Been a while...

Hey guys, been a while since I blogged anything around here. :-)

The summer was pretty mad and I was working flat out leaving me with little to no time for second life. Now the summer is over and I slowly find my way back into SL. At the moment I try to catch up with all the changes that have happened around SL, Xstreet and Apez.

At Apez we have completed most of our move to the new envoirement which is now based on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing. Cenji done a excellent job in the last couple of months preparing the move and coding all the packages for EC2 to run the Apez cluster.

This means also that we got a little behind on other tasks such as the control-demon and iVend updates.. but you can be sure that they will also hit you soon.

Got to run.. but I'll post more again from now on....

-Wise ;-)

Dynamic Shadows in Second Life

Hey all, I just came across a wicked video on youtube.

lordflylordfly who uploaded it commented to the video with:
A quickly-hacked together video showing you some of the new features coming soon to a SL viewer near you! Dynamic per-pixel shadows, spotlights, and the ability to project textures onto arbitrary surfaces.



I wonder what kind of gfx card you would need in order to run this on decent settings. Specially the dynamic lightning is gonna be pretty heavy on the graphic I'd say. Love the video though.

:-) -Wise

Akeyo - Motion Capture Animations and more...

Hey all,
where do you shop for your animations, sneakers and other underground designs? Well, I get my stuff usually at Akeyo's main store.

Here you'll find some of SL's hottest motion capture dance animations, AO's, chucks, sneakers, sculpted hoodies and a lot more.



Head over to Akeyo now and check it out!

-Wise

Second Life Quickstart Guide

Hi all,
I just came across this post on Torley Lindens Blog.

You can now download the "Second Life Quickstart Guide" which has been created to make the life of new residents easier. The guide contains 7 pages explaining the basic SL user interface, the pie-menu, how to move in SL and much more.

Second Life Quickstart Guide

Publish at Scribd or explore others: How-to-Guides & Manu howto fast

Download the pdf file.

Enjoy,
-Wise

Resident Choice Award Winners Announced!

Hi all,
over the last 2 weeks residents been given the chance to vote for their favorite locations, scripter, animator, club etc. in Second Life. Today Linden Lab released the results of the award.

We didn't make it easy for you and still over 6000 Residents filled out ballots for the Resident Choice Awards and told us all who their favorite DJ and designers were and where to find the best dance floors and makeout nooks. All the results are ready now and include ballots cast from the English, French, and German speaking communities. We had a little last minute trouble getting the Japanese characters properly uploaded so translated results will be available early next week. Right now they're in English.

You can view the winners on the Secondlife.com website.

Congrats to all winners, well done!
-Wise

Apez.realms - Leonis Plaza Grand Opening

Hi all,
we got a massive opening party coming up on the 15th. of April on Apez.realms! We have 3 great LIVE acts performing and be giving away gift certificates during the 3 hour event as well.

Event begins at 4pm SLT with Kristinahelene Teardrop (Formerly know as Therese Nightfire), then at 5pm SLT we have PM Bookmite and to end the festivities Quinton Diavolo!!! These are three performers you won't wanna miss - so get there early and get a good place to stand or dance!!!

Rentals are now available as well around Leonis Plaza and the rest of Apez.realms. Visit us ahead of the event if you're looking for a additional or new store location. You can also view all vacancies online on Apez.biz.

Here the slurl to Leonis Plaza.

-Wise

New Second Life Blog Syndicator

Hi all,
In the last 1-2 weeks I've come along a lot of posts on the Xstreet forum of people sharing blog url's.

This is some great community spirit and it's nice to see that Just Dinkin picked up on the idea by putting together a blog syndicator for Second Life related blogs.

Adding your own blog only takes 1-2 minutes and all you need to enter is your avatar name, edmail address, blog name, blog url and that's it.

To submit your own blog follow this link.

-Wise ;-)

Display your Second Life status on your Blog

Oh another blog post in one day,
Wow.. getting the hang of this it seems :-)

Checking my "google reader" I came past a blog post Peter Stindberg just posted on his blog Second Stindberg:

AjaxLife developer Katharine Berry has developed an interesting web-service that allows you to share your Second Life online status on your blog or webpage. There are three ways how you can display the online status, all described at avstatus.kathar.in.

I totally love this and a big thanks to Katharine for writing this.

I'll have to play with this code after work since I wanted to have a online/offline status indicator on the blog for a while. However, I didn't want to use the available trackers you get from other service providers which make you register again for another site. So this comes in very handy imho.

