Ben's blog (no longer Green Phosphor LLC)

2012-01-15T14:46:00.000-08:00

I have released 3sh3ll, my new project, under GPLv2. It's 3d, of course, but this time focused on realtime viewing of a stream of events. No virtual world integration... the 3d is straight up java code, using JMonkeyEngine. It's wired up to a pcap sniffer, and a barnyard2 output plugin for viewing of snort events. This is a new generation of operator console for cyber security.

The console generates an n-ary tree automatically, and shows it to you from the top down; measurements (blips) flow down the limbs of the tree, beginning at .1-second intervals and consolidating into 1-second intervals before consolidating down the taxonomy into root. The idea is to show links among as many nodes as possible given the real estate of the screen, and in a way which is readily consumable by the human with very targeted interaction. Here's a video of 3sh3ll. The project is at google code.

This is a very different approach from what I did with Green Phosphor. No patenting or expensive IP protection this time. Sure burned me last time. Eventually I will sell a corporate appliance version of the 3sh3ll system. But the core is open source. I hope the community validates my decision; it took me a long time to get here. :)

Ben

2011-12-04T11:58:00.001-08:00

Check out my friend Bing's site bingtohelp.yolasite.com. She is looking for suggestions on how to help with world hunger. You can read about why in her "about-me" page; her contact is on the site.

circumnavigating the tidal pool

2011-11-07T06:39:00.000-08:00

The Jefferson Memorial brought me to tears. The clarity of the statement against tyranny over the mind resonated with me powerfully.

Moving on to the FDR Memorial... and there it was. The glaring perversion of Jefferson's vision. "Free from want"

(The first memorial I visited yesterday was Lincoln, ultimate symbol of the rise of the Federal Govt.; I will leave a discussion of what Jefferson would have thought of him for later... hint: we are all now equally enslaved by a bigger system.)

What? Free from want? Is this a freedom?

The freedoms which were on the table before were freedoms of choice and of opportunity, freedom being the LACK OF EXTERNAL CONTROL OVER THE INDIVIDUAL.

Is there any way to provide a freedom from want without imposing CONTROL OVER THE INDIVIDUAL? Can someone explain this to me?

excellence

2011-10-08T10:49:00.001-07:00

It is not excellence we seek as architects.

It is beauty.

Beauty begins within the core of what we do.

limit

2011-08-01T17:25:00.001-07:00

There is a limit to the endless combining of all things with all things.

No matter how vast the set of permutations of the keys becomes, it is a finite number.

Spirit, creative, is limitless and can animate the otherwise lifeless matter.

The junction of the spirit with the flesh is the engine which makes captivity within matter pleasurable; endurable.

Jah be praised! Gaze on this vale of tears with an appreciation for the sanctity of all life! It is a beautiful place!

three layers

2011-07-31T10:00:00.000-07:00

I was very serious about painting for some years. The first fifteen or so paintings I produced in my first studio in railroad square back when I was twenty-one all focused on a 3d object which consisted of a pyramid with a cube stacked on it, with a sphere stacked on that. The relationship of this object to its surroundings - earth, sky, and space (and light) basically, is what I was exploring.

The pyramid was the body, the cube the mind, and the sphere the spirit.

Now I have become interested in a new isomorphic analogy. Rather than describing the individual, however, it attempts to describe the world. It is the jungle, the system, and the path.

The jungle is nature. No matter how we romanticize nature, it is a ruthless place where survival of the fittest rules.

The system is our civilization. Government, power lines, the internet, the media... things of the mind, of money, of technology. Rastafari have it correct, it is Babylon System.

The path is a narrow way through these other layers, which is discovered by the spirit.

Software Architecture and Quidditch

2011-07-31T09:09:00.000-07:00

First allow me the pleasure of saying that Harry Potter sucks. I'm a big fan of Tolkien, Moorcock, Zelazny, and other fantasy. But not the juvenihilisticism of Potter.

(can I say it sucks when I've never read it? how dare I)

Quidditch is interesting, though. Hurling on steroids, with the twist of the snitch. The snitch is a magic key to victory. There is a corollary in software architecture: the snitch is the core issue, core problem, which underlies the scaling and complexity issues of a system. It is the job of the architect to find the snitch.

Unlike in Quidditch, though, in software architecture it is the job of the whole team to do something with the snitch once it is found. In software, the best solution, the best idea, can come from anyone. The architect should facilitate the solution process once the snitch is discovered, so that the entire team can then win the game together.

Let's not build an entire school to kiss one kid's ass. :)~

link to the first parts:

2011-07-30T15:15:00.001-07:00

The Zenstone

quattro

2011-07-30T14:57:00.001-07:00

Glasshouse: brains were and are developed toward the better modelling of the changing 3d matrix around them

Arkowitz: you would be blind if you did not perceive through us, humans

tres honorabili

2011-07-22T04:27:00.000-07:00

Arkowitz took the final step up onto the ridge, anticipating the view. He had not been able to see much except the jungle he was moving through, zigzagging within the crevice of a stream channel.

The trunks of the larger trees which could only grow that big because of the water and shelter provided... were the only footing in many places. The dappled light hinted at the force of the full sun above.

Looking back over the valley Arkowitz could see the network of roads, powerwires, trains, and lesserknown layers of the system. Nature was eventually incorporated as yet another layer distributed throughout the substrate (aether).

The other side of the ridge sloped more gently down, but the pockets of nature far out on the plane were linked more strongly by green corridors, devoid of the tech of the other layers, and obscuring the movement of the walkers within them. Leading down into this level by level was a path over exposed rock, fed by smaller paths coming down from the ledges and domes of the spine. The wolf loped along one of the domes, to the last comfortable point on the curve of precipice. An ancient pine was clinging there. He lifted his snout into the air, balmy breezes carrying scents of fires, smog, and juniper, and the denizens of the jungle and the system.

