Open Source Meeting/2007-09-06

Transcript from the 2007-09-06 Open Source Meeting
[14:00]	Soft Linden: 	Usually start a smidge late...
[14:03]	Rob Linden: 	there we go...now we're getting close to quorum
[14:03]	Dnate Mars: 	Hello lovely Linden people :)
[14:03]	Rob Linden: 	hi all
[14:03]	Liana Linden: 	Howdy hi.
[14:04]	Object: Hello, Avatar! 	Object: Hello, Avatar!
[14:04]	Soft Linden: 	There we go. Was curious if the two far "corners" were within listening distance. Are.
[14:05]	Dnate Mars: 	it is less then 30m, yes?
[14:05]	Soft Linden: 	Yep!
[14:05]	Rob Linden: 	agenda: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Meeting/Agenda
[14:05]	Mm Alder: 	OK, I don't see any corners in this circle.
[14:05]	Rob Linden: 	we can start with agenda bashing now
[14:05]	Seg Baphomet: 	There really needs to be a parcel flag for "Everyone in this parcel hears everyone else"
[14:06]	Dnate Mars: 	that would be nice for bigger venues
[14:06]	Soft Linden: 	Sure. Would love something for also restricting sound to within a parcel too. Worth a JIRA at least.
[14:06]	Seg Baphomet: 	Thought there sorta was?
[14:06]	Soft Linden: 	You can do it with voice, and with spatialized sounds. Not chat AFAIK.
[14:06]	Seg Baphomet: 	There's that "REstrict spacialized audio" which I've never really understood what that means.
[14:07]	Wyn Galbraith votes for ganging the volume control on the Active Speakers list. 	Wyn Galbraith votes for ganging the volume control on the Active Speakers list.
[14:07]	Soft Linden: 	Right. I believe that's for sound effects - llTriggerSound and llPlaySound, Seg.
[14:07]	Soft Linden: 	Maybe physics collisions too, but dunno.
[14:07]	Seg Baphomet: 	As what "spacialized audio" means isn't really explained.
[14:08]	Seg Baphomet: 	In the context of the client, at least.
[14:08]	Soft Linden: 	First item is https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/ ?
[14:08]	Rob Linden: 	yup
[14:09]	Soft Linden: 	The short of that is that it can be hard to filter out just what's relevant for reading in sldev. Multiple lists are one solution but have a lot of problems when topics change, or when people don't keep their subscription set current...
[14:09]	Soft Linden: 	So the proposal here is for creating tags that go in the subject line to suggest what a thread is about, so people can use their mail clients to filter.
[14:09]	Soft Linden: 	So the question is what a good set of starter tags would be. We want few enough that people can remember them, but they should be comprehensive enough to be useful.
[14:09]	Mm Alder: 	So what would someone want to filter out?
[14:10]	Rob Linden: 	POLICY, for example
[14:10]	Seg Baphomet: 	I just don't think this is really getting at the root of the problem.
[14:10]	Soft Linden: 	Go on?
[14:10]	Rob Linden: 	Seg: agreed, but seems like the best compromise so far
[14:10]	Rob Linden: 	(but yes, do go on)
[14:11]	Seg Baphomet: 	Well, if noise is the problem, reduce the noise.
[14:11]	Seg Baphomet: 	I dunno. I guess it doesn't hurt but its not really getting at the root of the complaints.
[14:12]	Soft Linden: 	There's really not a lot of what you'd classify as "noise," that is - stuff that's just completely off-topic or personal.
[14:12]	Rob Linden: 	it makes it easier to visually filter out the noise
[14:12]	Rob Linden: 	(where everyone has a subjective definition of "noise")
[14:12]	Soft Linden: 	But there are a lot of threads that go on at length about things like licensing, or sort of blue sky feature ideas that couldn't realistically be implemented any time soon enough to demand everyone's attention.
[14:12]	Seg Baphomet: 	Well there's that. There's really not that much noise IMHO.
[14:13]	Mm Alder: 	I don't plan to filter out anything. Someone who intends to (Lindens?) should suggest things they don't care about.
[14:13]	Soft Linden: 	Folks who are just after a bit of hard tech or solving an immediate problem might want to filter those. But it would also be nice to allow those discussions to continue for the people who like a lot more social involvement or far-reaching brainstorming.
[14:14]	Seg Baphomet: 	But then, I'm someone who's been on massive mailing lists and was on Usenet going back to around 1994. So I'm used to dealing with it.
[14:14]	Squirrel Wood: 	Ta!
[14:14]	Soft Linden: 	That may be a good place to start though - is this most useful for filtering in, or filtering out? Do we only need tags for topics that have really blown up traffic in the past?
