LSL alike. Please do not tell me, readers of the Scripting persuasion, that you really love to read page after page of such stuff. Even if you do, honestly, love to read page after page of such stuff, please avoid mentioning it, as I will not cater to your peculiar fancies.

I decided instead to toy with the idea of providing a keyword, as with the one for tinyslurls (”SLURL”). This keyword, say “FLICKR”, if included would result in Twitterbox Control looking back on the user’s recent Flickr pictures - as taken from the RSS Feed for that person’s account - and turning the link for the latest one into a tinyurl. In short, it posts a tinyurl to your most recent Flickr picture. I do not even bother to properly parse the RSS feed to be honest, just grab the first available thing and assume it is right.

To properly use this function one must have previously sent a picture to Flickr, and thus it is a two-or-more-stage process: extract a picture somehow, get it into Flickr somehow, then sent a tweet. This does in fact work as it is, but it is not particularly convenient compared to, say, a BlogHUD.

In my disheartenment this morning, though, a thought struck me: why should this be restricted to pictures? Almost everything has an RSS feed these days, and they (should) all use the same format. Why not simply have a function which can be given the appropriate RSS feed, and will extract the latest item on it to post a link to? It could be something on Vimeo, or Odeo, or even another Twitter account. It need not necessarily even be yours. The point of this is a little limited perhaps but the possibility of possibilities intrigues me.

At this moment I am considering a notecard to be placed within the device and edited by the user, which would let keywords be defined for inclusion, so a line reading

FLICKR http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=25972087@N00&format=rss_200

would mean that any mention of the word FLICKR would be replaced by a tinyurl to the latest Flickr entry defined by the feed at that particular address. (It is mine, in case you were wondering.) One could have several different services. Perhaps with both FLICKR and SLURL being used in the same post, the SLURL could incorporate a thumbnail from the latest Flickr post. See - I have managed to turn the fact that it does not actually do what I wanted it to into a feature! The ghastly vision of a future in sales flashes briefly before my eyes, leaving me sweaty and shaken.

Please do not take the above as being necessarily indicative of the contents of Twitterbox 0.3, but there will be at least some vague and incompetent attempt to implement them.

Post Scriptum: I am currently using the “Google Documents” system to compose this and finding it surprisingly convenient.

Twitterbox 0.2 post animation on Vimeo

The latest version of the TwitterBox, 0.2, has just this minute been made available. There are two main changes here:

1. The TwitterBox now has more decorative and animated effects when twittering - see the video above;
2. More practically, if one includes the word SLURL (as written, all capitals) in a tweet, it will be replaced with the TinyURL to a SLurl for one’s present location.

As usual, full details, including links to the SLX and SLB pages concerned, can be found on the main Twitter page, and of course it is all free. I shall be posting the code at my earliest convenience.

Oh, and as an addendum - I have previously complained that Vimeo, my preferred Video Hosting Place, restricted uploads to a mere Thirty Megabytes per Week. They have recently changed their policies to permit Two Hundred and Fifty Megabytes per Week, and at no cost! I would thus heartily recommend them for all Machiniminamists without reservation; the resolution is the highest (400×300 rather than the usual 320×240), they allow direct access to one’s source files if one wishes, and their interface is simply a joy to use.

Daring avatars have provided us with a visual example of a Seance, which I am interested to see, though I do not think this is the best advertisement - it manages to appear simultaneously boring and a bit scary. In a circle of friends, two manage to say anything, and there is no connection between the Audible Part and anything that one can see. Otherworldly Voices come seemingly out of nowhere, as might be expected of them, and say little of interest. A much more detailed vocal explanation can be seen here.

Still. I’m sure we will be seeing a wide array of cinematography soon. Personally, I prefer to have a glass moving around on a table for my communications with other worlds; the traditional way.

With all that in mind, I would mention that the next version of the Twitterbox possesses functions to automatically include a SLurl to one’s current location if one says the word “SLURL”. There are also moves afoot to include a social service, inviting anyone within twenty metres to become your friend. I am not sure that this is desirable, all told, and may remove it.

The persistent rumours that folk on the Grid will soon be able to hear voices in their heads appear to be approaching a state of reality.