Arkowitz found a boulder with a decent angle for his back. Good place for a smoke.

The Lost of Freedom

2010-11-22T11:03:00.000-08:00

We have this great country because people have decided, over the course of a couple hundred years, that freedom is more important than their personal safety. Many gave their lives. Revolutionaries, soldiers, civil rights activists.

We have lost track of this great principle: that freedom is worth sacrifice. Without this principle, we are all victims of the terrorists, every day. Because they rule us through fear, we have spit upon the graves of the great citizens of the United States of America who gave their lives so that we could have this great country.

Ben Lindquist

new reference grid

2010-08-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

In the lower right corner you can see the new reference grid designed to keep people from being too disoriented in the blackness of cyberspace.

watching the super bowl

2010-02-07T12:51:00.001-08:00

Snowstorm

2010-02-07T11:30:00.000-08:00

The storm is a perfect illustration of the need for knowledge workers to work together within knowledge "worlds". The power of virtual reality is the sense of collaboration we can attain with other people; a sense which we know is important. We've all compared video conferences to traveling to be with a team face to face - and we realize the importance of really engaging with people.

One need only look at the oil graphs and container shipping I have been pushing to see that we have been dependent upon oil for transporting lots of things around the country, including ourselves. And the main reason most of transport ourselves - commute - around this great land is our need to be with people we work with. Being with people is what virtual reality - in its new form as "virtual world" - is all about.

Ben

small graph

2010-02-04T20:24:00.000-08:00

2010-01-17T06:54:00.000-08:00

sacredness of life
spirit can exist within matter

2010

2010-01-14T16:38:00.000-08:00

Well I've moved to Fairfax, VA. The DC area is hot.

I'm really excited about our new plugin API for Glasshouse; it's going to let lots of people build interactive, 3D applications which run in multiple virtual world platforms. I've already used it to produce a plugin called GridStack, which lets you choose columns from mysql databases and build graphs, stacking them in a correlated fashion... without leaving the virtual world or using ANY 2D user interface. This is the future of Glasshouse: visualizing the structure of datasources and using that within the virtual world to create visualizations of the data they contain. We'll be adding XMLA support next. Check out the video:

correlation between swine flu news and reported flu cases

2009-11-19T05:56:00.000-08:00

I put together a video showing Google flu trends data in Glasshouse; really interesting data. Check out the anomalous bump that I found.

Perhaps the explanation for the jump in reported flu cases in the northern hemisphere during the week of April 26th, 2009 was due to the WHO issuing their first Disease Outbreak Notice regarding swine flu, on April 24th...

wikipedia timeline

NFL Stats and Fantasy Points in 3D

2009-10-20T12:19:00.000-07:00

OUR FANTASY FOOTBALL TOOL IS LIVE!!!

Green Phosphor now has the entire history of the NFL available for 3D graphing - and updated every week. Our fantasy football tool, which anyone can run inside our public Wonderland sandbox by going to the tools menu, lets you create a 3D graph of any combination of stats or fantasy points, for any position, year, or week. You can also define the way points are allocated for your league.

Ed has been hard at work on this for some time now and we are really proud of it! If you are playing fantasy football, please try out 3D visualization to get an edge! You will see patterns and trends like never before.

http://greenphosphor.com/ff.html

MORE dimensionality

2009-09-20T17:09:00.001-07:00

Often the solution to a prediction problem (model the supposed underlying phenomena using variables and relationships) requires a model with more dimensionality.

We have created a flatland where people are constantly trying to reduce dimensionality to that which is easily comprehensible, thereby missing the opportunity to develop models which SOLVE THE PROBLEM.

I posit that merely observing the data you have collected regarding some phenomena, using more dimensional visualization (while still comprehensible)... can only help in the above process.

This is what Glasshouse is about.

Arkowitz

nice to have architects like Werner around

2009-09-03T18:57:00.000-07:00

Global Warming Data Visualization

2009-08-29T18:17:00.000-07:00

Can you do this in flatland?

2009-07-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

Great article on Werner Kurosawa

2009-07-09T07:06:00.001-07:00

great article by Bettina Tizzy

Werner built our fabulous headquarters in SL.

Ben

Article on MaxPing.org, and Wizards'Guild

2009-07-03T08:24:00.001-07:00

new article about Green Phosphor on MaxPing

The above article shows off Glasshouse Excel integration and realtime graphs in Second Life, and goes on to talk about the secure, subscription service we will be releasing - along with pricing.

The article also talks about the guild we want to help create... the Wizards'Guild. Check it out! I also started a discussion about the guild at the Thinkbalm Innovation Community, and in MaxPing's forums.

Ben

See an Excel sheet in SL with Glasshouse

2009-06-25T07:54:00.000-07:00

Once you run Glasshouse and load an Excel file, it's easy to make changes and pull those changes into the graph you create in Second Life. We added a refresh menu option to the green cube.

live graph quick demo

2009-06-22T11:10:00.001-07:00

This video really doesn't do the live graph justice; you should really see it in-world. But here it is anyway. :)

Arkowitz

new hq in sl; time-series; OLIVE; python MXP!!!

2009-06-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

Green Phosphor has a new headquarters in Second Life, next door to Popcha! and Brooklyn is Watching. Here's a SLurl:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/popcha/204/28/22/

Our buildings were designed and constructed by architect Werner Kurosawa.

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Ed has implemented time series animation in Glasshouse and in the Wonderland CICP adapter. In our Wonderland sandbox you can look at a graph of quarterback stats changing over time. It's killer. We're now applying this new capability to visualization of the stock market.

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The integration of Glasshouse with Forterra's OLIVE virtual world platform is going swimmingly. I visited their offices last week to see how things were going and I'm psyched. OLIVE is a fantastic platform.

