August 2014 – Page 3 – Ciaran Laval

August 21, 2014

High Fidelity – Una Paloma Blanca

The High Fidelity website is currently a strange beast. The site looks visually more appealing on my Mac using Safari than it does on my PC using Chrome. The whole layout is different, I’m not sure whether this is a caching issue or not. However I’m generally more of a content over pretty type of guy, with some exceptions, Microsoft Office 2013 being a glaring exception to that rule but I’ll move swiftly on from that. Another issue is that the top two links to the blog posts don’t work on Safari, the two links below do. However I don’t have that issue on Chrome because the layout looks different on Chrome.

However I’m not here to talk about website layouts, I’m going to talk about Paloma Palmer. Who is Paloma Palmer I hear some of you ask … someone? Surely? Anyway, Paloma Palmer has spent the summer as an intern at High Fidelity and whereas Paloma is far too young to be a cider drinker, she is certainly not too young to be involved in Javascript projects, as exemplified by the blog post : Paloma’s Javascript Project.

Palom has been coding for three years after taking classes in BASIC language and Java. This started in her Freshman year, I have absolutely no idea what a Freshman year is. I’m also surprised BASIC is still being taught, is this the same BASIC I’m thinking of?

10. CLS

20. Print “Ciaran Was Here”

30. Goto 20

That BASIC? That brings back memories! Anyway, Paloma explains why she finds coding interesting, it’s literally learning a new language and Paloma compares this to learning French. This is a point oft missed by people who are adept at spoken languages such as French but think code is scary. There are some major differences with application but some of the principles are very similar. The same goes for coders who shy away from learning foreign languages. Paloma also explains that coding is good for solving puzzles and applying maths to a situation.

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August 20, 2014

Foxes, Games And Bitcoins

An odd article has appeared in The Economic Times Of India : A Tumkur start-up VentureNext earns Rs 10 lakh a month by creating virtual creatures. The article is odd because it starts with a headline about how a startup has been selling virtual creatures in Second Life and making a living at it, diverts in the middle to a discussion about online gaming and ends by suggesting that Second Life is dwindling and that business people are turning to new ventures, such as Bitcoin.

The virtual creatures in question are Fennux, which are a breedable creature within Second Life. I’m not sure how popular these have been but they have been around for quite some time. Indeed I can recall that back in 2013 their adverts managed to find their way to the Second Life forum :

However Sathvik Vishwanath. the name behind Fennux is taking his company in a new direction , they are moving into bitcoin territory :

“I’m not able to constantly develop new things for Fennux because of my new startup. I’ll keep it running though, When one door shuts, others open, That’s just how the Internet is.”

According to the article, his new startup UnoCoin, raised $250,000 (Rs 1.5 crore) from Barry Silbert’s Bitcoin Opportunity Corp. That’s an interesting change of direction.

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August 18, 2014

High Fidelity – We Want To Make A Supersonic World Out Of You

The High Fidelity team seem to be having such a good time, having a ball and whereas they may not be quite travelling at the speed of light, the team are working at reducing the curse of latency, as they explain in their blog post : Measuring The Speed Of Sound.

We are obsessed with reducing latency, because we have observed aspects of 1:1 interaction which are broken by too much latency.

The issue that seems to be causing most concern is that of audio, rather than video. I’d really like to know what the mobile phone has ever done to Philip Rosedale. Did he have a hot tip on the horses that he received too late to place a bet on because of latency? There’s more to this than meets the eye, or in this case, ear.

However back to the technology. The High Fidelity team conducted a test, as they explain in their blog post :

We connect two high quality microphones directly to the two input channels of a digital oscilloscope, and we then use either a metronome or simply snapping our fingers or clapping to create a sharp audio signal that can be detected by both microphones. By positioning one microphone at the input of an audio system and the other at the output, we can then easily and reliably use the scope to capture the delay over multiple samples down to millisecond resolution.

The results of the test were interesting, Skype winning the day over mobile phones. However with regards to mobile phones themselves, it seems Verizon are quite a bit more efficient than AT&T or T-Mobile if you’re making your call in the San Francisco area. Verizon’s measured 280msecs for 1-way latency, compared to 400-450msecs for AT&T and T-Mobile.

Skype blew them all away however, in terms of end to end latency, as the blog post explains :

Skype, by comparison, generally outperforms the cell phones in terms of end-to-end latency: we measured audio delays of from 100-200msecs for various combinations of audio and video calls, where the two endpoints were on the same WiFi network. So this means that with a packet delay of about 40 msecs (which is what we typically see when pinging Boston from San Francisco), a cross-country audio or even video call on Skype is going to come in with about 250msecs of delay and be a bit better than using a cell phone.

Pretty impressive results, but far from good enough for the ambitions of the High Fidelity team.

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August 17, 2014

Second Life Should Cut The Facebook Cord

Facebook has never been a good fit for Second Life users, whereas other social networks such as Twitter and now Google + have no objection to people having accounts with their Second Life names, Facebook has stuck rigidly to it’s real name policy. Obviously this policy is somewhat flawed in as much as there’s no real authentication of those real names, but it remains a poor fit.

Yes there are plenty of people who are happy to use their real name Facebook accounts and link them to their Second Life accounts, but it remains a Second Life unfriendly domain. Now comes news that Facebook have donated $10,000 to a politician who is fighting gay marriage.

Facebook made the donation in May to Utah attorney general Sean Reyes and have defended their decision, in a statement to the Huffington Post they said :

Facebook has a strong record on LGBT issues and that will not change, but we make decisions about which candidates to support based on the entire portfolio of issues important to our business, not just one. A contribution to a candidate does not mean that we agree with every policy or position that candidate takes. We made this donation for the same reason we’ve donated to Attorneys General on the opposite side of this issue — because they are committed to fostering innovation and an open Internet.

There is some merit in that statement, many of us will vote for political parties with whom we disagree with on certain issues. However gay marriage is quite a big ticket item to be overlooking in favour of a so called open internet. Facebook’s defence of their support is extremely mealy mouthed and does them very little credit.

However the wider point is that Linden Lab should be promoting Second Life on networks that are more Second Life friendly than Facebook. Indeed Linden Lab have their own outlets such as the blog and Second Life profiles in which they should be communicating with Second Life users.

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August 17, 2014

High Fidelity’s AKA Get Easy Like Sunday Morning

The High Fidelity team have ramped up their blog discussion during August and there’s a lot of interesting and fun stuff to look at. There’s a post about the importance of the speed of sound, there’s a post about Javascript from Paloma .. Paloma being a 17 year old intern and not a place and then there’s a post about frogs who aren’t frogs sitting on lilypads and singing.

Now as this is Sunday and I need to shave and hit the pub to watch a bit of footie, I’ll focus on the frogs who aren’t frogs sitting on lilypads and singing. We’re promised a follow up post from executive producer Ryan Karpf to explain the concepts behind this post at a later date. However for now we’re left to see some members of the High Fidelity team at play.

Ryan, Chris Collins, Emily Donald and Ozan Serim all feature in this video as well as a guy with very large shoulders whom looks uncannily like the avatar form of former Linden Lab employee Andrew Meadows (AKA Employee Number 2 when he worked at The Lab). However as this avatar isn’t introduced I’m not 100% sure who it is.

The post introduces a name for the High Fidelity band, they are known as AKA, they are also known as AKA too.

The video in the post exemplifies High Fidelity in action as well as Chris Collins reminding me of a character from Monkey Island for some reason. However what we see here is facial expressions and once again the mouth movements are pretty damn impressive.

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