Speaking personally, and after taking medical advice, I have no intention of listening to Otherworldly Voices within SL or inviting other people to do the same, and it strikes me from a quick look at different reactions so far across many different Aethernet publications that a lot of others seem to feel the same way, or at least are sceptical as to their practical utility. Reasons given include:

• “it will ruin immersion to have inappropriate voices for appearances” / “my voice is part of my RL identity, not my SL one”
• “people are idiots“
• “group discussion would be even more of a nightmare than it is at the moment”. As others have said, it is hard to shout over other people with text, whereas any decent-sized group discussion with voice unless carefully managed becomes a bit of a mess.
• “any busy area would be a nightmare” (imagine - or perhaps try to avoid imagining - a Welcome Area or busy club)
• “people will start to spam by voice, not just text”
• “it is bad for non-native English speakers, who will have a harder time interpreting accents etc and expressing themselves” and one can’t use a Babbler with voice
• “there is no simple logging and analysis of voice chat”

The immersion and separation points are very important. One spends so much time customising one’s appearance and the way one comes across to others in Second Life, yet there is little one can do about one’s Other World voice - “masking” technologies aren’t really very good and don’t change one’s phrasing in any case. A couple of examples - Fiend Ludwig in the Herald’s comment area says:

SL is all about a *second* life - my voice is an exclusive feature of my first life and I want it to stay that way.

I also like Mr Nate Combs’ related statement about the “ebbing away of the distinction between the virtual and the real identity/experience”, that any direct insertion of voice (and by necessity ambient sound) intrinsically chips away at one’s sense of otherworldness whatever it is used for. Clearly this is something of an “immersionist” / “augmentationist” issue - some people simply will not see the issue, or think it silly - but I know which side of that I am most on.

The issue of logging or simple persistence of text on a screen, though it has not really been mentioned an awful lot, seems to me to be very significant as well. At the moment, an automatic record is created of every single conversation that I have on the Grid, which easily be searched within or without it, thus I can in an instant check whether I have spoken to someone before, what they said about my parentage and so on. Unless one is prepared to record and transcribe every conversation, this becomes rather difficult with Otherworldly Voices.

Even when one thinks simply of the advantages of (with text) being able to lose concentration for a moment or do something else - make a cup of tea, give a burglar what for - and then reread the last few messages in a conversation without anyone noticing that one has even been away, it becomes clear that there is a great advantage in such logging. Voice is immediate and demands attention or it is gone, or at least very hard to get back; having multiple conversations at once is tricky at the best of times.

Oh, and think of the issues when one is having more than one conversation at once, with people in different parts of the Grid! Speaking to A, B and C individually at the same time is simple with text, if one allows a certain delay, but three simultaneous voice conversations with the parties not hearing anyone else I do not think would be at all practical. It may be that these Voices will have to be limited to those who are in close physical proximity. I am surely not the only person who never seems to be conversing with just one person at once.

Now, the above might be taken to indicate that I am opposed to the idea of Otherworldly Voices intruding onto this plane. This is not the case - I possess no hostility to this projected Spiritualism and see few who do either. There are worries, though, that those not using Otherworldly Voices will be seen as evasive, or simply ignored, and that using the system will become the norm, driving out those who do not wish to for whatever reason. I do not personally fear this, as I consider that, given the number of doubts I see expressed even within hours of the announcement, for the foreseeable future the use of text will remain the default, particularly in group activities, where one must take the abilities and preferences of every participant into account.

To be quite honest, if I encountered someone who insisted on using voice to communicate on some matter of business, I would assume - as I have in the past, with External OV Services - that they were attempting to evade any possibility of their speech being recorded for the attention of the Linden Judges or for future evidence of contracts and agreement. I am only a rather amateur shopkeeper, but were I to be dealing with many customers at once, I would be most concerned that certain types would try to exploit the difficulty of logging. This corresponds, now that I think of it, to my mistrust of people in the Other World who wish only to communicate via the Telephone and refuse to send Emails of Confirmation - I consider them rude (for demanding that I reply at their convenience, i.e. when they call, not mine, i.e. when I get around to it) and potentially duplicitous (wishing to make promises and then avoid taking responsibility for them later through lack of evidence).