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I am super excited about the latest MXP developments (http://bubblecloud.org). Dan Miller is involved, and working with everyone on a python implementation of an MXP viewer! This is what MXP is all about: enabling multiple platforms to interoperate. Python, c#, Java, c++... heck SmallTalk even... we should all be able to play together nicely.

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That's all for now...

Arkowitz

us bonds eye candy

2009-05-14T22:26:00.001-07:00

fun in the sandbox

2009-04-24T08:29:00.000-07:00

I love working in Second Life sandboxen. Anything can happen; last week I was coding for eight hours straight and someone came in and shot me with some kind of weapon, probably just testing it... my avatar was propelled up in the air with all kinds of colored balls flying around me. When I landed my pulse was going crazy and I rezzed out one of my blue spheres to harass the person. Here's a quick excerpt from a chat I had just today, about another incident:

hotshotscott7: back
me: you missed some fun
Ed and I were in world and some dude came over spewing out black swastikas
hotshotscott7: lol wtf
me: so I rezzed out a blue ball that stuck to his crotch
then he got some chick to teleport in who was fiddling around with some kind of weapon but she never got it to work right

This is the real and surreal life in the metaverse. Love it I have to say.

Arkowitz

science

2009-03-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

Dr. David Resuehr has joined Green Phosphor as our Chief Scientist. We've also reworked our website to properly reflect our emphasis on biotech.

Cybertechnews has another article by yours truly - with a very interesting quote from Dr. David as well.

f(space,energy)=matter

2009-02-25T19:34:00.001-08:00

Think INSIDE the Box and Out of the Screen

2009-02-17T07:03:00.000-08:00

I was sitting in my office just now chatting with a dev who used to work for me at Right Media and who now is helping with the implementation of CICP in OpenSim. He was asking why there aren't a slew of data visualization apps in virtual worlds; the idea seems so obvious.

I venture that rather than a case of people needing to think "outside the box" it's a case of people needing to get out of the plane and into the box.

Ben

CICP is Public Domain

2009-02-16T06:26:00.000-08:00

I've published the CICP provisional patent app on cybertechnews.

I also have someone working on implementing CICP in OpenSim. Not only will this allow OpenSim developers to experiment with CICP, it will give Green Phosphor's data visualization product, Glasshouse, another virtual world platform to deploy with!

Glasshouse now turns Excel files into graphs

2009-02-11T13:15:00.000-08:00

It's now really easy to make a 3d graph within a virtual world. Just put the data you want graphed into an excel worksheet (the old .xls format), load up Glasshouse, pull in the worksheet, and off you go.

Try it out here: http://greenphosphor.com/?location=Beta

MXP Article

2009-02-03T09:46:00.000-08:00

I've got an MXP article on cybertechnews.com.

Back to that chess match Beth Coleman brought up:

Suppose that Yuri and 3Jane are sitting in a drawing room playing at chess. Between them is a checkered board with pieces on it; the black pieces belong to Yuri, suppose, and the white to 3Jane.

There are some great parallels with a virtual world here:

1) the chess board, like the virtual world, is not a continuum; it is broken up into a discrete coordinate system

2) Yuri and 3Jane are participants in a consensual experience.

3) the chess pieces are objects, and each is owned by a particular participant

4) the rules of chess, the strategies, etc. are IN THE MINDS of the participants; not in the chess board itself

Arkowitz

intelligence is green

2009-01-16T10:07:00.000-08:00

There is a lot of emphasis on being green these days. There is a growing consensus that we are going to destroy the world with our wasteful, polluting ways. We are not.

The carbon dioxide we are adding to the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels... we get it out of the ground. How did it get into the ground in the first place? Where was it before organisms decomposed and became oil? Didn't the abundance of life on the earth millions of years ago lead directly to the depositing of oil and other fossil fuels into the ground? From the air, to the ground. From the ground, to the air.

If we are not destroying the world, then why is our wasteful way of life so intuitively bad? I believe it is bad because we make everything ugly. Because we create conditions which bring about our own misery.

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Intelligence is the ultimate way to be green. All technologies for energy production are problematic; it is the intelligent application of mixtures of them - and, even more, the intelligent use of the energy itself - which leads to harmony.

Green is beauty.

Arkowitz

the mathematical implications

2008-12-25T06:43:00.000-08:00

In my emerging cosmology, energy is the fourth dimension, not time.

Arkowitz

time in virtual worlds

2008-12-25T06:28:00.000-08:00

Godel's extension of Einstein's work shows us that time does not really exist. It is imaginary. There is no time - only space and energy.

Just as the past is not an additional "dimension" into which we could ever travel, because the past exists only in our heads and the heads of many other organisms as well; the future is imaginary too. There is only the distribution of energy through space right now.

This only is the only of science, logic, and some aspects of the "creative" art of philosophy. Time surely exists because we bring it into being; we the participants in shared sensory experiences; communication.

This is the role of virtual worlds as well.

I hereby redefine a virtual world as a shared space-energy, no longer a shared spacetime. The time part will emerge as a direct result of the messages sent to the bubble server; I used to think croquet's teatime did this but then I read something that made me think it doesn't; rather, it enforces an arbitrary definition of time; a synchronized clock. We will not synchronize a clock; we will make time a function of messages arriving. Messages are packets of energy in space, and they appear to move, to us.

Arkowitz/Ben

ps - Beth Coleman's analogy of a chess game applies quite well to virtual worlds and will be the subject of my next post hopefully

new focus on biotech

2008-12-22T10:17:00.001-08:00

Green Phosphor has joined a small business incubator, run by FAMU and the SBA. This has allowed us to move into fantastic office space in Innovation Park. When I look out my window I see two buildings: the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and the Northwest Regional Data Center.

