Author: Vex

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Avatar Names: Should you Trademark yours?

TMAfter reading about Opensource Obscure’s run-in with Google+ (also covered here), I was pondering the following question: As (presumably) authors writing under pen names and SAG actors who are required to act under a previously unused name would be allowed to use their assumed names on google+, how do they protect their names from misuse.

Certainly, some (at least one) atomic persons have applied for and been granted a trademark (even registered!) for their avatar’s name. Would it be worth registering such a trademark? Would a Servicemark be more apropos for an author? What about “Doing Business As” arrangements? A US federal trademark registration is approximately $300, a state-filed trademark registration is $50 and a DBA in my city is $60  all for various terms, all not counting things like notarization, postage, etc.

I guess the real question isn’t about what is possible so much as what makes sense. Go to it!

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Second Life Viewer Contribution Agreement

Hooray! I finally worked through my corporate bureaucracy to get my Second Life Viewer Contribution Agreement approved, signed, submitted, and accepted by Linden Lab.

Now, of course, I need to collect up my viewer patches to see what still makes sense to submit!

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Tentacular magic for SL (Squidifying your viewer)

You might have seen Tateru Nino’s article Proxying Second Life HTTP Textures with Squid …  And then gotten frustrated for any of a number of reasons.  This mini-article expands on Tateru’s excellent post, adding two big hints: first use the right version of Squid and second how to get it working without fancy firewall rules.  The bottom line is that using these two extra tricks you can get a (much!) larger than 1G texture cache working with existing SL client software and even get it all running on a single machine!

Obviously, this procedure will only really be interesting if you are running a Second Life viewer using HTTP textures – I’ve tested using both Linux and Windows versions of a number of official Viewer 2s as well as Phoenix (and Firestorm).

So hop in your deep sea submarine and follow me below the waves in search of the elusive… Second Life Squid! …

NOTE: There is a followup on the way HERE
Continue reading “Tentacular magic for SL (Squidifying your viewer)”

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(Second) Life Updates

So, I’ve broken down and started setting up a little store for my scripted objects. It isn’t really there yet, but it’ll be sort of behind Scripting Your World HQ on Hennepin – I’ll put it in my picks and maybe make a classified when there’s something there.

On a related note, I’ve started repackaging various products for automated (mainly in-world) sales. Documentation, boxing up, etc. It is amazing how difficult SL makes it to get the permissions right. sigh.

Also, you’ll notice that I finally got my google adverts set up. It was a pain for not very good reasons. Please don’t try to help me out by clicking through unless you really want something – Teh Google treats such things as bad. On the other hand, if you see something you might like in there, feel free.

Projects I’m currently working on (that I’ll blog about later): new skin (maybe), HTTP in/out for modeling and simulation, and SLCC.