[14:14]	Soft Linden: 	ie, maybe we only need 2-3 tags right now, not a comprehensive set.
[14:15]	Rob Linden: 	that's part of my reasoning behind breaking it up into two categories in my proposal
[14:15]	Mm Alder: 	Is anyone here intending to filter?
[14:15]	Rob Linden: 	Mm: not the right audience to ask.
[14:16]	Seg Baphomet: 	Heh.
[14:16]	Soft Linden: 	I'd probably filter some stuff to only read batched up when I write summaries. I could pass up a lot of the less-immediate topics myself.
[14:16]	Rob Linden: 	the people that show up here are probably reading everything
[14:16]	Rob Linden: 	(or at least, far more likely than the other 500 or so people that don't come here)
[14:16]	Seg Baphomet: 	That's one thing that hasn't got much mention in this whole thing. SLdev traffic. :)
[14:17]	Rob Linden: 	here's the reason why this conversation keeps coming up:
[14:17]	Rob Linden: 	someone asks: "why don't more Lindens participate"
[14:18]	Rob Linden: 	I answer: "most find sldev overwhelming"
[14:18]	Rob Linden: 	debate ensues
[14:18]	Seg Baphomet: 	Who finds it overwhelming and why?
[14:19]	Seg Baphomet: 	My view is, most of the people complaining about the list probably aren't going to be appeased no matter what we do.
[14:19]	Soft Linden: 	Most Lindens are attached to multiple major tasks at any point. Even if keeping up is 15 minutes out of the day, that's a big cut. They can go to -traffic for summaries, but then they don't contribute to live conversations.
[14:19]	Rob Linden: 	Seg: I'm willing to be more of a nag to Lindens if people on the list are willing to be accomodating
[14:19]	Seg Baphomet: 	So why ruin things who are okay with the list for people who aren't going to be happy anyway?
[14:20]	Soft Linden: 	It would be cool if the graphics guys could just watch for [graphics] tags and keep up-to-current on just those targeted discussions, as an example.
[14:20]	Wyn Galbraith: 	Buy more Lindens!
[14:20]	Flux Cortes: 	lol >_>
[14:20]	Rob Linden: 	Seg: it's a courtesy thing in my mind
[14:20]	Mm Alder: 	So it comes back to needing Lindens to define the tags.
[14:21]	Soft Linden: 	That may be the case, if you're suggesting that nobody else on the list has an interest in these.
[14:21]	Mm Alder: 	I'm willing to use them, but not to filter.
[14:21]	Seg Baphomet: 	I dunno. What I want to see more of is leading by example.
[14:21]	Rob Linden: 	the more courteous thing to do, in my mind, is to try to provide organized communication, instead of expecting demanding it on the receiving end
[14:22]	Squirrel Wood: 	I hope you don't mind me spamming https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/ here. But I need more votes for a better user experience ^^
[14:22]	Seg Baphomet: 	Too much noise? Contribute some signal then, please.
[14:22]	Rob Linden: 	there's one sender, and 550 receivers.
[14:22]	Mm Alder: 	I didn't mean to put the burden on someone else, it's just that I don't know how work is parceled out at LL.
[14:22]	Rob Linden: 	Seg: it's chicken and egg
[14:23]	Seg Baphomet: 	Indeed.
[14:23]	Rob Linden: 	...and if you're waiting for us to blink, tough
[14:23]	Soft Linden: 	Something to keep in mind is that open source isn't something being imposed on every last developer. We're trying to look at each area and find ways to make open source participation net an improvement for each developer. Providing a better snr will help reduce their cost of participation, likely making participation more attractive to a few more Lindens.
[14:23]	Soft Linden: 	s/net/nets/
[14:23]	Rob Linden: 	when they see people get beligerant about being courteous, it just proves that particpating is a waste of time
[14:24]	Seg Baphomet: 	And something else to keep in mind is if you alienate the community too much, the community will fork and quite possibly make LL irrelevant.
[14:24]	Mm Alder: 	I think the difference is: When I want a break from my real job, I have a look at SLDev, but for Lindens, it's still the real job, not a break at all.
[14:25]	Rob Linden: 	I should elaborate on my earlier point. when there's one sender, and 550 receivers, then it's way more efficient for the sender to step back and do the more organized thing than it is to put the burden on the receiver
[14:25]	Seg Baphomet: 	And really, I'd rather that didn't happen.
[14:25]	Rob Linden: 	Seg: how afraid do you think we are that there will be a fork?
[14:26]	Liana Linden: 	What I like about tagging is that filtering on tags is optional for the receiver and keeps the list unified.