I'm very close to finalizing Green Phosphor's business plan. We're focusing on the biotech industry, and will be using our patent-pending 3D user interface technology to create an appliance for model based drug development. I can't wait to see genes, codons, hormones, proteins, and their interactions - all in 3D within the virtual world. Here's a video we just made, introducing the technology.

Ed has been working very hard on the first public beta of our Glasshouse gateway. It's a Java application which can be launched from our website and used to connect to your own databases, allowing you and other users to see the data you publish in 3D in our public Sun Wonderland sandbox, Second Life, or your own Wonderland instance! We'll have it live within a couple weeks!

I'm very excited about the new year!

currently reading: Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

Cheers,
Ben

global warming will save the frogs

2008-11-23T20:14:00.000-08:00

unification

2008-11-17T06:15:00.000-08:00

As things move forward through time, they lose energy. This entropy is an increase in complexity. Thought processes suffer from an increase in complexity as well; take as a simple example the counting of the whole numbers starting from 1. Every prime encountered along the way is a major increase in complexity.

Life is the process of architecting a solution to the multidimensional prediction problem of how to continue life.

Life uses information flow to optimize its fight against entropy.

Information flow may be accomplished using resonance of spinning fields with one another. Resonance may be the way to solve the uncertainty problem; a system may be measured but not interfered with if we have another system achieve resonance with it and then measure the second system.

Imagine a unification of Einstein, Godel, Heisenberg, and ... Tesla.

Arkowitz

Heisenberg and Language

2008-11-14T04:44:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Werner Heisenberg's book Physics and Philosophy: the Revolution in Modern Science. He talks about how language is necessary for science. Until now science has used two languages: natural language and mathematics.

Now we have a new tool: programming languages. A programming language combines the precision of mathematics with the expressiveness of natural language and can be used to create a perceivable manifestation of a model; this allows the communication of concepts and models without need for language at all. This is a virtual world.

One may say that whatever we do with computers will suffer from "finiteness" and predictability not reflective of the real world, and that a computer program may be defined mathematically. I respond that the network introduces chance into the picture. Is it possible to always predict accurately what a ping time will be? I don't think so.

I think we have the ingredients for something significant.

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I've been thinking about a definition of Architecture which applies to computer science and IT as well as to physical projects such as buildings and bridges. Here's what I've come up with:

Architecture is the creation of a set of rules which, when followed by a group of actors, results in the construction of something persistent.

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Ever notice that the only metaphors we have for the workings of our minds are the machines we have constructed? Switches and gears...

Arkowitz

Massive Update

2008-10-31T06:24:00.000-07:00

I've been working with Tommi Laukkanen on a universal protocol for virtual worlds. It will be the second version of CICP, as well as the next version of Tommi's protocol, SETP... so for now we are calling it SETP/CICPv2. My main contribution so far has been much of the language in the Domain Model. Jon Watte of Forterra has been contributing as well. I'm very excited about the effort. Visit the SETP wiki to see what we are up to... go to the domain model page. I'm going to paste the whole page at the bottom of this blog post, too.

Green Phosphor has a new website designed for us by Derek Au, one of the brightest programmers I know... who has abandoned programming for pottery, specifically brilliant porcelain constructions he has been making in China. I feel very fortunate to have him on board.

Just over a week ago Green Phosphor completed the filing of two patent applications. One covers our gateway between a virtual world and an analytical database; this is the IP that we are building our for-profit business around. The other app covers CICP, and we will always give that one away for free. Trolls beware, this patent app will hopefully end up protecting some very valuable open source technology: a flexible, efficient, cross-platform protocol for sharing interactive content within bubbles of simulated spacetime.

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Domain Model

This page is a place to define the key entities of distributed virtual environments and SETP/CICPv2 protocol.

Theoretical Entities
-----------------------

Shared Spacetime

The overall goal of our protocol is to enable multiple participants to experience a shared, simulated, spacetime. Mathematically a spacetime is a four-dimensional continuum. We constrain this continuum such that the time dimension only moves forward and is constantly incremented by some sort of clock synchronization among the participants. We also may constrain this continuum such that there are a finite number of positions between two given points rather than an infinite number. This means it is not necessarily a continuum in the formal sense of the word.

Multiple shared spacetime bubbles may exist, and need not exist within the same coordinate system. A spacetime bubble may exist within a region of another spacetime bubble. A spacetime bubble may also border another spacetime bubble. Spacetime bubbles may also overlap.

Participant

Participants are entities which are able to perceive aspects of the simulation and/or have an effect on aspects of the simulation. Participant types are: humans, daemon processes, artificial intelligence scripts and applications.

Injection

Process where participant adds an object it owns to a spacetime bubble.

Ejection

Process where participant removes an object it owns from a space time bubble.

Object

An object is an atomic unit of content. An object's effect on a spacetime may be comprised of multiple types and occurrences of content, but is treated such that either the entire object exists within a given spacetime, or none of it exists. If a spacetime is assumed to have a boundary, and some object overlaps that boundary, the object can still be expressed in terms of the coordinate system of that spacetime and as such is considered to exist fully within that spacetime.

Injection commands are executed against individual objects. Update and ejection commands may be executed against individual objects or groups of objects.

Every object affecting a given spacetime belongs to a participant in that spacetime. If a program issues an injection command, placing an object into a spacetime, that program is a participant in that spacetime. If the program is a human interface, the human using the human interface is considered a participant.

Interaction

Interaction is an event where one object changes the state of another object. Without interactions it could be thought that all objects have their private spacetime. Participants use their avatar as a proxy when interacting with objects they do not own.

Avatar

An avatar is an object which is used to represent the identity of its owning participant.

State

Object external state can be observed and internal state is not immediately visible. State could
be categorized the same way as interactions. External states which are expressed with the protocol and internal states which are simulated but with entirely different model.

