Cafe Bucky

I’m going to shelve my work on MacSimStick for the time being.  I’d been hoping to crack the nut of running Mono and everything else off of a disk image (Apache, PHP, and MySQL run fine, as does OpenSim paired with a Mono install on a local disk).  It doesn’t seem like the need is there, and I’ve been spending hours trying to get install_name_tool and dynamic libraries to play nice.

Sometimes it is good to fail fast and move on.

So anyways, there is a distribution out there that will run, provided you have Mono already installed.   Maybe that is a success and people are happy with that.  I’ll turn my attention to OpenSim paired with Amazon’s EC2, and Unity.  If someone makes progress on MacSimStick, and there’s interest, I may jump back in – I do have several ideas / goals for it.

I really have the Travel Bug today, and cant do anything about it at the moment, but am happy nonetheless.  I recently renewed my passport, and so I will probably hug the next US State Department worker I see.

Hmm, perhaps not.  That would surely get me on some sort of “list”.

Perhaps better to call up and ask for the Duty Officer, and say “yo, thanks!”.

Wait, scratch that.  I’m sure they have a list for that too.

See, to me, having a passport implies a lot of freedom.  It’s a gateway, not just to travel, but possibly to work as well.  I’m looking at you, Canada, Australia, UK, and the EU!

I dont have any immediate travel plans, but at least now I can say “yeah, fly me there!” without having to add the sheepish bit of “but I gotta deal with my passport first”.  That would be an Obstacle.  Not Good.

I can see my suitcases, and it’s time to dust them off :)

I am happy to announce the availabilty of MacSimStick, Alpha 1 (Pioneer Possums).

The goal of the MacSimStick project is to have a self contained OpenSim + MAMP environment for Mac users to run off a USB key. It is usable now for those who already have Mono and possibly X11 running on their Mac. I have not yet solved the step of getting Mono to run off of a USB key.

So, this release is called “Pioneer Possums”. If you have a working Mono environment, chances are good that this will work for you. I am looking for the Pioneers that will check this out. Hopefully one of them will be able to help me solve the Mono configuration aspect.

The release is distributed as a Mac disk image.  Download the compressed image – it is roughly 370  meg.  Uncompress the image, double click it to mount, and run “Start.sh”.

There is a README file in the top level that gives details as to the Test User, ports, and the password.  There is also a webserver specific to the project at localhost:8080.

I want to say thanks to the folks that given me encouragement, and who give this a go. I could have stumbled away in isolation trying to get the first release perfect, but I think it is more important to get a working snapshot out to the community – it will hopefully speed up the progress towards the goal of being truely self-contained. Believe me when I say I cant wait to get this out there in a more polished, ready to go form.

I may follow up with a much more techy/detailed posting, but I wanted to keep this one pretty brief and straightforward: “if you are on a Mac, use OpenSim, and have Mono set up, give this a go”.

Cheers!

As I have recently written, I’m working on getting a self contained environment together for running OpenSim and LAMP services on a Mac.

In other words, running a virtual world on your Mac off of a USB key.

So far, so good. But … I’m stuck!

I need some help in getting OpenSim and Mono configured. I’m running into a showstopper problem when a user logs in from a viewer. I’ve decided to put up a snapshot of what I have so that some experienced eyes can take a look at the problem.

The Pre-Alpha snapshot is about 240 meg, and you can get it right now.

The snapshot is a Mac disk image (a compressed sparse bundle). Download, uncompress, and mount. It should mount as /Volumes/MacSimStick. All of the main components are under /Volumes/MacSimStick/usr/local.

See the top level README for ports, passwords, layout, etc.

So what does work?

Apache, PHP, MySQL, and the Diva Wifi interface are all doing fine. There are some configuration tweaks to do, and lots of files and directories that can be removed. The goal right now is to get the end to end functionality sorted, and then we can go back and prune & tune. There is a simple minded shell script, Start.sh, at the top level. I expect that anyone toying around with this at this point is going to be in a terminal window, and is comfy with launching apache, mysql, opensim, etc from a command line.

What is the problem?

