In Second Life there are three different types of public chat: Say, Whisper, and Shout. Say can be “heard” by anyone within 20 meters of your avatar. Whisper can be heard by anyone within 10 meters of your avatar. Shout can be heard by anyone within 100 meters of your avatar.

The Problem:

In the Phoenix and Firestorm viewers there is a whisper shortcut: hitting Shift+Enter will cause your chat to be a whisper rather than a say. This feature has been a part of this line of viewers since way back in Emerald (the precursor to both viewers). This shortcut is on by default, and there is no option to disable it. The problem is: this shortcut is very easy to hit by mistake, especially if you’re ending your chat with some punctuation such as a question mark or exclamation mark, or if you’re typing some sort of emoticon. If you’re in a large area, anyone more than 10 meters from you will miss what you’ve said.

A Solution:

This is a work around that will allow you to disable this feature. There are two steps: First you need to enable the RLV feature of your viewer.

In Phoenix:

• Go to Edit > Preferences
• In the preferences window go to Phoenix > Page 1 > Misc
• Check the box next to “Enabled Restrained Love [RLVa] Feature”

• Go to Avatar > Preferences
• In the preferences window go to Firestorm > General
• Check the box next to “Allow Remote Scripted Viewer Controls (RLVa)”

After you enable RLV, you’ll need to log out and log back in.

Next you need to edit any attachment you have modify permissions for (or create a simple hidden attachment). In the edit window go to the content tab and create a new script (rename it if you like). Double click the script to edit it. Delete the default code that was added to the script, then add the following code to the script:

integer chan = 42;

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llListen(chan, "", llGetOwner(), "");
    }

    listen(integer channel, string name, key id, string message)
    {
        if (message == "whisper:off")
        {
            llOwnerSay("@chatwhisper=n");
            llOwnerSay("whisper disabled");
        }
        else if (message == "whisper:on")
        {
            llOwnerSay("@chatwhisper=y");
            llOwnerSay("Whisper enabled");
        }
    }
}

(You can, of course, set the value of chan to any number you like)

After you save the script and get the message that the script has been saved, you can type “/42 whisper:off” (without quotes) in public chat and whispering is disabled. Now you don’t have to worry about accidentally hitting the whisper shortcut while chatting in large groups.

As an extra detail, I added a shine that runs across the board at random intervals.

You can play the game here: Just Another Sudoku

you can play the game here: Dubbles

As I’m writing this I have about a dozen things I need to be working on, so I’ll add more information about this game later on

There is, however, a boring side to HTML 5 that isn’t getting as much attention. I’m talking about the many new features that aren’t specifically designed to drag your attention to a website by your eyelids. There are a number of new tags that are meant to work quietly in the background to make your website run smoothly. Not to mention the fact that using these tags correctly can really improve your search ranking. So let’s take a look at some of them, shall we?

Article

The <article> tag is basically your website’s way of saying, “Hey, Google. My eyes are up here, pal.” In other words, this tag lets you mark the main content of your website. Search engines can now place more importance on the content inside the <article> tag, making it easier to index pages more accurately.

Aside

At the time of this writing, there is a link over there on the right to a post I made about Flash. There are also links to my Facebook and Twitter accounts. None of that has anything to do with what you’re reading right now. And in the olden days of HTML 4, Google would have no way of determining what content was part of the article and what was just fluff. Now both of the sidebars are put in an <aside> tag. This identifies that information as just that: a side bar. This marks information that is relevant to the entire site, rather than just a particular page.

Nav

Of course, not all of the sidebar information is equal. Over there on the left is the main navigation for this site. A search engine may find that information useful for finding interesting related information. So navigation links can be placed inside a <nav> tag.

Header & Footer

Similar to aside, there is also site related information that goes at the top and bottom of a page. Nearly every website I’ve ever seen has some sort of header and footer. So HTML 5 introduced two new tags called, oddly enough, <header> and <footer>.

New Input Types

Remember back in the day when you had to do all that crazy regex validation on form fields; checking for valid emails and phone numbers. Now there are input types that do that for you. There are also a number of other specific types of input. You can see a list of them here.

I actually find it rather odd that, with all the fancy new features of HTML 5, these are the ones I was most excited about. Building websites has become much more organized. And I’m happy to throw away all those div tags.

