How Do We "take the paper" in Virtual Worlds

March 27, 2008

It's no secret that the news business has been dramatically changed by the Web. My generation and younger rarely "take the paper" the way my grandparent's or parent's generations did or continue to do. As virtual worlds like Second Life grow in popularity, yet another avenue for delivering news appears. I started thinking about this recently, and especially about how metaphors work in online media. We read Web pages and visit Web sites, which aren't really made of paper or bound to a location.

So does the virtual world offer us a way to "take the paper" again? Will this prove useful and interesting for this or the next generation? I don't know, but I want to play with the idea a bit and see what I come up with. With that in mind, I've started my own personal development project to test out some ideas.

"Reading" the paper in Second Life.

I'm doing all my work out in the open and being transparent about the process, even showing my newbie attempts at coding LSL. I've added a Flickr set to keep track of news-related in world work.

Democratic Primary Predictions

March 19, 2008

In the spirit of all those "my predictions for 2008" posts that we see at the beginning of every year, here are my my predictions for the rest of this Democratic primary season. I'm really just writing them down here as an exercise in fun. I want to be able to look back and see how I did when the primary is over.

My predictions are:

• The primary will not go all the way to the convention as everyone is predicting.
• Sometime in the next four weeks, between now and the Pennsylvania primary, an agreement will be reached to seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida.
• The delegates will not be seated according to the election results, but rather as some sort of arrangement between the candidates, with Hillary taking a slight advantage in delegates. Something like a 60/40 split, but don't hold me to the exact percentage. This keeps both candidates more or less happy with the agreement.
• Obama is trailing Hillary by 12 points in Pennsylvania as of this posting. By the Pennsylvania primary, he will cut the lead to somewhere close to the polling margin of error. Let's say if the margin of error is 4% on the last poll taken, he will be 4 or 5 points under her by the time Pennsylvanians vote.
• Obama then wins Pennsylvania by a very small margin. I'll guess 51% of the vote.
• Hillary then reluctantly withdraws from the race at the insistence of party leadership.

I'll go on record as an Obama supporter in the interest of full disclosure. Feel free to accuse me of wishful thinking. However, I have reasons for each of the points above, having thought about this a lot lately. But again, I'm just posting this for fun to see if I get close.

Status Update on Google-driven Web Development Book

March 12, 2008

After posting a link to a conference on building web apps with Google this morning, I'm reminded that I haven't written here much lately about my book. So here's the latest news for those who might be wondering, "Hey, what ever happened to Deryck's Google book project?"

The short story is that a complete book is just not a possibility for me. While I lack no dedication to my work, this just wasn't the season for me to do a book. My career took off right about the time I signed the book agreement, and now two job changes, several projects, and two years of aggressive development while also trying to write a book have taken their toll on my enthusiasm to see this book completed. I am also at a different place now, with different technical and intellectual interests, so turning back to the topic of Google-driven development is a little like turning back in time.

I have done quite a bit of work on the book in the last couple years, though. To keep this from being lost work, I'm working on turning the book material into 3 different shortcut chapters as part of Prentice Hall's digital short cuts program. I am really excited about this. The material will see some published form, and the work is not a complete loss.

I'm finishing the first of these this week, and expect to move fairly quickly on the other two (on the order of a couple months, I hope.) I'll certainly update here as these shortcuts are released.

Lazy Man's Twitter Updates via CLI

March 7, 2008

While the various twitter apps around are nice for reading tweets, I'm too lazy to want to fire up the browser or reach for a desktop menu when I just want to twitter. After a pointer from coworker Sean Stoops to a Lifehacker article, Send Twitters from Command Line in Any OS, I kicked up this little shell script to make it even that much easier.

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
	echo 'Usage: twit "STATUS IN QUOTES"'
	exit 1
elif [ $# -gt 1 ]; then
	echo 'Usage: twit "STATUS IN QUOTES"'
	exit 1
fi

STATUS=$1
TWITUSER=yourusername
TWITPASS=yourpassword

curl -u $TWITUSER:$TWITPASS -d status="$STATUS" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
  

Now it's just -- twit "MY STATUS UPDATES" -- and I'm done.

