Social Computing at Work

Roo Reynolds at IBM has the job title 'Metaverse Evangelist'. He's also very switched on about social media, networks and virtual worlds and on a recent post to his blog he has posted the IBM Social Computing guidelines.

Reading through these make a lot of sense and since I have had some rather dire, sensationalist junk (surface) mail over the past few weeks that is advocating draconian policing of (and even banning of access to) social networking in the work place, I think it is about time we tempered this approach with a little common sense. And that's what you'll find in the IBM guidelines. By the bucket load.

For any business organisation of any size, don't kid your selves, they are covnersations taking place on the internet about you. Your best approach should is to be an active, open and transparent part of these conversations and to use your educated and informed staff to do this. Ignoring the conversations is a lost opportunity to reach out to your customer base.

Social media used as an open channel to your customer base helps you to do something that I advocate as an essential element of any business communications strategy: be in your market the same way your customers are.

PH

Getting back to Second Life

I've more or less been away from Second Life for the past few months. This has been while I have focused on other things - new website, artwork, blogging and open source on the desktop.

My focus is now returning to virtual worlds and Second Life in particular.

Second Life has been getting a lot of press recently - some good, some bad. This is oddly familiar, and is a pretty common theme through-out the adoption cycles of social technologies. Think back to the first few years where the Internet and the World Wide Web became available - a lot of the same comments and condemnations where voiced then, but now we have adopted the technology and are extensive use of it through business, education and entertainment.

I fully expect to see the same from virtual worlds as a communications technology. A lot of people now understand why skype is such a good technology - multi channel (text, voice, video) personal communication, with the ability to conference call and exchange documents. Virtual worlds offer this interaction plus an interactive environment in which to hold the discussion.

Some press has been given to documenting criminal activities in Second Life. I can't deny that these elements are there, but at the same time I think it is also quite likely that there are criminals out there who are using mobile phones and sending emails, and the fact that they are will not prevent me from using either. Again, this is consistent with the adoption of the internet. The criminal elements need to be dealt with and we all need to see the technology for what it is, and not allow it to be tarnished by the actions of the few.

Second Life has uas reecently updated to include a couple of siginificant technology milestones: VOIP (Voice Over IP) and Webpage-as-texture. This may not sound that dramatic but they are of the final elements that I've been to glue your second life onto the rest of your internet communication strategy. What this also means is that in-world information can be managed and updated from outside, and this can be done using the tools that your content managers are already used to.

Second life is now able to become a serious content delivery channel, integrated with and displaying common content from your existing web presence.

PH

Going Open Source - Part 4: The Pale Heretic Way

To put it simply: I have found a solution for Linux on my Laptop that works for me.

An important fact about me (and therefore my approach to this) is that I'm not a systems administrator, but I do have 15 years experience working with computers as a designer, new-media developer and animator. I don't use Linux in my day-to-day work. I've just had enough of MS Windows (and never got on with Macs) and want an alternative. So what I need is something that works more-or-less from the point where it is installed and that my limited knowledge will allow me to cope with any things that I need to configure or fix.

The laptop I use (every day) is an HP DV2130ea.

Having left Ubuntu a few weeks ago when the new version decided to forget all about my hardware, I proceeded to try out a range of distributions, quite rapidly, to see if I could find one that managed to identify my hardware (critical requirement was it had to find and configure both my Intel WIFI and Nvidia Graphics Adapter). PCLinuxOS and Dream Linux both looked interesting but failed to work for me.

As part of this I discovered a very useful site: DistroWatch. A great site that lists most of (if not all) the available distributions and provides links to reviews, community sites and download locations. They also provide a hot-list of the most viewed distributions on their site – a good rough indicator of usage / popularity.

It was from this that I found OpenSUSE. A linux distribution funded and developed by Novell.

It got my interest from more-or-less the third screen of the installer, where it correctly identified my Wifi card and Graphics adapter and also managed to cope with the fact that my laptop has a widescreen display.

The rest of the installation was exactly what I had hoped it would be: uneventful.

OpenSUSE itself is easy to work with in the same sense that any of the Linux versions you choose to install are just about similar to MS Windows that you can find the application / control panel you need. The interface is clean and the pre-installed set of applications covers most things that you'd need, with a good range of applications available from the application installer with a minimum of fuss.

The list of applications that I'm running includes Open Office, Flock, Skype, Second Life, Blender, Thunderbird , Vmware, Remote Desktop.

The installations for all of these was relatively simple, as was creating menu icons for those that didn't do this themselves (seems to be a common thing in my experience).

Even the installation and configuration of VMWare Player wasn't too tricky and made much easier by a good walkthrough that can be found on the OpenSUSE website here.

So what I now have is a laptop that works, with the software I needed and so far (on the limited sample of 2 weeks) It's been reliable to the point where I can forget about it and just work. You can see samples of the graphics that I've produced below.

An that I guess was the biggest wrench – leaving the Adobe suite of applications behind. Despite their high cost, they are a great set of applications. What is encouraging is that the open source alternatives are very good and nearly offer all the required functionality.