-Wise

Apez.demo-rezzer youtube video

Hi all,
bellow you'll find a little youtube video Snap made as tutorial for our Apez.demo-rezzer. This is his first tutorial video, so excuse the quality. In the near future we plan to release more videos so that using our products gets easier also for the non experienced SL users.

The Apez demo-rezzer kit for prefabs allows you to show your creations to potential buyers on a designated demo area. Your customers can rez and walk through your buildings and view them before buying one.

Setting up the demo rezzer is similar to the usage of our building rez-system or other "boxing tools". If you like to learn more about how the rezzer works, please view the rezzers Apez.wiki page for detailed information.

Enjoy,

-Wise

Apez.auto-lease allowing "rate scaling"

Hey fellow residents :-)

Been a while since my last post on this blog, but RL has keeping me rather busy for the last weeks. Today I like to blog about a feature of the Apez auto-lease system which is yet undocumented but can be of great use for auto-lease owners.

The feature allows lease owners to give discounts on rents which can be used for promotions, special offers etc. In order to set a discount to a lease unit, go to your Apez.lease - spaces page and look for the rate field in the "bulk edit area" bellow your location(s) and unit(s).

The "rate" field in the "apply to selection" bullk-change area at the bottom of the lease.spaces page now accepts inputs such as "x2", "x.5", "+5", "-10", "/10" to adjust lease rates instead of specifying their value explicitly.

This means if you for example select 20 lease units from 1 location and enter +25, it will increase the rent for all units by 25L$. This is great if you have locations with different lease prices but want to increase all untis by 25L$. Rather then editing each one of them you only add the desired ammount with +xx.

It is also possible to give a 20% discount on all leases by using select 'All' and antering "x.8" into the rate field (or, for example, to increates rates by 10% you'd use "x1.1". In addition to multiplication "x" (or "*") it also understands addition, subtraction and division. So if you wanted to cut the lease price of all units by 25% during your promotion (or any other reason) you would enter x.75 which equals 75% of the normal lease price.

I try and port this info and a detailed "how-to" over to the Apez.wiki soon as I find the time for it. If you have any questions about the above feature and need help setting it up for your locations, don't hesitate to drop me a ticket through Apez.support.

Have fun testing this feature,
-Wise ;-)

Ohh.. my last name actually means something

Wohooo, my SL name has a actually meaning to it... in Hebrew.

Capra:
Penance ; atonement, forgiveness, absolution.

(Colloquial) forget it, it's not important
Reconciliation with misfortune in the hope that it will serve as penance

(Slang) my sweet, my darling

(Literally: my penance (as if to ward off the evil eye))
כפרות - expiation, Jewish folk custom during the days prior to the Day of Atonement to transfer one's sins to a chicken or to money given to charity

Big thanks to Kinadra for sending me this by IM :-)

-Wise

Integrating your product listings to your own site or blog

Hi all,
I have just been playing some with the Apez Developement API while I was doing some wiki editing.

What many Apez users don't know is, you can basically integrate many of the Apez services to your own website or blog. Using the API and Affiliate services you can even add your products to your site and allow your customers to buy them directly or through the payment processor (of course only if they have a Apez account).

If you scroll down a little and look at the right menu, you'll see a little test widget I have added to the Blog using the cross site EzBuy processor:

EzBuy is a simple cross-site payment and item delivery scheme where you put some special HTML form code or a URL link (described below) into your pages in order to provide a 'Buy' button or link for products. It could either be static HTML or dynamically generated HTML if you use server-side scripting to implement a shopping site.

This is actually the easiest way to link for example your latest product to your blog. All you need is a few lines of html code as explained here, add your product name, product ID and backlink URL's and you're ready to list your own products on your site.

Of course you can modify the code to add a preview image of your product, short description, rename the button and more. If you're experienced with web developement and LSL you can even create your own devices, tools and trackers using the Apez API.

I do some more testing soon, since I'm quite interested in "how much" you can actually add to a free blog or site with limited resources.

So stay tuned,
-Wise

It's weekend and the grid....

Hey all, are you ready for your SL weekend?

I sure hope you all, and get a few drinks, sit back and don't get frustrated. ;-)

Our friends at the Lab have completed the rolling restart as part of the LLNet transition to which we're all looking forward. Though, maybe end of the week is a bad time to do such a thing?

While we're all ready to hit the clubs, meet friends and go about our Second Life, the first issues have kicked in. I for one can't TP at all, get logged out on any TP request I accept, builds don't rez and I stay way clear of transacitons at the moment.