Content

Content is anything which can be perceived in the spacetime. Content only exists as a part of an object. Map can consists of one or more objects. All participation in a shared spacetime involves content. This includes images or textures, three-dimensional shapes, audio, fog, and light; it also includes changes occurring to any of these. Content may be injected into a spacetime, updated within a spacetime, ejected from a spacetime, or perceived within a spacetime. Injection, update, or ejection of content is performed via the protocol, by use of a command; perception of content is indicated via the protocol by receipt of an event. Injection, update, and ejection of content all result in perception events.

Awareness

Objects have awareness bounds. However they are defined geometrically, the awareness bounds indicate a region of space within a spacetime. If this region of space is affected by other objects, via injection, update, or ejection commands, events representing those effects will be sent to the participant responsible for the object. Objects may be defined with an empty awareness bounds, indicating that no events should be received.

Upon issuing an injection command for an object, a participant will receive events which correspond to all objects which were already affecting the spacetime within the awareness bounds of the new object.

Observation

An event where object observes another object inside its awareness bounds.

Migration (Teleporting / SimCrossing )

Process where objects teleport from one bubble to another. Teleporting can be seamless if bubbles overlap.

Visibility

Visibility is an attribute which reflects whether object or state can be observed through the spacetime. If transparent bottle is empty the state is visible as it can be observed with the mechanisms of the spacetime. If the state has to be inquired in an interaction it is not visible.

Appearance

When object is added to the world it appears. Objects and participants need to be aware of these events.

Disappearance

When object is removed from the world it disappears. Objects and participants need to be aware of these events.

Architecture Entities
--------------------------

Bubble (Simulation / Sim)

A volume of space simulated over time.

Cloud of Bubbles (Cluster / Grid)

A group of linked bubbles simulating distributed spacetime located in the same or separate bubble servers.

Bubble Server (World Server / Simulation Server)

A bubble server is a program which handles command and event processing for a spacetime. The bubble server is responsible for determining which events go to which participants, based on the awareness bounds and update coordinates of the objects the participants place into the spacetime. The bubble server may be essentially a messaging hub that is spatially aware only in terms of rough bounds and is not expected to perform physics simulation or collision detection. Bubble server will also contain object daemon (artificial active participant) injecting long lived persistent objects. Other daemon could be a physics daemon.

Human Interface / User Interface (Viewer/Browser/Client)

A human interface is a piece of software which uses the protocol and a user interface to enable a human to participate in a shared spacetime.

Subscription

Participants may inject objects which have a subscription capability. This means that other participants may receive updates involving that object directly from the owning participant. This can be useful to avoid network bottlenecking of a server; it is also useful when object updates take the form of a stream such as video or audio. The world server need not understand or process a particular video stream if the participant generating it streams it directly to all the other participants.

It has been suggested by Jon that subscription mechanisms and peer to peer streams could be defined in a separate protocol. - Tommi

I agree with this as well. All the SETP/CICPv2 protocol needs to do is allow an object to publicize the fact that it has a subscription capability and where to get it. --ark

Collision Detection

There should be a capability for a server module or special participant to handle collision detection for objects and trigger events based on that; it should also be possible for participants to handle their own collision detection.

It has been suggested by Jon that owning participant should always handle collision detection of an object. Another view point is that the bubble provides fundamental laws like collision detection. If several bubbles (sims from different providers) overlap then the bubble which is the primary bubble for an object (first point of injection) executes collision detection for that object. - Tommi

Reply: Collision detection is part of simulation of an object. Whether an object is squishy or hard, collides as a convex hull, sphere, mesh, or something else is part of the definition of the object. What the object does when colliding is part of the simulation (for example, does it bounce, or stick, or explode, or turn on a light, or ...). If you want to support simulating an object on a host other than the host that initially injected the object, then you'd have to also support injection and transfer of behavior, which is a Hard Problem and hasn't actually ever been solved well. Thus, an object is owned by its injector, its simulation is handled by its injector, and the lifetime of the object is constrained by the lifetime of the injector(!) If two injectors want to negotiate transfer of ownership separately from the protocol, and remove/re-inject the object (or perhaps more elegantly, allow transfer of ownership), then that's fine, but not necessarily part of this particular protocol.

I figure that since the bubble server has to be able to figure out the overlapping of awareness bounds and physical bounds of objects in order to do its job, why not enable it to also serve the participants with a basic collision (overlap of physical bounds and physical bounds) detection service. Objects have to somehow define their rough physical bounds to the bubble server anyway for awareness detection... the key is to keep it rough and simple. I am willing to ditch the idea of participants delegating collision detection for their objects to other participants; too complicated. Must eject and re-inject instead. --ark

Interaction Options for an Object

Every object may have interaction options which the owning participant has defined for it. Another participant may choose to activate on of these interaction options, which results in an event being sent to the owning participant; the owning participant is then expected to do something and update the object to reflect what is has done.

A human interface should allow a human to indicate a desire to interact with an object, and then display to the human the list of interaction options for that object. The human should then be able to select one, thereby triggering that event to the object's owner.

Understanding Things

2008-10-15T06:49:00.000-07:00

People often want fancy looking graphs that change with time. They want movement and activity. They want algorithms which analyze streams of data in real time and make decisions in microseconds.

Meanwhile I find that looking at one static 3d graph of net oil consumption/production for over a year now still doesn't get old. The more I look at it the more I understand about what's been going on in the world over the last 40 years.

Where is the long-term strategic thought? We all know that we have become a culture of sound bites and quick fixes. Now that is biting us in the ass. How are we supposed to "compete" with China when we're only worried about the next election cycle, and when our financial strategies are all based on shuffling risk and betting on never-ending growth, with ever-finer granularity?

