The Accelian

A blog for employees of Accela Labs

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Under the "bridge"

The DOCP bridge has undergone a lot of development thanks to our own Sousuke Tae, who has more or less singlehandedly coded the bridge as it currently exists. The developments from the bridge have led us to improve our Actors, which we had already coded and built. The new design takes the form of a small assistant that sits on one's shoulder. This makes it easier to touch under most circumstances, and it can be large enough that others are less likely to touch it by accident. Also, while Sousuke was building the bridge, I had time to rewrite the actor code (he later made his own assistant, which seems useful and fun however does not currently support the Actor functionality) and create a christmas gift for Ccs4ever Theilt, our assistant lead developer. This gift was a programmable trashcan robot that was DOCP-enabled, and therefore can be controlled via the new Actors.

New functionality will be soon added to the actors, such as inventory searching and resing/attaching, notecard searching, and eventually a rudimentary natural language interface. Currently the Actors can be used for IM from other objects and as a sort of universal remote control that learns all the forwarded functionalities of all the DOCP-enabled objects around it.

The bridge is going reasonably well, and although it doesn't forward yet, it does accept and process communication. If this attempt succeeds, we can use the same framework to allow web browsers to access the Synergist and the rest of the DOCPnet through standard http and some fancy plugins.

The robot, called the Gemini, was a simple thing that I whipped up in about an hour, however I'm sure that once the look of it is fixed up a bit and we add a bit to the DOCP interface and the included functionalities it will become quite a useful tool, as well as a fun plaything. Currently it is a blank slate -- a docp interface with no functionalities to choose from (though I included a few sample functionalities in comments). However, it is trivial to add functionalities, and in fact one can quite easily make an extremely powerful system out of it. One can have a script interpreter that interprets moves and conditions in a trivial language, add a vocal interface with which users can converse with and interact with the bot on channel 0 in a near-human language, add sensors, and make it work as any number of things, from a greeter to a security guard to a personal assistant to a tutor. One could even hypothetically give it some form of non-GOFAI intelligence and store the data on a notecard.

All of these things are fun to play with and fun to develop, and I think a few of them might just make us some lindens. It is my firm belief that copyable, modifyable, open source code and objects truly do have a market, in the metaverse and elsewhere, and that people are willing to pay a stipend for the convenience of having a package at their hands and to support the work that they themselves can build upon.

Before I get too preachy, I must go. I wish all a merii kurisumasu, hapii horideisu, whatever.

~EnkiV2

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

The Synergist

The project that is currently offically called the PakNet will be renamed to the XTPNet upon launch, however we accelians already have another name for it -- The Synergist.

What is the Synergist? The Synergist is a Xanalogical replacement for the World Wide Web, based upon the DOCP, a crossplatform language-agnostic RPC and object passing protocol. The Synergist implements Xanalogical features such as transpointing, transclusion, and transcopyright, and has a built-in meritocracy-type economy and a system by which the entire Synergist becomes a massive versioned library of code and data.

I am working now on coding the DOCP base interface and bridges to ObjC, Java, C#, and LSL. The XTP, the protocol layered on top of the DOCP and used for the Synergist, is simple -- forwarded paint methods are called by new objects representing the frame's drawing capabilities, and they forward their drawing and UI methods to the server. This provides a simple method by which the methods, which are configurable, can be used from a server app coded in any language without translation.

The DOCP can also be used for inter-script and inter-object communication on Second Life, and I plan to try to get this as widespread as possible. Unencrypted communications over DOCP/XTP are port/channel 1960, and secure communications are 1984.

I will try to post more info later as things progress.

See you all In-World.

~EnkiV2

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Intro

Hey there, I'm John Ohno. This is the first post on the blog "The Accelian", a community blog for Accela Labs employees and other interested parties.

Accela Labs is a software R&D company that I founded in 2004, and I remain the president and lead developer. We've done a lot of stuff over the years, and although we're a small company (and not even incorporated), recently it's become difficult to manage the company's operations with a physical HQ. Ergo, we are getting ready to move the Accela Labs "office" to Second Life, where hopefully we can work and communicate effectively, and perhaps get some interns later on ;-)

Our current projects include both IRL and ISL projects -- both real life and second life, respectively. Additionally, we are working on development tools that will allow us to work on our IRL projects from ISL. These include shell bridges, interactive caching shells, cvs access, source dbs, and wallscreen multiplexing of program video output. We are also going to be creating some scripts and objects for sale ISL.

If anyone wishes to contact me ISL, my name is Enki Stardust. The vice president, Jon Kopetz, is Ccs4ever Thielt.

Thanks, and see you ISL!

~EnkiV2