[14:26]	Seg Baphomet: 	I dunno. Really I'm worried about keeping things from ever heading down that path. :)
[14:26]	Mm Alder: 	I don't think anyone here is opposed to tagging, but no one here knows what the tags should be.
[14:27]	Rob Linden: 	Seg: our belief is this: if we can be efficient, it'll be hard for a fork to compete.
[14:27]	Liana Linden: 	There's no perfect nomenclature. So, I think we can go forward with a best guess. Keep the list small to start. See what behavior emerges.
[14:28]	Seg Baphomet: 	But yeah. Back to the bug. Tagging isn't a terrrible idea, but the one's making the complaints really need to be the ones to explain what they need. :)
[14:28]	Rob Linden: 	does anyone else agree with Seg, or is everyone anxious to actually settle on a list of tags?
[14:29]	Soft Linden: 	Yes and no. There are people who aren't complaining, but not participating at all because of the volume. So two good questions for us to ask would be: what kinds of areas would benefit from more participation, and what kinds of subjects have consumed a lot of space.
[14:30]	Seg Baphomet: 	And start with a small list, and grow as needed, will make it more likely that people will remember what tags are in use and use them. :)
[14:30]	Liana Linden: 	Rob, I haven't asked you, but I think your proposal in probably represents a distillation of what may work best for a majority of Linden devs. Is that accurate?
[14:30]	Rob Linden: 	I think so. It may still be a little heavyweight, but I'm willing to use it still
[14:31]	Soft Linden: 	I'll toss out licensing, policy, and optimization as some of the bigger topics that might not draw universal interest. Would anyone add to that?
[14:31]	Soft Linden: 	If we're shooting for the big items, not every last item.
[14:31]	Rob Linden: 	Soft: did you read my comment about licensing?
[14:32]	Soft Linden: 	Regarding licensing being directed to the other list, yeah. I'm more thinking the GPL advocacy and interpretation discussions that happen a lot, where there's not so much a clear question as people explaining and re-explaining things to each other.
[14:33]	Rob Linden: 	Soft: ugh...those sort of things should be directed offlist
[14:33]	Seg Baphomet: 	I dunno. A convention used on some larger lists is to tag things based on if a specific group is intended to read the thread, not necessarily based on topic.
[14:33]	Liana Linden: 	tag: INAL. ;-)
[14:33]	Soft Linden: 	I like the I Am Not A Lawyer tag :)
[14:33]	Seg Baphomet: 	[ATTN: LINDENS]
[14:33]	Seg Baphomet: 	[ATTN: Linus]
[14:33]	Rob Linden: 	hmmm. ok, I don't want to start from scratch here
[14:33]	Seg Baphomet: 	[ATTN: jms]
[14:33]	Seg Baphomet: 	etc :)
[14:34]	Rob Linden: 	I say we either settle on what's in JIRA now, or postpone this conversation to next week, and do the same thing next week
[14:34]	Seg Baphomet: 	Yeah, see that's the thing. A lot of the licensing noise is rooted in LL's refusal to give a final answer on things. ;P
[14:34]	Rob Linden: 	(actually, I'm not going to be here next week)
[14:35]	Rob Linden: 	Seg: I'll admit we've been very slow to answer stuff, but clogging sldev isn't going to solve it
[14:35]	Rob Linden: 	I've had many people bitch about our licensing speed, who have yet to send a single email to licensing@lindenlab.com
[14:35]	Soft Linden: 	I'll add some comments to the jira - put a reminder about that on-list.
[14:35]	Squirrel Wood: 	What about... splitting the list up into several, each dedicated to a specific area of the whole mess?
[14:36]	Mm Alder: 	No splitting please.
[14:36]	Soft Linden: 	The split's what we're trying to avoid, squirrel...
[14:36]	Squirrel Wood: 	kk
[14:36]	Soft Linden: 	Many discussions really are appropriate to multiple lists, or shift focus part-way through. The traffic levels in each are also going to go up and down a lot.
[14:36]	Mm Alder: 	So make a list Rob and we'll run with it. It's a work in progress anyway.
[14:37]	Rob Linden: 	let me ask my question differently. Is the tag list in JIRA stupid and indefensible, or is it a starting point. If it's a starting point, I say we roll with it, and then keep the conversation going if needed.
[14:37]	Liana Linden: 	it's a good starting point.
[14:37]	Soft Linden: 	I think it's the right solution. All for it
[14:38]	Squirrel Wood: 	Hello Nicholaz
[14:38]	Mm Alder: 	Aye.