When Adobe first released AIR, I was asked to prepare a very large base code library for a possible migration. This was to have features available for any games that were created for AIR while not breaking any existing games. The idea was to have a game behave a certain way depending on whether it was built for Flash Player or for AIR. This has come up a few times since then. To give an idea of the task (and the problem) I’ll use a simple example.

For this example I’ll set a simple task: Create an app that saves user data to some storage some where, depending on the following situations:

• If the app is running in a browser then send the data to a server to be stored.
• If the app is running on a desktop, save the data to the harddrive.
• If the app is running on a mobile device, save the data to a sqlite database.

The Problem

The idea, when I was handed the original task, was for the app to determine what platform it was running on and react accordingly. The problem was when you compile an app or game for Flash Player, the AIR specific classes and functions are not available and you’ll get a compiler error.

So the idea of adding all the functions you need into the base code and simply calling the ones you need doesn’t work. The desktop and mobile apps will compile just fine, but the Flash app will not.

A Solution

The solution I came up with is to use an interface. For the purposes of the example I would create an interface called ISavable, and define all the functions necessary to save the data. Then create three classes that implement this interface and saves the data according to one of the three conditions.

Next I would create a class called DocumentBase. I would define a protected variable called _savableClass or something similar and the type would be ISavable. Then I would write the following constructor:

public function DocumentBase(savableClass:ISavable)
 {
    _savableClass = savableClass as ISavable;
 }

This class will contain all of the logic and functionality of the document class. Then I would create three classes that extend DocumentBase and use super(); to pass in the correct interface to the base class. These three classes would be used as the document class for the three different platforms.

Of course this isn’t exactly what was called for in the task. There isn’t any automatic decision making based on the platform. But all of the logic is contained in a single class, with the document classes acting as wrappers and passing in the correct functionality.

After this plugin was completed and in place I added some tracking features to it (which will be in a separate post or two). The purpose of tracking my resume was mostly to see what skills people were looking at. If I notice a lot if interest in a particular skill, then I can focus on building that skill.

A resume is built by adding to different sections (explained below), then entries from those sections can be added to a resume. Multiple resumes can be built. So, here are the sections:

Skills

Aside from the features presented in the list, there is also an editor where you can provide a description about the skill. This allows you to expand on the overview presented in the resume. If some one reading the resume is interested in a particular skill, they can click on it to see more information.

The skill editor provides a place to include how many years of experience you have in that skill. There are also two types of categories. You can label the industry the skill is most often associated with. For example, you can label a skill as applying to graphic design or software development. You can also set an experience level. The experience levels can be anything you decide.

Education:

Education is separated out by degrees. The list in the image outlines the information included with a degree.

The editor for education provides a simple form to fill in the pertinent information.

Work History:

You can add employers to the work history. Despite the simple overview presented in the list figured above, there is actually quite a bit of information you can include about previous employers.

There are fields here to include much of the information people look for when looking at previous employers. There’s also a text area where you can include any additional information, such as primary responsibilities or accomplishments.

Once the skills, education, and employment history have been completed the information can be added to a resume. The information isn’t added automatically. This allows you to create multiple resumes if you choose.

All of the entries in the three different sections are listed at the bottom of the resume, and you can check the ones you want to include. There’s also a form to fill out your name and contact information. The text area is for the overview, career objective, or what ever you want to appear towards the top of the resume.

And that is, so far, the resume builder I’m using on this site. I won’t be releasing this yet. I want to give it a good run and get some feedback on it. And I’m sure that, as it gets more use, there’ll be some changes.

The old site, as pretty as it was, really lacked any real cohesion. So it was time to retire that site and give the site a more up to date look. Before beginning on the design, I spent a lot of time looking at what other sites are doing. I know the over all look of this site is a sort of break away from what most modern blogs and similar sites are doing. This is deliberate. I sort of ignored those sites and paid attention to what the big sites are doing. I looked at Google, Yahoo, Adobe and similar sites. Those are the sites I looked at for inspiration.

And, as I already mentioned, there are going to be new features coming online soon. Why these features aren’t immediately will become apparent once these features go live.

So, thank you for visiting, and be sure to check back to see what is new on this site in the coming week.

~Paul