To sum up, there is certainly nothing wrong with people using OVs within Second Life - they do quite frequently already - but I would not expect it to become the dominant form of communication, instead reserved more for certain people and certain occasions. I imagine that it would be useful for some forms of discussion or lecture where the main speakers can communicate more easily by, well, speaking, than they can with a keyboard. I imagine that those who already chat in this way will find a built-in system more convenient, and that some others will encounter it for the first time and find that it suits them. It will remain an added option.

The day when one is ostracised for preferring to speak in the form of the written word I do not see approaching - particularly as there is no proposal to differentiate between residents in terms of access (though perhaps between landowners - a different kettle of fish) and thus use of voice does not become a social signifier in itself. Voice is useful when playing games, where it provides quick communication without having to release controls for a moment and potentially die, but that is not common in Second Life. There are also many more people here interested in tinkering with their identity, appearance, setting and other such elements who would find that the general use of un-tinkerable voice interferes with their enjoyment.

Here, as an addendum, are a few other pieces on the subject:

• Official Linden “Blog”
• Second Life Insider
• Vivox Press Release
• Second Life Herald
• Second Life Education Research
• A thread in the second_lifers Livejournal community

The TwitterBox is now present for your delectation on SLExchange and SLBoutique (the latter was giving me gyp last night, but seems to be behaving itself properly today).

As always, the latest versions of everything are available from my main TwitterBox page.

I have also now posted the source code for my PHP Intermediary Server Thing:

twitter-control-0.1.phps

This will not I expect be of interest to the casual Twitterer, but if you were wondering precisely what it was that the Thing did, well, do go ahead and read,and it may enlighten you to at least some small degree. There are a number of comments in the code, but, in short, it reads in the contents of the POST that is sent by the TwitterBox to it, which should be of the form

user email
password
action
status

then evaluates the “action” parameter. There is a generic function to send a request to Twitter using curl, which returns the JSON data that it receives parsed into an array. (I wish more online services would agree to return data in the JSON format.)

Notes On The Process Of Obtaining The Owner’s Proper Twitter Identity

The script makes it easier for users by only requiring them to enter their email address, which Twitter requires for the login procedure. Knowing the Screen Name of the owner is very handy for the TwitterBox, though, and in future I hope to use the ID number as well for nefarious and disgraceful purposes.

The TwitterBox gets round this by exploiting the two following facts:

1. Upon an update, Twitter sends back information regarding the last post made by the user, including username and user ID number;
2. Twitter will not post an empty update, but will still send information back.

Therefore, when it receives a “get id” action, the control script tries to make a blank update, which does nothing except returns information about the last post made. The script then takes the user’s screen name and ID number and sends them back to the TwitterBox, which remembers them. Thinking about it now, I suspect that if the person has actually not made any tweets at all, this may not work. Hmm.

Notes On The Process Of Updating (or “Twittering”)

As mentioned above, updating with either a blank or real entry returns information on the last post, including the time that it was created. The control script checks this - if it is before the time that it sent the request, it assumes that there was a failure to post and says so. Otherwise it says “OK”.

Notes On The Process Of Checking For Tweets

When checking for recent updates, the script pulls together all of the tweets that it receives into the format:

screen_name
text
relative_created_at (this is the “about 4 hours ago” part)
created_at (converted into UNIX timestamp format)

up to a limit of 1500 characters, which is about all that LSL will accept as the body. (The http_request event will allegedly accept 2049 bytes, but the header seems to take up a lot of this.) Note that it will not include a partial tweet if the length goes over the limit. It then sends the compiled tweets back to the TwitterBox. Actually, even restricting the number of tweets sent to 1500 characters, one still does get a satisfactory number of tweets.

If you read the LSL script for the TwitterBox itself, and you understand LSL of course, you will see that it is the box itself which actually decides which tweets to announce, if any, filtering them on the criteria “must not be posted by the owner’s screen name” and “must be after the last tweet that I announced”. The PHP script does not store any screen names or requests or any such thing, and it would have to make two requests to Twitter to be able to filter on screen name, which would be an extravagance. The TwitterBox itself is quite capable of doing this.