[14:38]	Nicholaz Beresford: 	hello all
[14:38]	Saijanai Kuhn {VOTES} 	Saijanai Kuhn {VOTES}
[14:38]	Rob Linden: 	hi Nicholaz
[14:38]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	[VOTES]
[14:39]	Nicholaz Beresford: 	(sorry, late ... thursday is pretty inconvenient for me)
[14:39]	Squirrel Wood: 	I would suggest adding a tagline of sorts to the mails listing the most important keywords so people won't have to look them up
[14:39]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	I only started the discussion origianlly because so many people were caling for a split. I'm split-neutral... whatever everyne is willing to use, tags, split mailing list, forums...
[14:39]	Soft Linden: 	Ya, was just thinking a weekly mailing list guide might make sense.
[14:40]	Rob Linden: 	ok, I'll roll with the current list.
[14:40]	Wyn Galbraith just wishes it was easier to herd the cats, "I have a hard time just keeping track of the buggers." 	Wyn Galbraith just wishes it was easier to herd the cats, "I have a hard time just keeping track of the buggers."
[14:40]	Rob Linden: 	next up on the agenda:
[14:40]	Saijanai Kuhn notes that Wyn isn't using her cat herder tag... Did she joint the group? 	Saijanai Kuhn notes that Wyn isn't using her cat herder tag... Did she joint the group?
[14:41]	Rob Linden: 	access to voice stream
[14:41]	Wyn Galbraith: 	What group! Alas I have no more group space.
[14:41]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	ah,my private group, PHilosophy of Second Life scripting. Meant a s a placeholder for spiffy group tags
[14:42]	Wyn Galbraith will make one up in one of her groups. 	Wyn Galbraith will make one up in one of her groups.
[14:42]	Rob Linden: 	my understanding of the situation is rather vague, adn what I can say is even vaguer
[14:42]	Rob Linden: 	(re: voice, that is)
[14:43]	Squirrel Wood: 	I can confirrm that voice works flawlessly with 17 people in thechat.
[14:43]	Mm Alder: 	OK, I put it on the agenda because I'm trying to do lip-sync and for that I need the voice stream.
[14:43]	Soft Linden: 	So the question as I read it is whether it's possible to make something that taps voice.
[14:43]	Soft Linden: 	Right now, you can do this by creating a software audio device, but that's going to be an OS-dependent solution. People use this for stuff like voice morphing already.
[14:43]	Rob Linden: 	many of the protocols are open protocols (SIP, RTP), and the codec is actually a standard (albeit non-free) codec
[14:43]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	you'd have to grab it from the voice cient, no?
[14:43]	Rob Linden: 	however, it's woefully undocumented
[14:43]	Mm Alder: 	Or make SLVoice open source (not necessarily SLVoiceAgent, vivoxsdk, etc.)
[14:44]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	client*
[14:44]	Rob Linden: 	actually, one bit of agenda etiquette I'd like to propose:
[14:44]	Soft Linden: 	Who added that ot the agenda, anyway? I'm curious if there's an immediate application for this, or if it's just sort of a neat-to-have thing.
[14:45]	Seg Baphomet: 	The voice thingy needs to pass audio back to slviewer for rendering.
[14:45]	Rob Linden: 	send mail about things that haven't recently been discussed before/concurrent with adding to the agenda
[14:45]	Mm Alder: 	I added it. Right now I'm trying to document what I can see of the voice code, then I plan to implement lip-sync.
[14:46]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	you'd need to talk to the company directly, I suspect...
[14:46]	Squirrel Wood: 	lag may work against synched lips.
[14:46]	Seg Baphomet: 	I should probably sign the agreement and Jira my OpenAL patch already. ;P
[14:46]	Mm Alder: 	Sorry Rob. I'm still learning etiquette. :-)
[14:46]	Soft Linden: 	Yes please :)
[14:46]	Wyn Galbraith: 	Loose lips sink slips.
[14:46]	Rob Linden: 	that's ok, Mm. this is somethign I haven't formally asked for before
[14:47]	Mm Alder: 	So why isn't SLVoice open source?
[14:47]	Rob Linden: 	it's not our code. it's from Vivox
[14:47]	Rob Linden: 	...adn the discussion/plan for working with Vivox predated our open source work
[14:48]	Mm Alder: 	Do they have objections to open sourcing it?
[14:48]	Flux Cortes: 	they should
[14:48]	Rob Linden: 	I can't talk about our conversations with Vivox
[14:49]	Mm Alder: 	I don't need everything open source, just enough to get the audio. Is that hopeless?
