TingWiki/ting70

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ting

ting70, Sunday, 23rd of July 2006, 18:00 UTC (20:00 CEST)

See ting-wiki for more about tings.

second life

We try to meet on second-life along with the. Add your second life name to the participants list, please.

We chose a hobo hangout for tinging in second life. secondlife://caletta/113/221/26 are the coordinates. Try to get there or tell us your name in second life (on irc or gobby) so we can teleport you.

irc

We are meeting half an hour before a ting on irc, server freenode, channel #onebigsoup.

collab-editor

We use Gobby as a collaborative editor. Use v0.3.x only please - older (and newer) versions are incompatile and will likely ruin the ting.

TheSheep provides a gobby 0.3.x standalone server. Adress is c141-46.icpnet.pl port 6522 (default). Check irc.freenode #onebigsoup when there are problems to log in.

VoIP

We use teamspeak for VoIP. You find the teamspeak login data on the gobby page ting69_talk or ask on gobby or in irc.freenode #onebigsoup. teamspeak port is 8767 (default). Use quick connect to enter the server adress and join in. Configure your teamspeak to push-to-talk, please.

Joining the ting using gobby only is surely welcome.

topic proposals

• tings are open. so come up with a topic - you will realize pretty soon if someone's interested in it
• add topic, we're not against them

some recommendations for ting

Please save the ting every few minutes on your hard-disk. In case gobby crashes (it does so sometimes) or in case somebody deletes all text we likely have a version to retrieve the ting without loosing too much of it. So save.

In case gobby crashes you have to relog in using a different name a n d a different color. You can not relog in using your former name o r color.

• We start each contribution on tings with a sign: - this is because the colors get lost when exporting the ting to a wiki-page and not signing you can't tell anymore who wrote what on the wiki-page.
• Export is some hours (or the next morning) after a ting is over. Remove what you do not want to be globally public before leaving a ting.
• A ting might take 20 minutes or many hours until deep at night - in Europe at least ;).
• Tings are set up for 18:00 UTC, and - like all good jam-session - sometimes don't get started but some hours later. So stay loged.

Also open the tingn_document page, please. It is for life-summarizing the ting. Copy results or precious passages over to it. Ting_talk might get pretty long and chaotic after some busy ting-hours. It's nice to have the contents already condensed when copying over the ting to ting-wiki. We actually copy the document on the article page and the talk on the discussion page.

The chat in the chat-window (below, in gobby) is translucent and will not be copied. It should be directly connected to a real irc channel (or peekko), freenode #ting for example, but it is not yet. Hack that, please.

today's tingers

(sign: name, location, second-life identity, personal web-site)

• ma: Mattis Manzel, Venice, sl: Mattis Voltaire, Mattis-Manzel-wiki
• sh: TheSheep

maybe participates, dunno yet

• add

collab-editor contents copied in

ting70_talk

ma: Well. I'm a bit tired, I've been too busy recently.

Experienced that in the beginning of the year when a demon of stupidity had knocked me off for some months. You sit somewhere in a corner moaning that it washed you off board. But for some reason, that is not comprehensible for you, the steamer goes on. It doesn't even slow down. It keeps its course and speed. It's funny.

sh: Well, I feel this dumbing down since a year, actually. It's paralyzing, can't get anything done. I'm trying to shake out of it, but usually I just sleep 20 hours a day (but recently I don't sleep at all, so maybe it's gone?).

ma: sleeping, sigh. Dreaming rocks sometimes. I very seldomly do. But then it's sometimes as if I'd really be someone else. I like it. Gives you new energy for being to old one somehow. Even if the dream was bad.

sh: I never have dreams, unless in fever.

ma: I hadn't for years. Now rarely, three times a year or so. Refreshing. No idea what hacked my brain. Well enough. (Encouraging insertment: Gimme a nice idea you had recently).

sh: I had just a great idea for a piece of collaborative software. Sorry to interrupt, but I might forget later. It's an 'universal game board', or something like that (the name is irrelevant). The idea is similar to gobby, only instead of text, you've got an empty space, on which you can draw simple things (very limited), and place icons. The icons can be added, copied, deleted and moved around by everyone connected.

There would be also a chat, and maybe some kind of a notepad to put down score.

Anyways, such a system could be used to play almost any board game out there, as well as be used for roleplaying sessions, various planing, tabletop battle games, etc.

ma: alsmost infinite possibilities. "Icons" like lion uses in his explanatory drawings?

sh: No, rather small images representing objects, like the pawns, or tokens, but also roleplaying characters on map, monsters, treasures, or maybe playing cards. I'd imagine you can 'create' new objects and assign them icons and names and maybe even some attributes, like health, then put them on the board, move around, clone, edit, etc. In addition, you could upload an image as the background, for example a map or a chessboard. Or just use a 'large' icon instead. Not sure.