Let's hope the gird goes stable soon.
With now 80.000 users online - and certainly more on the way as the weekend starts in the US and other time zones. Let's see how long this takes to show on the grid status page.;-)

-Wise

Classifieds don't show in "all" search

Yeah well, what sort of month was this then?

Earlier this month, parcel descriptions in SL kept being capped. The reason is a bug in the current SL server version which randomly deleted everything in your parcel description in a new line (after a [enter]).This of course made traffic numbers go down, lowered search ranking and basically residents can't find you, since your keywords are not in search.

Shortly after a massive load of Xstreet delivery errors kicked in.
What happened was, merchants received a "delivery error message" for a failed purchase and the customer wasn't charged but in many cases received the product. Lucky enough Xstreet staff can now access resident inventories and check if the items are there or not. However, this has never happened since I use Xstreet which has always been a great marketplace to me.

Since all them issues are not enough, Xstreet changed the "session live-time" when you login to the site. For the ones amongst use who are actually pretty active on their forum this means, you have to constantly login again every time you receive a post notification for a forum topic reply.

The login wouldn't even be the problem. The thing is, if you click on a email link, login to Xstreet.. you end up on the "my account" page and you're not re-directed to the actual target. So you tab back out of your browser, bring up your email client again just to click on the link again so you can follow the topic (or whatever you do).

Finally, today is friday and the last day of this buggy month... paid in-world classifieds don't show in the SL search since today in the morning (GMT). Now don't get me wrong, we're not talking about classifieds from the "classifieds tab". We're talking about the "paid classifieds" you would see on the right side when searching under "All" or online on search.secondlife.com.

Sorry LL, but get a grip.. it's weekend, the customers are out shopping and people have thousands of L$'s in classifieds not showing up. I checked for our top keywords and I'm not very happy with the results. Anyway, I thought I share this, so share it with others...

-Wise

Configure iVend vendor's with "tags"...

Hey all,
today I'll write about a Apez.iVend vending system feature, most merchants don't know even exists.

Since the release of iVend 2.3 it is possible to create affiliate vendors and pass this vendors to other avatars. In order for your resale vendors to work for your affiliate, the collection & product names are stored in the vendors object description when you configure them on Apez.biz. Now, once you save the configuration, the system sends your settings to the vendor in-world and stores the information to the vendors object description.

In order to quick-config your vendors, or affiliate vendors from in-world, all you need is your collection names and product names. Note, the shorter and logical your collection- / product names are, the easier it is for you to config vendors by editing the object description.

The "tag" for the vendor description looks like this:
prodcut name from collection name by merchant name

Note, you should always avoid using from and by in your collection or product names. It can mess up your affiliate vendor config since both words are used to fetch the vendor setting from the database.

----

Here some samples setting up vendors with tags.
I've added some Apez.tags under each line for better understanding.

Single prim vendor:
product name from collection name by merchant name

Apez.tools control-demon (builders edition) from apez.tools by ApezProducts Engineer

This will assign 1 product from 1 collection ''by avatar name'' to your vendor. The tag "by merchant name" is only required for affiliate vendors. If you're planing to use this vendor yourself, you only need to add product name from collection name to the vendor description.

Multi-panel vendor:
coll:collection name (merchant name) coll:2nd collection name (merchant name)

coll:Apez.textures (ApezProducts Engineer) coll:Apez.tools (ApezProducts Engineer)

This setup will assign 2 collections to any multi-panel vendor.
Including the (merchant name) behind the collection name allows you to give a copy of the vendor to other residents for resale. If you only planing on using this vendors yourself, you only need is:

coll:collection name coll:collection name in your vendor description.

Once you configured your first affiliate vendor, simply right-click it and select '''take copy'''. This will create a copy of the pre-configured vendor in your inventory. Repeat this step for all products you want to create affiliate vendors with, then box them up and put them on sale or give them to your friends.

Related: Apez.wiki - How-to setup affiliate vendors

Have fun playing with this,
-Wise

Remember the pins...?

Remember the good old pins we all used to have?

They are back and you can get them at the re.act main store.

Dave from re.act just released 60 or 64 of them sweet little things. He put a lot of detail into all the different pins and they are only tagged with 50L$ a peace. Beside the pins you'll find all sorts of clubbing gear, dj equipment, visuals and more at his store. Check it out, it's well worth the visit.

Enjoy,
-Wise

Got the style sorted :-)

Yeah!

1st. day of my private blogging day is over and it was fun. Got the style fixed up a little and are quite pleased with the result. Took me a few hours but I think this is it... :-)

I added a google calendar iframe to the right.
Shows Apez and the LL grid status when selected. I think I will make better use of the Apez calendar this way. :-)

I also added my google ready to the bottom, but not atisfied with the result. I wonder if there is a hack for blogger.com so that posts like the one bellow are capped with a "read more" option. Got a little carried away on that first post which made it quite long :-)

Anyone know of a widget to import my twitter timeline?