I actually find the way that the TwitterBox operates when displaying updates more convenient than using an External Instant Messaging Client, as the latter won’t tell one what nonsense one’s twittering friends have been blithering whilst one has been away - whereas upon entering SL now, I am immediately (or at least quickly) brought up to speed with the latest trivialities. Hah! What say you to that, Corporate IM Giants? Stop blubbering, Yahoo, it really is unseemly, stiff upper lip chaps.

Things For The Future

The next version of the TwitterBox will hopefully possess a few new features:

• option to automatically post a SLurl for the user’s location after every tweet (in tinyurl format, of course, SLurls can take up the whole of the tweet by themselves);
• automatic notification of other TwitterBox users in the vicinity, and the option to add them to one’s friend list (this one might cause a little difficulty in practice, though I have a few ideas, and is probably going to be entirely useless anyway, so is the least likely to happen);
• an easier method of entering the username and password and generally configuring the TwitterBox;
• changing the sound and adding a more visual alert;
• the option of automatic updates on certain events (e.g. an automatic “has logged in” tweet on entering SL);
• anything else that isn’t too difficult.

Do bear in mind that all of these things are “coming very soon/in the next update” in the Linden Lab sense i.e. may or may not appear at all.

Right. After a frustrating evening of trying to deal with all sorts of issues relating to Second Life, mine own Hosts and Twitter itself, it seems that the TwitterBox version 0.1 is now ready for release, and I have placed an open copy in my freebie box - available in the usual place.

I have put up a permanent Twitter-related page from which you should always be able to get the latest version and/or news. It also contains a link to the TwitterBox Basic, an LSL-only client that can only post, not receive tweets.

I may write further on the matter but for now I must retire.

Updated: versions of the TwitterBox are now available for public consumption - see the main TwitterBox page, or subsequent journal entries.

I mentioned in my last entry the subject of using HTTP Basic Authentication in LSL. (For those of you not familiar, this is a simple and not very secure method of restricting access to a web page via a username and password.)

From further investigation I have come to the conclusion that “using Basic Authentication in LSL” would be a very short article, because the fact is that one does not seem to be able to do it at all. It is quite simple to send the username/password in an external request, all one has to do is send the following header as part of it:

Authorization: Basic user_pass_base64

where user_pass_base64 is the base64 encoding of “username:password”. However, the LSL function llHTTPRequest does not appear to allow one to add new headers, and prefers to do them all itself; Authorization (dratted Colonial spelling) is not one that it provides a hook to.

Why was it that I was interested in this? Well, I have had some recent experience of an Aethernet Service known as Twitter, a very simple system for distributing short messages about what you are doing at the moment (or about anything, really) and also, of course, for reading other people’s updates. Think of it as the most minimal sort of “blogging” system imaginable. Updates can be made and read not only on the Web, but also via or sent to one’s Portable Telephone (for free I might add) or on out-of-SL Instant Message systems.

As well as simply the challenge of implementing this inside Second Life, I am interested by the potential that exists for this to be used as a system of automatic communication. Say, for example, one has a security device which instead of informing you via IM or email when it has expelled an intruder. Twitter will keep an archive of all of these notifications, and if you wish one might subscribe to it, as could any interested party; one could monitor it on the Aethernet or via Telephone or through any other mechanisms developed in the future.

(This sort of thing is often termed a “mashup”, a word which makes me think of some sort of brewing procedure, but I prefer the old-fashioned term “laziness”. It is far easier to have other people do the hard work of setting up a system, providing phone access and so on, than it is to do everything oneself - and being lazy in this case also benefits others who might wish to do similar things to you, as long as you make your methods known. Socially-beneficial idleness, well, things do not get much better than that, surely.)

Anyway: Twitter requires that one authenticate any requests to it via Basic Auth, and I was unable to do that in plain LSL, so I simply created an intermediary - a PHP script which could receive username, password and command from somewhere else, and send it on to Twitter, returning appropriate data formatted for use in SL. This has certain privacy implications, but at the moment anyone wishing to use this will have to trust that I am not saving their email address and password. I can guarantee that it only stores the information for a tiny fraction of a second, but if you do not trust the security of my site, well, I suppose you could host the script yourself, or just not use it.