The problem seems to be something about how Mono deals with the network. I provided a full logging of the problem in /Volumes/MacSimStick/Logs/OpenSim.log. That file shows the full run of Configure.exe, followed by a session of OpenSim.exe.

Some suggested ways to attack this …

Use your own version of Mono against the diva distro in MacSimStick. If that works, then we know we have a problem specific to my install of Mono 2.8.

Did I miss anything in the Mono or OpenSim config files? (probably!)

Could the problem have something to do with virtual network interfaces (such as the one created by Parallels?)

Is the version of Mono just fine, but we find that it works with an older OpenSim distro?

For reference, my Mac is a 2006 Intel iMac running 10.6.4. I have tried the phoenix and imprudence viewers, and I get the same problem each time. At least that part is consistent.

What are the next goals?

Well, once we have something that functions much like the Windows USB counterpart, I will turn my attention to:

• Simple Startup and Shutdown
• Getting rid of excess files and directories
• Tuning of all config files
• Making use of the web server. Provide info on where to get viewers, a local wiki for the project, and be able to serve as a web gateway for objects in world that need it.
• Getting a good logo

Some more goals:

• Be completely self contained (not touch the local disk at all.. I do currently use a MySQL socket in the standard /tmp location)
• Allow for different mount points besides /Volumes/MacSimStick (am not sure if config files can take care of that for everything…)
• Make it easy to change ports and passwords

I think this is all doable. Although one part of me would love to hold off on snapshots until I have everything working end to end, it’s more important to know when to ask for help! That way, those of us on the Mac side can get going on this that much quicker.

Thanks for any help!

Recently some enthusiasts got together the idea of running OpenSim off a usb key. Even doing a video to show the process.  Pathfinder did a great post on it, as did Ener Hax.  Tateru Nino made a ready to go version of it available.

Pretty Cool, if you are a Windows person.  You plug in a usb key, press a couple of buttons, and have a self contained virtual world on your machine that you can connect to with your fave viewer (SL, Phoenix, Imprudence, etc.)

I’d been waiting to see if someone would do the same thing for the Mac folks.  Time Passed …

… Well … ok, fine, I’ll do it!

So I am undertaking the MacSimStick Project.

I must be out of my mind.  There are a lot of moving parts :)

So What Is The Goal?

The goal is to insert a usb key into a mac, click on an icon, have a self contained virtual worlds environment come to life, use it, and to be able to walk away with any changes you make.

That nicely glosses over about a dozen things happening in the background.

Some assumptions and goals:

• be self contained, keeping off of the local disk as much as possible (log files, etc)
• dont make the user install anything
• wont assume what they have installed (such as Mono).
• dont interfere with web server or database already running on the machine (use different ports)
• provide the power to change things (MySQL and OpenSim consoles), but work without requiring their use

What Are The Puzzle Pieces To This?

• Apache 2.2.17
• MySQL 5.1.52
• PHP 5.5.3
• Mono 2.8
• OpenSim – Diva Distribution

A reason why I include Apache and PHP is because it opens up a lot of interactively options for scripts in a Sim to call into a local web server.

Where Am I With It?

I am working with a disk image on my iMac:  /Volumes/MacSimStick

The first iteration of this will depend on that name.  I compiled Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Mono to depend on paths within /Volumes/MacSimStick/usr/local

Apache, PHP, and MySQL work fine.

The Diva Distro of OpenSim is connecting to MySQL and writing to the database, but bombing out further in the process.  I’m thinking that a good approach will be turn off a lot of things (why is it trying to call JScript?), get things working end to end, and then slowly turn some things back on.

If I am still stuck in a day or so, I will upload what I have to get some more eyes on the problems.

What’s Next?  What Do I Need?

As far as configuration goes:

• corral all of the config files together by having a Config dir full of links to the actual files (PHP, Apache, MySQL, Mono, OpenSim)
• create a startup script which launches a terminal session (using the “screen” command).  This will provide separate shells for MySQL and Opensim.
• create a shutdown script

I need beta testers.  I dont want to make this widely available until I am confident that it works for a handful of folks (for one thing, it’s going to be a sizeable download).  Contact me at my gmail.com address: javajoint, and I will point you at a download.  I am pondering if I want to put this up at Amazon S3 or Dropbox …  It’s going to be a few hundred meg.