[14:50]	Rob Linden: 	Mm, I can't give you specifics. Things aren't hopeless, and there's plenty of reasons to be optimistic about where we're going, but I have to be cryptic about this stuff. sorry for sounding like a magic 8 ball
[14:50]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	that's platform specific. On the mac, you can grab the audio via Sound Flower I believe
[14:51]	Mm Alder: 	I'm looking for a clean implementation, though.
[14:51]	Seg Baphomet: 	I'd sure like to know what the holdup really is.
[14:53]	Rob Linden: 	well, let me be more specific about one thing: in the course of doing business, companies sign agreements that obligate them to keep their mouths shut. This is one of those cases.
[14:53]	Flux Cortes: 	else they sick the angry lawyers
[14:53]	Seg Baphomet: 	lulz
[14:54]	Squirrel Wood: 	Top secrets ^^
[14:54]	Mm Alder: 	OK, I'll plan on doing the lip-sync with a babble loop. Not to elegant, but maybe it'll get someone's attention.
[14:54]	Soft Linden: 	This question should go to the list a bit though - it's possible there are already sound tapping solutions that could easily be used for development until the SL-specific issues get sorted out.
[14:54]	Soft Linden: 	Ya.
[14:55]	Seg Baphomet: 	You could perhaps write an OpenAL wrapper, intercept slvoice's OpenAL calls and do what you will with them...
[14:55]	Rob Linden: 	k. just to wrap up here. Per my earlier comment, what I really see this office hour being useful for is unstalling conversations that get stalled on sldev
[14:55]	Seg Baphomet: 	Binary blobs are fun!
[14:56]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	someone on the sculptydev list was suggeting that realtime sculpty textures based on audio streams would be fun...
[14:56]	Soft Linden: 	The only binary blobs I like are my gpg encrypted secret bits. :P
[14:56]	Rob Linden: 	(sculptydev?)\
[14:57]	Seg Baphomet: 	Feed audio into a GLSL shader.
[14:57]	Soft Linden: 	Ya, Argent Stonecutter's pushing pretty hard on that. (Assuming you mean video streams!)
[14:57]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	sculpty group founded by Aarl
[14:57]	Seg Baphomet: 	What we need is skeletal animation on sculpties.
[14:57]	Saijanai Kuhn wants to know how many streams will run on a sim... 	Saijanai Kuhn wants to know how many streams will run on a sim...
[14:57]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	group founded by Qarl, not Aarl
[14:58]	Rob Linden: 	Saijanai, do you have a url?
[14:58]	Soft Linden: 	afaik, you can have 255 or 256 parcels in a region, each with its own stream.
[14:58]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	I think they ment audio streams, as in animated voice patterns
[14:58]	Soft Linden: 	Keep in mind you only receive the stream for the one in which you are present, however.
[14:59]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	still not the same as a true animation system for sculpties then.
[14:59]	Seg Baphomet: 	Bind sculpties to the existing avatar skeleton skinner... thingy.
[14:59]	Seg Baphomet: 	Mmmmmm.
[14:59]	Soft Linden: 	Well, a skeletal animation system wouldn't make sense to limit to sculpties anyway.
[14:59]	Squirrel Wood: 	Procedural textures. Yum ^^
[14:59]	Saijanai Kuhn: 	wsa thinking of a different issue than skeletans actually
[14:59]	Seg Baphomet: 	An animation system, period, would be nice.
[15:00]	Soft Linden: 	Hee - but this is definitely pie in the sky stuff, I'd think. Animation already isn't well-performing for just a bunch of avatars using it. If someone wanted to spend some time reducing costs there, maybe... :)
[15:00]	Wyn Galbraith: 	Everything's a nut to Squirrel, even textures ;)
[15:00]	Seg Baphomet: 	Right now its basically impossible to really get more than one prim to move in any kind of sync with another.
[15:00]	Squirrel Wood: 	It is possible. Just link them ^^
[15:01]	Rob Linden: 	k....I'm about to time out here. anyone else have anythign for me?
[15:01]	Soft Linden: 	Are we out of agenda, out of time?
[15:01]	Squirrel Wood points you at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/ for a vote ^^ - feature request to let people edit prim properties in the edit window like particles, hovertext, .. - Every vote counts ^^	Squirrel Wood points you at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/ for a vote ^^ - feature request to let people edit prim properties in the edit window like particles, hovertext, .. - Every vote counts ^^
[15:01]	Saijanai Kuhn has an idea about that, use texture animations, but instead of m xn frames, its m frames for n sculpties 	Saijanai Kuhn has an idea about that, use texture animations, but instead of m xn frames, its m frames for n sculpties
[15:01]	Rob Linden: 	(feel free to keep going otherwise)
[15:01]	Mm Alder: 	Thanks Rob.