At the present time, Twitterbox 0.1 posts and receives new friend post notifications adequately. Saying an entry on channel 282 (”too-whit-too-whoo”, a rather pathetic construction but sort of memorable) sends a message, and it checks every minute for updates. I shall release the full script and PHP intermediary when I have put in some of the other functions that I am interested in, for example, a system whereby anyone coming nearby within SL wearing the Twitterbox HUD announces their user ID to your Twitterbox, giving you the option to add them as a friend. Perhaps something to automatically send SLurls to Twitter. Or similar.

For the meantime, anyone wishing to read my pointless twitterings can add ordinal to their own list. If anyone would like to help me test the above-mentioned social functions I would be obliged if they would let me know.

A tip of the hat to the respected journalist Mr Hamlet Au, who has had considerably more success than I in eliciting a response from Channel Four Radio, whom I believe I mentioned earlier. I must say that Mr Au’s full piece is well worth reading, highlighting as it does the regrettable tendency of our men and women of business to slip into a most peculiar automatic argot when confronted with a question for which they appear to lack understanding, answers or interest. Below, however, you may find an extract:

“In the UK Guardian story,” I asked her (Natalie Schwarz), “you’re quoted as saying [Channel 4 is] ‘the first radio station to launch in Second Life’… Many members of the SL community have objected to your assertion of being ‘first’, because it discounts this pre-existing culture of SL-based radio as if it wasn’t even there. What would you say to them?”

Schwarz’s reply: “We do not discount the pre-existing culture of SL-based radio and respect it. What marks us out as different, is that we’re combining real life broadcasting with virtual world news and culture. Second Life is in a rapid period of change, one that is starting to see more traditional media channels combining with virtual worlds. This is a very exciting time, and we want to work with you and help it grow and flourish.”

I am left very little the wiser as to quite how the content of a station - even were it to be the case that this was the first radio station in Second Life referring to both the Other Place and the Grid, which I would doubt - has any connection with it being “the first to launch” in general. I suppose that one could narrow one’s definitions of the terms “radio station” and “launch” to such a degree that one is indeed the first radio station to launch, but in that case I am in fact the first resident of Second Life to build anything, if by “resident” you mean “diminutive ginger inventress” and “build” you mean “construct a giant lighthouse that actually looks a bit like a teapot”.

I must add at this point, as I am experiencing slight pangs of guilt for my sarcasm, that I am not at all offended by and am in fact quite keen on the projects behind these latest two “firsts” (the above, and also our first Tabloid, both referred to in Mr Au’s piece). I am always very encouraged to see new projects emerging to inform and entertain the good folk of the Grid, and at the moment I am not of the opinion that either tabloid or station will bring about the demise of existing organs. To be quite honest, the fact that the hectoring of residents is often put down to “jealousy” or “fear of the new” irks me not inconsiderably - no-one is more excited by novel developments than I, as we boldly march forth towards the Twentieth Century.

Said counter-criticism misses the point entirely, which is that nobody wishes to have their own achievements and the achievements of their peers publicly dismissed, and doing so then being surprised at the reaction reveals a lack of both research and understanding, the latter of not just Second Life but also humankind. Such a lack, I fear, does not reflect well upon anyone. I would be delighted to be proved wrong on this point and do of course keep a perpetually open mind.

Incidentally, there has been extensive kerfuffle concerning a new Automaton colloquially known as “CopyBot”, which demonstrates the capability of certain new systems to capture every single item that can be seen. The Herald has a piece on it with linked cinema of an early, crude version, but I was able to instruct it to copy me last night during a meeting of many Grid luminaries, with results both amusing and personally disturbing.

The copy was exact down to the last rivet, though the automaton itself is a mere clown, simply mirroring everything that one does, including one’s animations. It would disturb me considerably more to have an actual person mimicking my appearance but behaving differently. I do not expect any creation to allow the mimicking of one’s actual personality for some time to come, but when one spends a lot of time on one’s appearance, as residents of the Grid usually do, and one is intimately familiar with it as the representation of one’s self in a particular world, seeing it duplicated has a visceral effect, a sapping of a portion of one’s individuality. We are not all Taoists.