A brief note to the GIMP community – can we have vector objects (multiple in one layer) and layer folders please, because these are the only things that I have missed having moved from Photoshop to GIMP, and that says something right there.

Right now, I'm on a train to meet a client, and I will be demoing some bespoke MS Windows applications in a VMWare virtual machine on this laptop. That's about as good as I could have possibly hoped for.

OpenSUSE has a new version 11 out in about 30 days. I'll let you know how the upgrade goes.

PH

Origins

People occasionally ask how I chose Pale Heretic as a company name.

A few years ago, close friends and I used to play the MMORPG Lineage 2. Now, this game is incredibly labour intensive and the amount of effort required to progress increases almost exponentially. This got so extreem that we all opted to start again, so we could re-experience the fun of being a new player, rather than the incessant grind of higher levels. Our first guild (a way of creating a team of players) had been called the Dark Apostles ... so I chose the Pale Heretics as the next generation. I've loved the name ever since, and when I sat down to name this company, I found a lot of synergies.

In Pale Heretic I wanted to create a company that could explore concepts that went against what industry dogma dictates (heresy is always defined by the dominant religion). The name also has impact, is memorable, the domains where available and as a name is almost entirely un-used.

Pale Heretic is a concept innovator, unorthodox, creative, independent. We are eagerly exploring the long tail of design and interaction.

Going Open Source - Part 3 update

I'm going to keep this short, because I want to go into the details in Part 4.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron proved impossible. No wireless and no graphics card driver was just enough of a problem to make it really annoying. A complete clean install didn't fix it so I decided to try some other distributions - www.dreamlinux.com.br : as slick as using a Mac, same wireless + graphics problems, www.pclinuxos.com :Even more problems. Then I tried openSUSE 10.3 www.opensuse.org Amazing stuff - everything worked first time. Wireless was working from installation onwards, NVidia make drivers for openSUSE specifically for my graphic card.

In the next part I'll run through my first week's experences, but so far? Wonderful!

Going Open Source - Part 3

I spoke too soon. I've found the first pot-hole on my road to open source nirvana.

Ubuntu release their linux distributions on a fairly regular basis. I was working with 7.10 'Gutsy Gibbon' and have just upgraded to 8.04 'Hardy Heron'.

I did this by hitting the friendly little button within the update manager that said something like 'there is a new version click here to upgrade'. How cool is that? Nice and easy, click, wait for the download, off we go.

Not.

Having got the files required for the upgrade downloaded, the updater failed to work. This was rapidly followed by it telling me I had something like 930 updates waiting to be installed. It also politely noted that there was something wrong, and so it wouldn't be able to install all the updates but I could do a partial update.

No.

Turns out the failed upgrade had left my laptop in a state where no updates could be installed. Some forum hunting later (on a handy Windows machine) and I discover that quite a few people have had this error in one form or another. By starting the update from the console I was able to understand that a circular dependency in the Audacity plugins libraries (one of the bits of audio editing software that comes included in Ubuntu Studio) was causing the updater to fail. OK. Un-install offending libraries at the command line and hey-presto the updater works perfectly. OK, so this isn't what I'm used to for what is the equivalent of installing what Microsoft Windows users know as 'service packs'.

Still, it's installed now right? Back to the happiness!

Nope.

It's installed all right, but that doesn't mean it's going to boot.

Boot into recovery mode, reset x-windows client. Laptop boots, moans that the login screen theme it was expecting to load is missing and thankfully shows me the login dialogue. Great. I'm in.

It turns out that the NVidia display drivers that are required to make reasonable use of the graphics hardware in my laptop don't work with 'Hardy Heron' despite working perfectly well.

The next step form here is fairly obvoius – download the updated version.

You guessed it, no.

Where did the wireless network go? I can see it in the network manager dialogue, I know the right values are in here so why isn't it working.... back to the forums and I find that there are a lot of posts about this. Apparently there is something up with the version of the hal (hardware abstraction layer) that means the network manager fails to work with a good range of common wireless cards.

Great.

Now please bear in mind that this is stuff that was working before the update. It also becomes apparent that this was a bug that had been picked up during the beta test stage. I also found that there is a work around. It basically involves winding the version of all the bits involved with with managing the wireless network and the HAL back to the versions from 'Gutsy Gibbon'. The process to to this I am piecing together from a number of forum posts and I'll let you know how it goes when I manage to get it to work. It's surprisingly hard to fix your network when it breaks, because the one thing that makes it really easy to fix the problem is having the network.

I guess, all in all I've spent about 3 hours so far to get from 'Ubuntu broke it' to potentially working, but it's going to have to wait until I can get to a cabled network line I can use to actually try this out (the download the files onto a USB memory stick version of the fix just didn't work).

I'm still trying to fix this. If anyone knows either how to make it work, or how / why this happened please post it here!

Going Open Source - Part 2

It's now been 3 weeks since my laptop munched it's hard disk and I took the (long overdue) opportunity to try and take all my studio functions onto an open source platform.

