Altberg

There are lots of blog articles about Ebbe Altberg. Inara has a detailed outline of his resume and some of his personal  interests. See: Ebbe Altberg – a short profile. It seems everyone is blogging about Ebbe. None of us have any idea of how well he will do with Second Life™.

Hamlet of New World Notes is planning to interview Atlberg. That may be the first time we get any idea of whether Altberg can get his head around what SL is.

Strawberry

Strawberry Singh has an article up about a free photo studio. See: StrawberrySingh.com Simple Photo Studio (free).

Jump over to her blog to get the link to the page in the SL Market Place.

As she points out this is a simple studio. If you have been around  SL for a time then you can do most of what photo studio does with a prim. But, if you are not a builder, it is a handy thing to have and the video is a mini tutorial.

Viewers

The Fitted Mesh Viewer version 3.7.0.286015 is out. This is an update from earlier this week. Thies release has another couple of dozen fixes. Download.

The most stable viewers, in decreasing order of stability, are; Firestorm, Impudence, and the SL Viewer.

Imprudence lack support for server side Avatar Baking. For my purposes that makes it useless in Second Life.

Servers

Rumor is there may not be a new package to roll to the RC channels next week.

Avastar

The changes to support Fitted Mesh are up to version avastar-1-1-969_blender-2-65.

SL Login

Some people have been having login problems. That may be a problem that will be seen less often now. Coyot Linden tells us:

As some of you may have noticed we redeployed the login servers this morning (2/6). There was no change in functionality. Instead, we brought them up to a current OS version from one or two years old to newer versions of standard apps, like webserver, caching app, etc. and all of the better functionality and security fixes that go with that.

But, nothing has changed about the login code or process.

Maestro Linden pointed out that ADITI has only one login server. The main grid AGNI has 15 login servers. Coyot says they are adding a second login server for ADITI.

Maestro tells us:

On Tuesday, there was ‘voice maintenance’ which was to update the vivox backend for voice, which actually didn’t involve changes on the simulators themselves, but did affect voice on all sims on AGNI. The changes were bug fixes and similar. They were mostly for quality enhancements for people using a recent version of the voice SDK.

The ‘recent version’ is significant because apparently most TPVs use a very old version of the SDK. So, TPV users wouldn’t see much change from the update.

The version in use now is: Vivox 4.5.0009.17865.

Whirly Fizzle said Firestorm 4.4.2 release is using the old Vivox SKD. The beta Firestorm 4.5.1 is using same SDK as SL’s v3.

So, we may see better login performance and fewer voice problems.