Month: September 2011

Microsoft’s Win8 Secure Boot

by

Since most of my readers are Windows people this is an issue worth bring up. It seems Microsoft wants to build in a feature named Secure Boot. It will be an integral part of the coming Windows 8. It sounds like a good reason to upgrade to Windows 7 and hold off Win8 as long as possible.

Booting

Everything seems to have a boot process. Booting takes time and is prone to root kit attacks. Microsoft is looking at redoing the boot process. With this rethink they are including phones, tablets, pads, laptops, and desktops.

What will all the rethinking look like to the end user? They have a cool video, about a minute long.

The Challenges

Think about how the process might work on phones, pads, and tablets. All seems pretty straight forward, until you think about when a device has problems. If you’re on a smart phone you do not want to see Press F1 when there is some problem. So, using a similar process across a wide range of devices can get complex.

Read more

#Second Life Server Update Week 38

by

There was lots of interesting news at this week’s meeting. Check these things out.

Roll Outs

Surely by now you know the main grid gets new server software Tuesday morning. The Release Channels get new software on Wednesday. This week the main grid got the the Server-Maintenance update running on Blue Steel.

Data Collection

The Lab is doing lots of analysis of the regions to find bottlenecks and problems. This roll includes new data collection features. One of the more confusing and hard to find problems is labeled TimeWarp. The Lindens think they have found the problem, at least where the problem resides. The additional data collection will provide more information on many aspects of the Second Life servers and reveal more about the TimeWarp problem (more on that later).

Unexpected Prim Return

The addition of Land Impact costs has created some surprising situations where region prim limits are hit and prims get returned. Changes made by scripts can change object shape and trigger a Land Impact value and trigger returns.  A feature has been added to the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) to anticipate such changes and prevent them. I think the idea is to return an error message in the script error channel rather than allow the change and trigger returns. Nice idea.

Read more

Phoenix with Mesh?

by

Today I’m seeing Plurks and Tweets about the Phoenix Viewer getting mesh. Looking at the Phoenix Viewer site, I find they are adding mesh support to Phoenix. Interesting.

Henri Beauchamp, of Cool VL Viewer fame, has back ported the render engine from SL Viewer 3. He is allowing third party viewer developers to use his work. One of the Firestorm-Phoenix team made the conversion to Phoenix, Ansariel Hiller.

A new release of Phoenix is coming soon. You can read the details on the Phoenix blog (link above).

So, it seems series 1 viewers will be getting the ability to render the new free style models we call ‘mesh’.  Jessica explains this viewer version will probably be more crash prone. Also, that Phoenix is on its last legs. She makes a point that the ‘team’ did not make this addition. A couple of team members made it as a personal project. Now it is being added into the Phoenix Viewer project.

Read more

#SL Cloth Simulation Clothes

by

With the addition of mesh objects we have some nice possibilities for creating new things in Second Life. Ashasekayi made a great 6 part clothing/rigged mesh tutorial. Gaia also makes wonderful tutorials for working with sculpties, going from sculpties to mesh, and mesh. They have the basics pretty well covered. I want to get beyond the basics and find more Blender features. I have found several features that can help with modeling and in particular with making clothes. This article is about one of the Blender features.

Second Life Tutorial Example
Nice Clothes Example

Looking through loads of tutorials I’ve found some I think are pretty good examples of how to use the feature for making clothes look like they are made from real cloth. This is not a complete how to make a top. This is about a feature you can use in making a blouse.

Feature

Cloth Simulation – This is a feature in Blender that I have seldom seen discussed in Second Life circles. I wanted to explore what it can do and try it out. I used Blender 2.59.

Read more

The Effects of Mesh

by

Tateru Nino writes the Dwell On It blog, a favorite of mine because she does numbers. Today she has an article titled, The effects of the Mesh content-type on Second Life. The article is an accurate assessment of the current state of ‘mesh’ in Second Life. The comments show the user reaction to mesh and are interesting to read. I have a very different opinion than I see in the comments there.

It is All Mesh

Opinions

In psychology there are the concepts of transference and projection. If you have a new age belief system, you know those concepts as mirroring. The concepts are a mix of ideas that basically results in the idea that what we see in others is ourselves. So, if we see someone being dumb, we are probably seeing our own stupidity. If we are smart our first thought would be to ask of our self if we are being dumb and missing something. At the least it can save us considerable embarrassment.

So, with mirroring as the top cliché read through the comments on Tateru’s post.

Defining Mesh

I read lots of stuff. Somewhere in my reading I came across an idea Einstein expressed in a conversation about language. It contained the idea that people cannot communicate or understand each other if the language does not have words that precisely describe concepts. If we use ambiguous terms we will have ambiguous discussions. Ambiguity is a disaster in technical conversations and any conversation where one hopes to achieve some consensus of opinion.

Read more

Second Life Viewer Problems

by

As much as I use different viewers, I miss lots of the problems. Lance Corrimal, the Dolphin Viewer person, pointed out some of the problems in SL Viewer 3.x. There are a couple of gotcha’s.

Speed

SL Viewer 3 and viewers based on version 3.x code are slow. I’ve been using the SL Development Viewer for so long I expect it to be slow. If you are just moving to a 3.x based viewer… well prepare yourself. It affects the SL Viewer and third party viewers based on version 3 code.

Outfit Problems

We usually see these problems manifesting as problems with alpha layers. If you are wearing multiple layers then an outfit replacement only replaces one layer. That results in layers left behind from the previous outfit.

A work around is to remove the current outfit then add the new outfit. This does leave you nude for a few seconds. So, you need a changing room… or not, if you are an exhibitionist.

Crashing

If you attempt to teleport more than one person at a time, you have likely run into this problem. Inviting more than one person to tp crashes the viewer.