The install went well, most things worked with little or no tinkering.

Now we come to software. There is a set of software applications that I need to find open source alternatives to, because if I don't then I can't work.

My list of essentials is:

• Photoshop, illustrator, Indesign, Flash, Director and Dreamweaver, all by Adobe
• Blender, Open Office, Flock, Skype, Thunderbird and Second Life
• Some decent fonts

First let me say that the latter all come with Linux versions, Blender and Open Office are either pre-installed with my chosen distribution (Ubuntu Studio) or are available via the inbuilt application installer service. Easy. Worked first time. Apart from one annoying thing about blender in that it doesn't recognise my ALT key, so some of the key combinations don't work properly.

Originally I was planning to find a solution for the Blender / ALT key problem and post that in part 3, but thanks to Dan Kegel at http://www.winehq.org I now have an answer to this and a mostly working copy of Photoshop.

For the ALT key problem: Go to System >> Preferences >> Windows, and under Movement Key, pick "Super (Windows Key)" instead of "Alt". Worked perfectly for me.

Flock and the Second Life client are both worth noting in that whilst they were both very easy to download and install, the hardest part (ironically) is the process for making a desktop icon for each application. This involves writing a short text file in the following format:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Second Life
Comment=Second Life Linux Client
Exec="/home/alan/secondlife/secondlife"
Icon=/home/alan/secondlife/res-sdl/ll_icon.BMP
Path=$HOME/secondlife
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=
Categories=Network;Application;
GenericName[en_US]=Second Life

This example is taken from my Second Life desktop icon, but the format is the same for any. The file itself needs to be saved in the root of your home area and needs to be named appname.desktop where appname is replaced by the name of your chosen application. I'd be very interested to hear if someone knows of an easier / point and click way of doing this?

Finding replacements for the assortment of Adobe software that I use has been a trickier task, compounded by the fact that some of the technologies are proprietry and won't be available from anyone else. My experience of finding replacements is something like this:

Photoshop: this is the hardest one of the bunch and also the tool that I use the most. There are a number of packages out there that give up to about 70% of the features available from Photoshop. Gimp and Xara Extreme are both high on my list, and Paint.NET looks to be very promising if I can get it to work (no success yet).

Again I need to credit Dan Kegel at http://www.winehq.org for pointing me to their Wiki page on running Adobe Photoshop under Wine. Which after a complete removal and reinstall of Wine, worked perfectly apart from two things. First, I'm installing from Creative Suite which includes all the Adobe software and comes on 5 CDs. Problem is that the installer fails to recognise when you change from disk 1 to the next disk. Thankfully, Photoshop is on disk 1. The second problem is that the Activation and the Updater both fail. The activator throws an error exclaiming “not enough disk space available to run this program” and promptly closes, but leaves Photoshop running, and the updater just sits there and does nothing. Neither are exactly catastrophic problems – the software works just fine.

I'm still going to try and get Paint.NET working though. If there is an option to use native Linux, opensource alternatives then that's my preferred solution.

Illustrator: Inkscape pretty much has this one covered. It's fairly easy to use and is similar enough that finding the equivalent tools in the software is not too much of a problem. This piece of software came as part of the Ubuntu Studio basic installation.

Indesign: Scribus is on first glance (and I haven't made much use of it yet - just a simple A5 flyer layout) a good replacement for indesign. Again, this application came as part of the Ubuntu Studio basic installation.

Flash: To be honest, Flash is what it is and I wouldn't attempt to find an alternative. Flash 8 installs fine under Wine. Works exactly as you would expect. Installing Wine is very easy, as it can be found in the application installer service.

Director: I use director for a lot of CD-ROM based materials and a fair amount of legacy stuff. The installer worked fine, but I haven't yet managed to get the application to start. I'll update on my progress in Part 3.

Dreamweaver: There is an alternative – Quanta Plus. It's available via the application installer service. This one isn't as good a fit as the other alternatives. Whilst it has a good functionality and includes templates, site management and all the usual stuff, inluding an in-window preview render of the page, that preview is not editable. Personally speaking, I use dreamweaver because of the ability to chop between editing direct into the rendered representation of the page and the underlying code at will. This is why Quanta Plus doesn't work for me. Not because it's a bad piece of software, but because it isn't a fit for the way I want to work. This is also compounded by the fact that Dreamweaver 8 installs and works perfectly under Wine. So for web page work, I know which one I'm choosing.

BUT (and this goes for any of these applications) if anyone has a recommendation for any alternative applications, or ways to make things work then please post them here and I'll follow up on them in Part 3.

And I suppose it's worth making a point about that too: there will be a part 3. I've been using Ubuntu Studio for 3 weeks now. It's not perfect. I still spend time sorting things out. Making odd things work that really, just ought to work. I have yet to finish with printers, fonts, laptop mode and drivers for things like my MP3 player and Wacom tablet. But despite this, there is a very solid alternative to anything by Microsoft and I have no desire to go back.

Pale