Arkowitz

Open Source

2008-10-13T19:50:00.000-07:00

We are preparing a reference implementation of a CICP adapter for Second Life; when it is ready we will be releasing that along with the lg3d-wonderland adapter as Open Source.

Arkowitz

Lindquist's Theory

2008-10-06T15:27:00.001-07:00

Life is a process which is able to thwart the Uncertainty Principle.

A computer program (logical (mathematical) construct!) as well is a way to adapt and reoptimize a prediction mechanism based on input (sense) over time (process).

The answer to the problem of the observed, the instrument, and the observer... is that the observer is the instrument.

Indeed, God does not play dice with the Universe. God created (is) life.

dat'd'art

2008-09-05T11:46:00.000-07:00

-- the art of finding and expressing truth through data

happy vw la; happy slcc

2008-09-04T16:52:00.000-07:00

happy 4d continuum

diagram for intelligent control mechanism

2008-08-18T18:38:00.000-07:00

Improved SL Glasshouse Available

2008-07-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

I've made a few improvements to the Second Life version of Glasshouse:

1) Descriptions of graph nodes are now set so that mouseover shows them
2) The purple cube shows the sql that generated the graph
3) Graphs no longer die off on their own

Everyone will need to get a new version of the Glasshouse Assistant object; I've left one (turqoise sphere above the graphs in SciLands dataviz area) for copying by all.

For a slurl to the dataviz area, go to the SLDataViz Wiki.

Arkowitz

CICP Seed Spec

2008-06-29T11:33:00.000-07:00

Here's the spec for the basics of CICP. I'm looking for constructive criticism of this with an eye toward the future... we will be adding it to Sun Wonderland within weeks.

http://greenphosphor.com/CICP_spec.pdf

By the way, this has all been done before, though not as simply and without an easy way to create primitives. Have a look at HLA.

Arkowitz

CICP

2008-06-27T13:38:00.001-07:00

I've decided to license Content Injection and Control Protocol free to closed-source virtual world platforms as well. The more available platforms Glasshouse can integrate with the better.

I will have a spec of CICP put together by the end of the week, and will be soliciting feedback and contribution from architects involved with the major open source and closed source virtual worlds. Within one week after that, CICP will be finalized and can be implemented in any virtual world; any platform with CICP then becomes a platform which can host the Glasshouse data exploration environment.

I believe CICP will be a valuable protocol for external apps to integrate with virtual worlds, for viewers to communicate with servers, and ultimately even for the various virtual world platforms to interoperate with one another.

I pledge to continue the patenting process for CICP and to license it free for all to use. Note that I am all about making money... but not with this protocol. I plan to make money with Glasshouse, and Glasshouse and other apps like it need CICP.

Ben

pithy saying

2008-06-25T18:44:00.000-07:00

Much is going on. I have decided to license my Content Injection and Control Protocol free to every open source virtual world that will implement it; and Green Phosphor will help implement it as well. We need a cross-platform protocol like CICP in order to hook our Glasshouse gateway up to virtual worlds. Other types of products could benefit from CICP as well - process modelling apps, AI's, sim-to-sim gateways, you name it. CICP is primitive now but is the seed for a new way of approaching virtual world architecture.

Ed, our CTO, is just about ready with a new public Wonderland server which will allow us to demo Glasshouse much more easily. The Java webstart capability of Wonderland is killer. Meanwhile I plan to get more involved with realXtend.

And now for the pithy saying. I hope you like it, I came up with it myself and I'm so proud of it.

Beware the east!
For it is the west.

--Arkowitz

Partnership Business Model

2008-06-21T07:28:00.000-07:00

We're in the process of solidifying our business model. It's quite simple:

License Glasshouse, our data exploration gateway integrating virtual worlds and databases, to customers globally via partnerships with professional services companies, industry-specific solution providers, virtual world providers, and business intelligence providers.

Glasshouse is an enabling and integrating technology. Business intelligence projects benefit from being able to expose what they are doing into virtual worlds; virtual worlds projects benefit by being able to present and explore data within the virtual meeting place, in 3d. Professional services companies can build projects around Glasshouse that provide new value to their existing customers.

Green Phosphor LLC is and will remain a very lean company. We will continue to build our core technical team here in Tallahassee, as we add features and capabilities to our gateway and tools software; and we will build a layer around the core development team which is focused on supporting our partners' efforts and channeling feedback and requirements to the development team. That's it. No sales; no professional services in the field.

Ben

filaments

2008-04-06T15:17:00.000-07:00

OK - so we need visual feedback about the manipulative control potential of limbs projecting from avatars.

Using reverse kinetics is supposedly prohibitive as far as calculation, if you are doing it in a "robot arm" simulation kind of way. I have two solutions:

1) Use real AI that hasn't been developed yet ??? to control the limb sections of avatars via neurons receiving sensor from the limbs and sending control to the limb sections.

2) Here's what we can do right now: filaments. Make the line that extends from an avatars hands actually do things. Way less calc, and still shows other avatars a physical connection between an avatar and a thing which can be manipulated. Make color of a filament mean something; display menus along filaments.

Was it Zelazny's Changeling where the guy with the natural magical skills comes home and sees all these crazy filaments of different colors that are an interface to the magic he can access?

Now I am not suggesting we try to model knots... rather all filaments connect to objects at specific control points offered by the objects. We are here working with a 3d "network graph" of nodes (objects and avatars in the metaverse) and filaments (filaments are edges as well as control mechanisms).

Many thanks to Patrick Lee whom I hung out with back during my comp sci days at fsu and who was fascinated by the way magical user interfaces were described and then loaned me the book.

Ben

chinatibet

2008-03-26T17:56:00.000-07:00

What is enlightenment?

Does it visit one child who can only be found by certain monks?

Does it appear here, there?

