Posts by onefang 1954 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2017
"I remember the day when you only had one computer per household, "
I remember a day when there where three computers for all the schools in the state. We had to share them. Luckily there where only two people in my school that knew what to do with a computer, me and my mate.
I don't make her do that, she came up with the idea all by herself. Coz she's lousy at remembering passwords, a password manager is too hard for her, and me being a sysadmin at times, I'm used to looking after other peoples passwords, so what's a few more? So, when she remembers, she tells me her passwords and I store them in my password manager. It's the times she forgets that are a pain, then neither of us knows them.
"Or or some wrinkely old ballsack looking dude will come along, and take over the entire known Galaxy, while sending his 'Agents' out to put down some Sect of Space Priests. Who will have all been, but forgotten about in around Twenty Years time. Before some millennial comes 'round and destroys your new shiny, shiny."
I'll have what he's having.
"@onefang: Pray do tell more!"
Well, since you asked...
I had long been involved in Second Life / OpenSim. The Second Life viewer was open sourced long ago, and as is typical with crap code, lots of people forked it. The Second Life server was never open sourced, so some people wrote a clean room implementation of the server called OpenSim, which is open source. Almost as crap, and people have forked it. Some company hired me to work on their custom viewer. Some other company hired me as their long term viewer developer, and I also helped run their OpenSim based grid.
With that experience under my belt, yet another company eventually hired me to add Oculus Rift support to their custom OpenSim viewer. This was before Oculus Rift was released to consumers, so I bought a Rift DK2 and ported the Rift code from the CtlAltStudio viewer to this companies custom viewer, which I recall was largely based on the Imprudence viewer. I understand at a trade show Angela Merkel submitted to the experience of my VR code and didn't throw up.
Someone wrote a viewer for Android, which I believe now supports Google Cardboard or Daydream, I've not tried it.
Finally we get to the interesting bit. The local city councilor, being the only person I had ever voted for that actually won, got into a discussion with me at a protest he had organised. I mentioned the above things to him, or some of them. He often uses Google Street View to show people various things around his ward, especially planned changes. He was interested in taking this to the third dimension, and adding his own stuff. So I dragged my Oculus Rift development system to his office, gave them a demo, and we made plans. I was part way through a from the ground up rewrite of Imprudence viewer and OpenSim, since the original code bases are pure unadulterated crap, but that project was no where near ready for this job. He would have preferred a web based option, but there was no mature open source solution for that. So we could wait a few years for the code to be ready, or go with stuff that works now. Who knows, in a few years time he may no longer be a city councilor, so we went with the later option.
So the plan was to use various bits of data, including OpenStreetMaps, to build an OpenSim based grid that replicates the city ward he is responsible for, and to script various bits of the city so that clicking on them switches between existing city and planned city. Either running a viewer on his laptop, or an Oculus Rift, or the Android viewer on a phone, to show the things he was using Street View for. Also letting people have guest accounts, so they can wander around on their own.
I wrote a Lua script to collect elevation data from here, overhead photos from there, building data from elsewhere, and build a small database of data and textures, to be read by a C# OpenSim module & LSL script I wrote that created that section of our city in his grid. Second Life / OpenSim avatars are generally giants, so I scaled things down to be life sized, and even spent a lot of time walking around the virtual / real city with stop watch / tape measure in hand, to keep it real. Basically you stand in an empty grid, enter longitude / latitude for the part of the world you are interested in, watch as the world grows around you, then go for a wander.
The big problem was the building data. OpenStreetMaps has protocols for including building shapes in it's database, but since it crowd sources its data, we had to rely on the crowd to source the data. No one had added any building data to our part of the world. The councilor wasn't able to find a city council source of that info that I could use. So I have created an OpenSim grid that replicated our local council ward, with accurate elevations, reasonably detailed photos of the ground and building roofs, but no actual buildings. sigh
I should dump this project in my GitHub account some day, and find a part of the world with building data so I can finish it. Alas the councilor is stuck with Google Street View for now.
Ya had to ask, didn't ya.
You are only half right. Sure the Vive and the Rift have somewhat low resolution, but for example a Moto Z in a Daydream has significantly higher resolution. Other companies are working on even higher resolutions, with kit coming Real Soon Now. So getting things up to scratch for virtual monitors isn't that far away, and doesn't need that big a graphics rig.
I recall there's even software for doing this already.
"I would love a VR version of Google Street View with intuitive controls."
Googles Street View app works fine in Google Daydream.