The potential legal, economic and social issues of being able to easily duplicate anything exactly are of course considerable and something upon which I may write at a future point. On one hand I am thrilled at Scientific Advance, on the other I am extremely concerned that folk receive their Just Reward for their efforts, even if it be merely recognition (something that I am mostly concerned with) and do not wish to see a world whereby there is no real exchange of effort.

I have no respect for the “Market” and despise the Invisible and Bloody Hand, but at heart Currency is a system that allows for resource distribution, the resource here being creativity and skill and effort. Furthermore, one’s land requires the input of Capital for it to survive. Already I see that some scoundrel is distributing copies of this Bot for a sum, and others are distributing its program for free. It is uncertain whether the simple remedy of Instant Messaging the Bot with the phrase “!quit” works with these versions, or whether, as with the one that I encountered, it requires deliberate confirmation first. Even if so it will not be long before such barriers are removed.

Perhaps the best solution that I have seen (excuse me for not being able to find the original) was referring to Mr FlipperPA Peregrine, saying that since everyone is his friend, nobody wants to copy his work, because nobody copies their friends’ work. Reader, will you be my friend?

Caledon 85,46,26 - Version 0.4 of the Slurlblogger is now available! As previously demonstrated by mice with hats, this version will now post directly to a blog as well as to email, and is notecard-configurable.

Caledon 87,47,26 - I have tested it with Blogger and Wordpress (on my own server), however, if anyone could confirm the stuff in the instruction card about other hosts and systems, that would be good. Typepad testing would be useful too. I’m sure I will be tweaking.

Caledon 87,47,26 - The following logo was not actually posted via the Slurlblogger, but after submitting this I will be adding it by hand….

(A further addendum: this is, please note, very much an experimental version, and may not work perfectly with everything. Please do not shout at me and knock off my glasses if it does not work with your system. There are a few issues, such as post titles perhaps not working outside of Wordpress, that I am looking at.)

Purchase from SLBoutique
Purchase from SLExchange

Well. The SLurlblogger seems to be relatively operational now. All I have to do is write up the damned documentation on how to set it up to post to Typepad, Wordpress, Blogger and all of those nonsense things.

Individual notes can be taken and appear as paragraphs, as you see, and the display of SLurls can be turned off if need be.

I have also set it up so that it is more menu-driven, which is clearly a useful thing and makes the business of configuration considerably easier. Of course, with this method, paragraphs are limited to the size of the chat box, but that is really…

…rather large, and in any case overlong paragraphs spoil the Readableness of a document, I find.

If only it could post screenshots one would never have to leave the Grid. Incidentally, is it just me, or is the colour of chat text a little unpredictable? I’ve seen my own chat appear in green and that of objects in white, occasionally.

Caledon 95,29,29 - Well, this is a post from my back patio…

Caledon 146,78,73 - and this is one from just beside Mr Gould’s rock

Caledon 191,188,23 - and this is from the Caledon telehub - I’m bored now, post this already!

As soon as I had made my entry regarding Slurlblogging, I noticed a post on Second Life Insider mentioning BlogHUD - an attractive device allowing wearers to post slurled posts to a central blog. (A “slurled” thing here indicates a piece of information produced from the Grid and tagged with the location of its production - the equivalent of geotagged.)

This is an interesting service and looks far nicer than my hacked-together effort - really, Ordinal, affixing a texture to a plywood cube is not presentation - but performs a different service. BlogHUD works via a central site and allows many people to post to one blog. I am interested more in allowing many people to post to their own Journals, wherever they are.

Ideally I would like to have a device which allows automatic posting to Journals of all stripes. This is something of a long-term project however, as many are very different. From what I can see, there are two main protocols to crack - Blogger and Movable Type. These should allow one to post to Journals on Blogger, Movable Type (including Typepad), Wordpress, and many others, as many systems support these two. This should not be an insurmountable issue at all; such things as Lev Kamenev’s Blogger gadget already exist, it is mostly a question of getting one’s act together to actually sit down and do the work. It may be complicated by the fact that there are three different versions of posting to Blogger - original, Atom and Google - though while the first two are deprecated or soon to be deprecated, this does not mean that they cannot be used.

I have written a simple script which posts to Livejournal, the interface itself being rather simple, but an issue here is that not that many people actually use Livejournal.