Let there be peace.

What is the balance between freedom and peace?
We sometimes die for freedom.

Proud to be a Norte-y-centrale-et-sud American!

Ben

Finding the Egg Pile

2008-03-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

Today is one of my days to work from home. I took a break this morning to hunt for eggs with my wife. Yes, to hunt for eggs, right after Easter! There's a reason for the old Easter traditions.

We have two chickens and a rooster. They roost in a loquat tree right in front of our house every night, and in the morning they flutter down and march off around the back of the house into the woods. For a couple weeks now we hadn't been able to figure out where they were laying. So off we went, into the back yard, through my secret door in the fence, and farther back into the woods where it was obvious the chickens had been foraging and scratching a lot. No eggs.

My wife stayed on the inside of the fence, and I went along the outside, through the edge of our neighbors' yard, checking near an area where they used to lay; still no sign of eggs. Having pretty much given up, I kept walking along the fence so I could get to the end, where we have a gate... and there, in a small hollow behind some sort of palm bush, was a cache of twenty eggs.

Now I wouldn't be putting this in my blog if there weren't a moral to the story. The moral is that you often find answers when you stop looking in a particular place and instead browse and explore without preconceived notions of where the answers lie or what they are. Think of the woods where the chickens are laying as your data warehouse.

Ben

data, spin, and getting the truth

2008-03-24T09:58:00.000-07:00

Typically, leaders ask their data people to find stats and examples from their operational data with the purpose of supporting particular theories, claims, or existing "perceptions" of the public, the legislature, the board...

Turn this on its head. Ask your data people for insights which emerge by looking for what is interesting and objectively significant. See what is there.

The truth will be revealed. Much better to use your data warehouse to inform future decisions and strategies than to use it retroactively to try to justify past ones.

---

This brings us to an additional characteristic of the New Analyst. When asked by a candidate, CEO, Director, client, or boss to spin up some statistical numbers to support a particular view or perception... the New Analyst will refuse to violate the foundation of their discipline. The New Analyst will pull up the numbers that are there from a large swath of the multidimensional tree (within the metadata) which points to the data which reveals the view or perception the exercise started with to be what it is. To do otherwise would be to act as a "Court Statistician". :)

- Arkowitz

The Challenge for IT

2008-03-12T13:19:00.001-07:00

Information Technology people need to enable new types of problem solving by mapping real-world problems to contexts within which teams of non-technical people can solve them.

Arkowitz Law #1

2008-03-07T15:17:00.000-08:00

Any increase in communication among people ends up being a good thing.

(also known as the anti-babelfish law)

the energy cost of virtual worlds

2008-03-07T15:12:00.000-08:00

Arkowitz Law #2:

The cost of operating several acres of virtual space able to support training, project warrooms, collaborative datamining environments, and meeting rooms for people regardless of physical location, for one month, is roughly equivalent to the cost of one round-trip airline ticket from New York to Los Angeles.

uploading and normalization

2008-03-04T19:08:00.000-08:00

When uploading data into glasshouse, make sure you have created a table which is fully normalized. Each column of the table should be a dimension. Consider some data recording temperatures by day for two cities: Prague and Memphis. You might have recorded it this way:

day,prague temp,memphis temp
Sunday,25,29
Monday,26,30
Tuesday,30,29

What works best for glasshouse, and reflects the fact that Prague and Memphis are both really just values of an implicit dimension (geographical location), is the following arrangement:

day,city,temp
Sunday,Prague,25
Sunday,Memphis,29
Monday,Prague,26
Monday,Memphis,30
Tuesday,Prague,30
Tuesday,Memphis,29

ark

land use model, etc.

2008-02-23T18:20:00.000-08:00

I think charging for land use is the wrong model. Yes land should be valued because of its proximity to other land; but beyond that it is just a virtual thing. Space in virtual worlds is just a mathematical construct and should be free. Content placed within the space should belong to the creators or purchasers of it.

So what is cpu time in a Second Life sim? It's really energy. Paying for it makes sense, but not when tied to a particular piece of virtual land. What's the right model for a virtual world host to make money? Probably paying for your energy use, not your content (which built-on land and customized land really are... just content). A platform which can't shift land (space) simulations around on a pool of servers will have a hard time charging for just the amount of cpu used to simulate your space...

Ben

Hasta la vista, Green Phosphor Island!

2007-12-30T07:02:00.000-08:00

I have removed my payment info from my second life account; I will not pay another $300 monthly fee for Green Phosphor Island. Folks interested in demos or use of the Glasshouse technology within Second Life can simply meet me in a public sandbox. Those already using Glasshouse off of the island may continue to do so.

Paying $300 per month for one server to run a virtual world sim means you are pretty much getting yiffed. While I am on the subject of ridiculous things, have you seen all the avatars that "camp out" in Second Life, earning a few Linden$ per hour for sitting in a camping spot? We're talking cents per hour for someone's time! Folks is your time really worth that little?

Ben

Oil Consumption by Country and Year

2007-12-10T11:58:00.000-08:00

totem_rez 1 grid kBarrels/day .3 {select year, year, country, country, kbarrels_per_day from oil_consumption where year > 1980 group by year, country order by year, country}

(I got this data from IBM's ManyEyes; it originally came from BP)

Ben

Dan Fouts, ladies and gents

2007-11-29T20:33:00.001-08:00

Embed this into a gql query:

select s.year, s.year, s.id, concat(p.fname, concat(' ', p.lname)), s.passyd from seasons s, players p where p.position = 'qb' and s.id = p.id and s.year > 1980 and s.year < 1990 and s.team = 'sdg' group by s.year, s.id order by s.year, s.id;

/ark

data wizards

2007-11-20T13:16:00.000-08:00

The engine that will drive true transformation within organizations who want to make better use of their data is: the data wizard. Data wizardry is a new profession. These are people with the communication skills and technical prowess to facilitate discovery sessions for your teams, within the virtual environment (and that includes the phone, email, all non-proximity-based communication).

