Progress: Fun with PHP

Thursday the 17th proved to be a very frustrating day indeed. I decided to focus on the issue of getting data from Second Life into MaxMSP by way of my laptop's apache server. Enabling the server is baby simple; a checkbox in system preferences. Enabling PHP on the server was somewhat more complicated, but this Very Helpful Tutorial on editing your apache configuration files in Terminal worked out perfectly. Tested, it works, all is well.

Now, on to the real issue: Getting Silo up and running.

Silo was created by Zero Linden for storing and retrieving data using HTTP. Silo comes in the form of a PHP file that needs to be installed onto the apache server. This is where my problems have erupted. Where to install the file depends on your apache configuration. It seems to me (with my very limited knowledge) that the file should be placed under the Document Root, which for Mac OS X is /Library/WebServer/Documents. I tried testing it using the small python program that accompanies Silo, and the test came up with an error.

The other two most common apache configurations require that silo be placed either in the user's public-html directory or outside the document tree. From reading through my apache configuration, I don't believe either of these are it, though I admittedly have little to no experience in these matters. Of course, the Silo ReadMe does state that there are other, more complicated apache configurations that he did not list. If that ends up being the case, I'll need to track someone down who is knowledgeable about these things.

Needless to say, after three hours of trying to puzzle this out, I was frustrated beyond belief. Time to move on to something else!

I began constructing my motion tracking patch using the cv.jit objects. I ran a few tests, seeing how they would track movement in SL, and everything seems to be fine so far. Currently, the issue is incorporating cv.jit.faces into the mix to track individual people. It doesn't seems to output any sort of coordinates for the location of the face, but I may be able to use the output of the draw object used to outline the faces somehow. I'm still looking into it, and hopefully I'll have an answer by the end of today or tomorrow.

Onward!

- M