I need some extra eyes checking out the configuration.

Donations!  This is going to cost me in hosting, and I am between jobs.  If you can help sponsor the work, cost of hosting, etc, I’d sure appreciate it.  I’ll stick a PayPal button at the bottom of this post.

More on this soon.  Thanks for the enthusiasm so far!

Not long ago, I wondered aloud about what to learn.  Even if I stopped sleeping, I’d still not have the time to absorb all of the things I’m interested in.  I’m glad that I will never be bored, but I am always dealing with the priorities of “what to focus on?”  It’s a fun side of being a generalist: so much is so damn interesting!

So I thought I would write about the flip side, and mention what I am learning.  That way, potential employers and friends will know that I am not sitting around cooking bacon for my cat all day, and that I do have a project or two.

I am focusing on Cloud Computing, C# and .Net/Mono, NoSQL, OpenSim, and Unity.

They all tie together too, kinda.

As you know, a big interest of mine is Virtual Worlds.  I’m a champion of OpenSim and the Hypergrid, because I see a lot of parallels to where we were with Apache and the Web in 1995.  I am glad we have the Windows Sim on a Stick download which utilizes the Diva Distribution.  I am  currently looking into how to use MAMP to do the same thing for the Mac community.

Now that I have mentioned the server side of things, let me do a quick take on the client.  As I’ve written, I really want to see a Unity-based front end to OpenSim.  I have started porting my Slider object from SL to Unity.   My work so far has been in JavaScript, but in order to network it with, say,  Smartfox Server, I’ll be writing a bit in C#.  I see some good reasons to learn C# and Mono (starting within the contexts of Unity and OpenSim [1]).   I’ve been reading Programming C# 4.0.

[1] Seeing as how OpenSim is written in C#

So far so good.  You may be wondering how I tie Cloud Computing into this.  On the Cloud Computing side, I’ve been a user of Amazon S3 for a while.  EC2 was sorta off my radar, but a recent post by Ener Hax caught my attention, where she points at the idea of using the cloud to host OpenSim instances.  This put me on the chain of thought of “how to quickly scale for events in Virtual Worlds?”.  That has me delving into Amazon Web Services, and I am reading Jeff Barr’s Book “Host Your Web Site in the Cloud“.

The last bit of my current techy study stuff is NoSQL.  I’ve been through the try-redis tutorial and love it.  I am decent with MySQL, but I’ve always been a big fan of hashtables/associative arrays/keys & values etc… it fits my mental model of what I like to do in a program (index into an array, based on a key) — having that approach for a database makes sense for a couple of projects I have in mind (my photo database, and ThereThen addresses) .

So that’s my current focus.  I see jobs come across that want other things (like Java…), but I like what I’ve picked for myself!

I was just reading an article on MakeUseOf.com: Create A Google Custom Search Engine For Your Research

I got inspired to tinker with a custom search engine for Virtual Worlds stuff.  Let me know if you want to collaborate on it.

Try a sample search. Go on. You know you wanna ;)

[I just sent this to the developer email list for the Snowstorm project at Linden Lab.   Although I am not a code contributor, I've followed it and have contributed some ideas here and there.   I can't tell other developers what to do, but based on how LL is treating the community, I cant turn a blind eye and continue to participate in their effort]

In some small way, I’ve contributed some ideas (but not code) to SnowStorm.

I do hope SnowStorm, and the 2.x codebase, prosper and find greater acceptance.

However, I am a tech/developer/VW enthusiast, and will be focusing my energy elsewhere.

I dont like how Linden Lab is treating the Education and Non-Profit communities (ending their 50% discount).

I cannot, in good conscience, contribute to the efforts of a company that treats its customers that way.

My efforts will go towards the development of OpenSim, OpenSim grids, Unity, and possibly the 1.x and/or 2.x codebases in the TPV sphere.  It may well be that I receive no compensation for those efforts, but I will feel much better about participating in that community.

Linden Lab cannot treat customers the way it has, and expect to outsource some of their development efforts for free.

Daniel Smith