Green Phosphor is all about enabling and empowering a new community of data wizards as ethical, competent, and brilliant group discovery and decision facilitators.

Ben

real actual work

2007-11-13T07:36:00.000-08:00

What are you doing in virtual worlds?

- socializing?
- training?
- virtual meetings?
- marketing/branding?

These are all great activities for virtual worlds, but they are not enough. What I want to see is real actual work being done. Work that is at the core of a user's daily mission.

Collaborative problem solving.

Group decision making.

A virtual world can be a virtual warroom.

I don't know about you, but I've seen great things come from warrooms; there's no better way to get a group to focus and act in concert than by throwing them all into one big room with laptops and whiteboards and keeping them there until a project is off the ground, a prototype is developed, or a solution is found.

Now you can do the same thing with people who are scattered around the globe. Save one plane ticket and you've paid for the technology.

glasshouse

2007-11-11T12:47:00.000-08:00

Back in the green phosphor days of mainframes and vdt's, we worked in equipment rooms called "glass houses". Then of course there's the Philip Johnson home. Glass surrounded by green.

Glasshouse is an appropriate name for our product. Our gateway and methodology give you a transparent view of your data; your business. We'll turn your data warehouse into a glass house.

Ben

get knocked down, but I get up again

2007-11-11T10:46:00.000-08:00

I'm in the process of bringing green phosphor back to life. I'm going to keep the Second Life island, and keep totem up in sl for people to use for free. For commercial use we are focusing long term on the lg3d-wonderland platform.

Website is back up; and I'm thinking of making a couple changes:

- invitation codes: going away; registration will be completely open
- totem is already used by a gnu project; I may change the name to "glasshouse"; what do you think?

Ben

provider cancelled

2007-11-10T10:09:00.000-08:00

Cancellation is a time of renewal. For example, why am I paying $300 per month for a second life island? How much electricity does that machine (sim) use?

lg3d is the way to go

we're going to contribute peer-to-peer to it (it being the gpl lg3d-wonderland project), and provide our patent-pending data visualization technology within the platform.

it will be a new web. a 3d web.

think of it: avatar data-wads, cryptographically signed, being teleported form machine to machine, virtual space to virtual space (and virtual space and machine not the same)

we have a personal space; there is a sphere which we can perceive. there is yet another sphere, inside it on one side and outside it on the other, of things which we can influence... touch.

these spheres of perception and influence are our beings within the dimensions we inhabit.

May they be temples of the Spirit.

interceptions

2007-11-09T17:59:00.000-08:00

The greenphosphor.com site has been down all day. This blog is now my only lifeline to the world *sob* *sob*

(I'm reminded here of the IBM computer voice in Frank Zappa's Thingfish [first track of second disc])

We'll be back up with a new version of totem, and a new hosting provider.

Ben

learning

2007-11-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

We're helping companies learn from their data. This involves a number of threads of effort under one project umbrella:

- consolidation of metadata (unifying the description of your data)
- access to data feeds where they are
- mapping of data dimensions to physical(virtual) dimensions of visualization

In terms of roles, you have:

- facilitators. You provide them. We train them to be able to rez out any visualization of any query of your unified database, and then further manipulate the visualization of the query.

- teams. These are your people, assigned to whitehat teams and blackhat teams, solving your business problems, using your data. All they need is avatars and browsers.

Once you obtain the capability to have secure virtual meetings facilitated by data wizards, and attended by teams formed without regard to geography, new levels of understanding emerge.

Arkowitz

quarterback query

2007-11-06T05:15:00.000-08:00

I just rezzed out this query, on Green Phosphor Island:

totem_rez 1 grid yards .3 {select s.year, s.year, s.id, concat(p.fname, concat(' ', p.lname)), s.passyd from seasons s, players p, (select id, sum(att) as catt from seasons where position = 'qb' group by id) c where s.position = 'qb' and s.id = c.id and c.catt > 800 and s.id = p.id and s.year > 1986 and s.year < 2005 group by s.year, s.id order by s.year, s.id}

Check out your favorite quarterback. I like two in particular: Marino and Favre.

go here for a slurl to the island

Ben

open source

2007-11-05T15:08:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking about open-sourcing the Second Life piece of the totem system.

This would enable anyone to build their own type of visualization, that works with totem... and use it to render any data anyone has uploaded to totem, given the right gql query.

We need a collaborative, community-driven website for totem... also that will enable the contest we will be doing:

A contest for the most significant truth revealed through use of totem. Data art in Second Life.

---

by the way, if you need an invitation code for registration to use totem, just use friends45

ps - and yes, if you created your own type of visualization, you could charge L$ and sell your own assistant objects

truth

2007-10-17T10:47:00.000-07:00

There is no truth in scientific data. Every observation has a probability of error; science has learned that nothing is really true; we deal only with approximations.

Yet we compare the approximations and find principles governing them; principles or laws that we hold up as truth.

This is the purpose of Green Phosphor's Totem project. Totem enables any Second Life user to snarf some data into our database and then rez out a 3d representation of a sql query... a representation that others can view, comment on, explore. My hope is that this will be used for interesting, perhaps controversial, things; and that truth will be revealed.

Truth is only as good as the reliability of the data used to reveal it... so we hope to build a community which will audit and approve of the data used in Totem.

Our initial release of Totem is really only going to be useable by the most geeky of users; "adepts" if I may. You have to learn GQL (Greenphosphor Query Language), which gets its power from embedded SQL commands. I find it fun, but then I am pretty darn old school when it comes to computing. Hence the name Green Phosphor.

Your partner in truth,
Arkowitz