Well, I didn’t get either of the jobs I was hoping for as of my last post — I started working at Startek, a call center which handles support for AT&T Wireless customers in the southern U.S.  After I had been there for two weeks, I was offered a job at a contracting firm called Fact Computers, to be a systems administrator for the provincial government.  Unfortunately, and for some as-of-yet unknown reason, they decided to call me up the day before I was supposed to start working (after I’d quit my job at Startek, unfortunately) and let me know that they weren’t going to hire me after all.  Two weeks of unemployment and frantic job-searching followed.  I am now working for Marketel, a company which manufactures and supports autodialers, as a sort of jack-of-all-trades…  I work primarily in tech support, but I’m also doing sysadmin and programming as well.  The job can be fairly monotonous at times, but my co-workers and supervisors are great — where else would you find a supervisor who, between calls, randomly starts singing things by “They Might Be Giants”?

I’m working on a new version of DanteSL to enable multithreading, since the login process freezing the program temporarily is the biggest problem I can find with it.  Motion is going to have to wait, as I haven’t been able to find any functions in the libSecondLife code which would allow me to impliment movement.  I’m also working on another version, to be called something entirely different, using AIML as the A.I. engine instead of Dante.  The custom AIML interpreter will be closed source, and the overall product will be commercial in nature — essentially, I’ll be providing the bot and custom “scripts” for it as an advertising resource for customers.

I’m getting much closer to actually starting my major robotics project of the year — I was worried about having to pay for custom fabrication on the body, but as it turns out, my brother has just purchased a farm, complete with — oh rapture of raptures — a fully equipped machine shop.  He’s going to be selling most of the equipment, to help pay of the mortgage on the farm, but he has decided to keep enough of it around for me to “play” when I go out to visit.

So, I have a 12 page paper to finish for a class in computer ethics, due on Tuesday.  I also have to study for my final stats quiz (tomorrow night), and get in applications for the Google Summer of Code (I hope to be employed by either FreeNet or Linden Labs — FreeNet because I’m doing a lot of research into the underlying technology for the aforementioned paper, and Linden Labs because I’m doing a lot of work based around their technology for Dante’s Second Life and for the Mageforge Virtual Sanctum — so I’d be getting paid to do what I am fully prepared to spend most of my free time for the summer doing anyways).  There isn’t much hope of me being accepted, as I didn’t bother to do research into the SoC project before now, and the application deadline is April 5 — not enough time to talk to the organizations before I submit my applications.  As a result of my classes, I get to miss my friend’s wedding tomorrow night.  By the way, if you read this, Congrats Fern and Adrian!  I’m also trying to plan around my tax return so I can finish the hardware side of some of the projects I’m working on — wearable computing and robotics.  If anyone knows a cheap source for MCQV111AFB ASIC chips, let me know — I have about 40 Kopin 320M lcd panels which I can’t use until I find the chips, and I can’t find the chips for less than $70 a piece.  Work on Dante’s Second Life is continuing, but slowly — next update will include either multi-threading or random motion code, as the mood takes me.  Anyways, tomorrow is rapidly becoming today, so I should wrap this up.

Ciao!

DanteSL Second Life Learning Chatbot Release 0.1.1.

Features:

• Login as any Second Life character
• Learns as you talk to it
• Read-Only and Write-Only database modes

This is a quick and dirty release, I only started working on this project yesterday so things like motion and friend requests aren’t currently handled.

Requirements: Second Life account, Active Internet Connection, .NET 2.0 Framework

Known Bugs: Main program freezes when you connect, until the client has fully connected or given up.

Source code and binary files:

http://www.technomagia.tk/projects/dantesl/DanteSL0.1.1-SRC.zip

http://www.technomagia.tk/projects/dantesl/DanteSL0.1.1-BIN.zip

EDIT:  I just realized I left out instructions for compiling the source — Source is written in VS2008, not sure if it will work in any earlier version.  You must have both Dante (http://www.dantebot.com) and libSecondLife (http://www.libsecondlife.org) installed for the program to compile, and you may have to update the references to reflect the path you have installed it in.  Since Dante is written using VB6, I highly doubt it will run under Mono in Linux, although all the C# components should be fine.