Quick Python Tip: Socket Timeouts for Page Scrapers

March 4, 2008

It's not well documented, but there is a way to set a timeout for urllib, urllib2, and the like. This is done by setting the default timeout on the global socket. So if you're constantly hanging cron scripts because some resource you want to scrape is never responding, add the following to your script:

import socket                                             

# "timeout" is a float and 
# is the value you want in seconds.
timeout = 2.5
socket.setdefaulttimeout(timeout)

Any subsequent calls to urllib or any other module based off socket will now generate an IOError if the response is not returned before reaching timeout.

How you handle IOError is up to you. :-)

A Django Auth Backend for Second Life

March 3, 2008

I've started hacking away at a personal project of mine around Second Life. More on that in the days to come, but I did want to share some code created last night while playing around with Second Life logins. I've worked up a Django authentication backend for authenticating users on a Django-based site against Second Life's login process. I've created a Google code project for the code, so cleverly named slauth.

This is code of the "release early, release often" variety. There are no docs, no tests, not even a README. I just wanted to get this up while I had 5 minutes today. I welcome feedback, and I'm certain I will be working on this as the larger project evolves. I'm not even certain I'll use this in the final project. I feel uncomfortable taking username and password for another "site," but without a proper login API for site-to-site authentication, this seems to be the only viable route. This uses the same XMLRPC auth process of the Second Life viewer code, which seemed to legitimize it a little for me (since this is how third party viewers have to authenticate). It's certainly better than page scraping the response of the Second Life web site's login form. If there were a way to register you application with the login process, I would be totally cool with this. Then, the user could verify a site as being legitimate -- or at least more legitimate than any joe running this auth backend. ;)

Having said all that, it's pretty easy to authenticate via this package. Just make sure the module lives on your PythonPath, and then add slauth.backends.SLAuthBackend to your Django AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS setting. You'll even be able to login through the Django admin with your full SL username ("Anders Falworth" in my case, as an example). Of course, you won't get into the admin until you add make the SL account "staff". (This app creates a stub Django user account for each successful SL login, and then you can check is_staff, then login again with the SL account, and you'll see the successful entry into the Django admin site.)

This is the main class that does all the work:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User

from slauth.utils import valid_sl_login, get_or_create_sl_user

class SLAuthBackend:
    """
    A Second Life authentication backend for Django-based sites.
    """
    def authenticate(self, **kwargs):
        """
        Use kwargs to make the authenticate method more flexible.

        Django's admin app assumes username/password logins, so
        allow first and last in one username.  For example,
        username could be 'Bob Smith' and this method will split
        that apart into the first and last names SL login expects.

        So either of the following would work:

            >>> from django.contrib.auth import authenticate
            >>> authenticate(first_name='Bob', last_name='Smith', 
                                               password='foo')
            >>> authenticate(username='Bob Smith', password='foo')
        """
        first_name = kwargs.get('first_name', '')
        last_name = kwargs.get('last_name', '')
        password = kwargs.get('password', '')

        if kwargs.get('username', ''):
            username = kwargs.get('username', '')
            if ' ' in username:
                first_name, last_name = username.split(' ')

        authenticated = valid_sl_login(first_name, last_name, password)

        if authenticated:
            user = get_or_create_sl_user(first_name, last_name)
            return user
        return None

    def get_user(self, user_id):
        try:
            return User.objects.get(pk=user_id)
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return None

You could certainly use parts of this without using Django, even though it's written with Django in mind. There is a utils module that has sl_login and valid_sl_login which returns the response from a login attempt or a True/False on success or failure of a login attempt.

Please have at the code at it's Google project home if you have need for or want to play with Second Life logins via Django or Python. Comments, suggestions, and of course, contributions are always welcome. This code is released under the GNU GPL v2.