I've been working on rendering OpenStreetMap in an OpenSim based virtual world, and also on adding VR abilities to an OpenSim viewer. You feed in latitude and longitude, it renders that part of the world. Wouldn't be hard to feed it your current GPS coordinates.
"Which reminds me the Quack has given me a tube to fill with a crap sample. The handle provided is ridiculously short."
Which reminds me, the government wants me to give them shit. Now that I'm over fifty, they send me one of those sample collecting kits every five years. Undecided whether to address it to Parliament House Canberra, or to my local members home.
"I've seen companies use this strategy before, when I worked in Financial Services, this was common when a company's name became synonymous with bad practice and they come under threat of investigation or law suite."
When a company changes it's name, it's safe to assume they are doing it to get away from the horrible stench they created around their old name.
"Before I got a car, commuting 5 miles on public transport was an hour each way (this is where I got my transport costs from). "
I was avoiding all the housing talk, but this caught my eye.
There was a place I used to work at where catching the bus there took an hour, coz I had to catch a bus into the city, then one out again, no direct bus. It also took me an hour to walk there. I kinda like walking. So unless the weather was crazy, I'd always walk. Much cheaper, and good for me.
"If physicists weren't too busy messing around with trivia such as dark matter, string theory and quantum entanglement they'd be getting to the bottom of this."
But string theory and quantum entanglement are precisely why cables get mysteriously entangled. Dark matter probably is involved to, it's usually dark for long periods of time where the cables are.
"I think it's funny to create an AI that writes boilerplate for you. We used to have junior developers to do that, but I guess that's progress. :/"
Waaaay back in the mid '70s, at my very first paying job, when I was a junior developer still in high school (the job was during the school holidays), I wrote a script that did my job of writing boilerplate code, then spent most of the rest of the time working on my own projects. This was in Cobol, it's good to see that the new Cobol is following in its footsteps, even if it's a bit slow to catch up.
"If you search for me on Google then nothing comes up and I want to keep it that way."
I just typed "Anonymous Coward" into Google and got 1,260,000 hits. That's way more than for my alias, and way more for my real name. I'd hardly call that "nothing".
Oddly, the top hit on my real name, and the number four hit, where obituaries for two people that share my uncommon name. The images that turned up included photos of a dozen strangers in suits, and my cartoon that I often use for an avatar. I don't own a suit.
This is the same bug that Google has called a feature since day one, I filed a bug report about that many years ago, as did others, but Google claimed it's a feature, wont fix.
In my case things that I send to a mailing list, got classified as sent email by Gmail on the way out, which is fair enough, but also get classified as sent email on the way in. So I don't get to see my own emails in mailing lists. I have to subscribe two gmail addresses to each mailing list, one write only, one read only. Or just move all my old mailing lists off gmail, something I really should pull my finger out and get finished.
"I use it!
My home network, my ISP connection and the server where all my web sites live (and the sites I host for others) are all dual stack. It wasn't THAT hard."
I'm almost the same. My home and server both are dual stack. My home network tries to be, but I think there's a bug in my old router that stops IPv6 working fully. Can't be arsed to fix that just yet, but it's on my TODO.
"Yeah yeah yeah, features, yeah, camera yeah. Security UPDATES?????"
My Moto Z, which is an older model, was getting security updates once a month, until the rather lengthy wait for Oreo. It got Oreo this month, I'll see if it returns to monthly updates. Considering it had Marshmellow on it when I bought it, that's three major updates it has had, and several minor ones.
"1) With a mod on, it's too bulky/heavy to put in a pocket"
Considering it starts off being very thin, I find it fits in my pocket fine with a mod on, even in the same pocket as my dumb phone.
"2) You can't put a case on the phone when it has a mod attached"
Mines been dropped several times. The mod tends to come off and the edge bumpers protect the phone. So far no damage, not even a scratch. Still wont bounce it across a table.
"Motorola’s Z2 Force isn’t the newest kid on the block. But it still remains the only “shatterproof” phone on the market"
I tend to find dumbphones are pretty shatter proof, at least the good ones. Dumb phones I have bounced across a table to demonstrate how tough they are, then show my smart phone in it's protective cocoon, and not bounce it across a table.
"I have the original Moto Z Force (1.5 years old) and I don't think I've ever seen the battery under 30% after two days of operation even now. I totally forgot about the mods it can use lol."
I have the Moto Z, and easily get a couple of days out of it. YMMV obviously.
"I'm just really happy it's getting the Oreo 8.0 update soon ;)"
I got Oreo OTA already a week or two ago. Real Soon Now for you I guess.
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