-Wise

I guss I'll start blogging..

Wohoo, finally I decided to keep my own blog online about my life in the Metaverse - or the virtual world of Second Life.

I joined SL after a report on TV (yes, me too) after I been doing scenario design for games like Operation Flashpoint, Armed Assault and the military version of it Virtualbattlespace 2. Joining SL sure was a change from what I was used to from being a active combat simulator freak for many years.

If you compare for example VBS2 to Second Life, it's 2 different worlds.
VBS2 is a simulator for the serious games market, used by law enforcement agencies and the military around the world. In VBS2 you create (or play) scenarios staged on islands up to 400 square KM in size. Operating anything from vehicles, choppers, small squads, platoons up to controlling whole operations as forwrd observer or instructor.

Yes, you can see how different this is to what you'll find in Second Life.
However, somehow SL got a hold of me and wont let go any more, which is fine with me btw. I started in SL with a very small Department Store, or Mall on the themed Knighstbridge Sim. Learned a few important SL lessions in that time, but let's not look back and talk about people. ;-)

Knightsrbidge is also the place where I first met Snap Spitteler.
Snap became a good friend of mine in the last 2 years and still is my Sl business partner today.. He hasn't gotten an easy partner - no asking - but we get along great and I'd like to thank him for being a friend for the last 2 years.

Snap, I know I can be a pain, but I love you bro!

With Snap I later formed [SLCI] or SL Content Innovations.
[SLCI] used to create residential and comemrcial prefabs, custom building and we had a small selection of building tools, textures and gadgets on sale. We enjoyed creating the products for [SLCI] so much that we certainly spend some insane hours online in SL over the last... 1 1/2 years. We sure had our up and downs in SL, learned our lessions, had our losses... but even today I still enjoy Second Life a lot. Maybe not as much any more as I did 2 years ago, but I still enjoy my virtual life, with all it's up and downs on a daily base.

Early in October 2008 I got chatting with Cenji Neutra who owns and operates Apez.biz in SL. I have been using the Apez.products and services since my early SL days and always loved it.

Apez is one of SL's largest provuder for web-enabled lease and vending systems called Apz.auto-lease and Apez.iVend. I don't want to start advertising on my private blog right now, so please visit the Apez.site or the Apez.emporium in SL to see "our" whole product range and services. I think I'll have enough to blog about Apez and other things in the future.

Cenji wanted to know if Snap and me would be interesed in merging SL Content Innovation with Apez. Like I said, I always loved the Apez system and while (at first) it is difficult to get the hang of, the infrastructure Cenji has created around Apez and SL is some amazing work. The current website doesn't do it justice but - thank god - this will change soon.

After I discussed the pro and con's of a possible merger with Sanp for a while we finally agreed to go ahead with it and give up [SLCI] which was quite sad. I'll sure keep our [SLCI] logos, signs and other stuff for a long time. To always remind me of the last 2 years.

And this is what I do today in my Second Life.
Officially I'm the Apez Public Relations Manager. Part of my job is it to enforce the apez brand, public presence and coordinating advertising across SL and related web sites.

As part of this I also manage the Apez.promote network. Apez.promote is a web based banner network for SL related web sites. With currently 20 participating sites advertisers reach thousands of residents with their campaigns from 1 central point. Please view the Apez.wiki for more details if you'd liek to advertise or participate in the network.

I'm also part of the Apez.support team to assist in the daily ticket workflow we get from Apez customers about products, services, the promote network etc. If you ever talked to Apez.support chances are big we met. ;-)

Now, if all the above leaves me some spare time.. I edit the wiki :-)
While Cenji has created a great site, service and products since 2005, maintaining the products and services didn't leave much time to structure the wiki and keep it maintained. If you recently looked at it, you'll see that it has changed quite a bit - but is still not complete and we're basically working on it now on a daily base.

So yeah, this is me and what I do in "My Virtual Life".
I could write on now for a while, but would most likely end up talking 5 hours about Apez.. and this is not the purpose of this blog.

So yeah, I type and type and type and all of ya think "Okay, so what does he want to say?"

Nothing... just trying to get the blog started somehow and this is the result.
In the future I will write here about the things I encounter in SL, teh stuff that wants to make me rant, and anything I feel a urge to share. You're welcome to follow...

Thanks for stopping by... -Wise