Drawing is also important -- you could use it to teach playing chess or go, marking moves on the board, for example.

ma: This would be a mighty useful tool, I guess, augmenting the chance that somebody starts using real-time collaborative tools (editor, VoIP). I simply do not understand why people do no (wikipedia for example). Nobody ever tried is the only explanation to me. You know Go? I don't. Chess-class on teach-me, cool idea.

sh: I can teach you some basics of go. It's a magnificient game. I don't play often and I'm not a very good player, but the rules are very simple. There is a go wiki out there, sensei's library it's called, very good one, lots of useful resources. The go community is very strong.

ma: I've no idea about the difficulties of coding such a tool. You'll need help, I suppose, on things you're not that good at. We should start a project. Make a wiki for it. I can learn go later. Like afterwards. Is it like tangram a bit?

Maybe when I'm back in Berlin I'll come over to Posnan for a cup of tea (+ some go). It ain't far.

sh: sorry, was afk. yes, it's not far, you're welcome. I'll try to talk with our lecturers on the uni, they might give it as a student project :). It will be low quality, of course, but at least it's a first prototype.

ma: cool! Something new and useful in the middle of the big black summer-hole. What would you name a wiki for it? The "collab-draw-wiki"?

sh: I think that starting with a wiki is not such a good idea -- we should rather start with volnteers ;). I don;t really have much time this summer. Have to graduate after all. And the students won't do it until winter. But there is no hurry, I think.

sh: If I was to do it, I'd code it in python, using pygame. Not exceedingly complicated, especially if I could use components of gobby, for example. Or jabber protocol libraries.

It would be incredibly cool if there could be added a physics engine to it.

ma: physics engine? like diagrams and such?

sh: something like this, maybe not as cool, but at least allowing objects to collide, have their mass, speed, etc. http://video.google.pl/videoplay?docid=-409028730194183047

ma: ah, ok, I see. Basic for gaming in gravitational surrounding, kinda.

sh: You can play with coins, or marbles, for example. You could play table hockey. But that's pretty advanced, we need the basic functionality first -- moving icons around.

ma: watching, powerful. A touch of croquet. You should go for it I think. Will be fun on the next wiki-Woodstock!

sh: Yeah, once I finish my master thesis. But I think I'll write about it on the community wiki, maybe somebody will make it faster than me :).

ma: Not holding back ideas. Important. Doing something in November somebody else did already in September is nothing.

sh: But day after day the show must go on
your life slipped away
before you built any castles in Spain
your time has gone by.
-- Alan Parsons

ma: Wait goes on: uttering some ideas in August for something someone does in September is doing it, almost. At least when your public relations departement is clever enough ;)

sh: I don't care who makes it. I'd like such a tool, that's all -- if nobody picks it up, I'll surely try it. Bah, I'll try it even if someone picks it up :)

ma: Agree on it doesn't matter who does it. I was just trying to trick you.
Maybe the gobby-folks like it or have even been thinking about that themselves already. They don't like me, I fear, so I can't help.

sh: I think they have enough on their hands already. I'll see if I'll find comeone interested. I'd rather base it on jabber, or a custom messaging system, not gobby. But obby protocol could be good for it too...

ma: a wiki won't hurt, I mean. It augments possibilities. You make a page with some tech talk showing you are not an idiot and when your thesis is done, probably the thing is ready yet. We don't care who, we want it, right?

sh: Right. But I'm bad with words -- I prefer to sketch things. So a wiki is probably not so good. I'll try to describe the idea as well as I can and to think about it some more. You can think about possible uses in the mean time ;) A prototype would be very encouraging, I imagine.

sh: Well, basically there are two hard parts. One is the network communication, but for that we can use some ready libs. Only have to learn how to use them. The other one is the display and user interface -- I don't think there is anything simple that could be used here. So, we'd need someone experienced with graphics programming, maybe a game programmer or something.

ma: encouraging, you bet!

Know the generateur-poietique? Olivier Auber (nice French guy) made it. The program is rather simple, different areas where only one participant can edit. But it has a begining of what you're thinking about.

http://poietic-generator.net/

Olivier might look at the wiki.

sh: it could be called 'General Distributed Object Manipulation Program' ;) or maybe something with 'collaboartive' in it. But I like the name 'toybox' :).

I think I know a person whou would want to write it as a web page, using java script, ajax and ruby. If it was made this way, you could put it on a wiki.

ma: Well, tings are not that evil in the end. I just always forget about it during week-time ;) Olivier is on skype at the moment btw. Messaged him.

sh: I'm installing java to see it.

The name ----> ToyBox

ma: "collab-object-manipulation-wiki"? toy-box-wiki, toybox-wiki - far better.

Impressive I found artpad http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/WikiWoodstock/artpad but flash based, I think.

I'm going to hit the sack, maybe I'll get up early. 5 to 11 pm turned out to be the best time in this heat here. G'n8. Thanks. Good ting, as usual.

sh: good night, thank you.