Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The meet up has come and gone for this month. Did you go? Could you get in?
I went a bit late, 5 minutes or so after it started. I did make it in. I had decided to use the Firestorm viewer. I lasted about 15 or 20 minutes before the viewer poofed. I didn’t try to get back in. There wasn’t much going on when I was there. Three Lindens were hanging around. People were chatting away everywhere. So, it was pretty chaotic while I was there.
Today is the day for the Lindens to get in-world and mingle with the masses… well, whatever mass will fit in the region Our Island aka Basilique. The meet up starts at 1 PM SLT today, 5/14.
Seems everyone in the SL blogosphere is publishing the time and location. Since this is a single region without any adjacent regions, I expect it to fill up quickly and be hard if not impossible to get into. When I checked out the location at 8:30 AM there were already people camping out. Checking the map later, about 10 AM, it seems the region is already starting to fill up.
Everything ends. It is just a matter of when. We hear this story of Second Life™ ending all the time. It is not new. Lots of Chicken Little. That SL has not ended, does not mean it won’t. The sky COULD fall. But, I think we will have plenty of warning should the end draw near.
I came to Second Life from Myst Online, which has closed and come back a number of times. So, I’m used to games I like closing. Rizom is another one I liked and played for a time. It too closed and came back. Others just closed.
The Third Party Developers met last Friday. This is the first of those meetings to run a full hour in some weeks. So, we have new information on several subjects. Some of that information I published on Saturday and Sunday as smaller posts rather than one gigantic post. This article will be the smaller bits of news from the meeting. But, it still went over a thousand words.
Oz Linden announced the next TPD Meeting is next Friday May 1. This is one week away, out of the normal pattern. He will be gone the following weekend and is pushing that weekend’s meeting up one week.
We currently have an inventory problem that prevents logging into Second Life. The currenlty frequent cause of the problem has been tracked down to having Flat Inventory.
A flat inventory is an inventory where thousands of items are in a single folder. Mostly the term denotes an unorganized inventory where stuff is mostly in the root or objects folders rather than being organized in folders and subfolders. As the viewer is downloading inventory folder by folder a folder with thousands of items can take too long to download and cause a time out. This jams up the login process and you get a failure message.
In the Third Party Developers’ meeting Oz Linden mentioned that someone spotted a maintenance version viewer without the ability to send snapshots via email from Second Life. This omission of the feature Snapshot-to-Email from this RC version is deliberate. It will eventually be removed from all Linden and Third Party Viewers.
The way the system works, the images are sent TO whoever with the FROM address of the user-sender, at least when the Lab knows the sender’s address. But, the email is being sent from a Second Life server, so they are spoofing the FROM address. This ‘spoofing’ is a common practice of spammers and black-hat crackers. So, the SL servers are getting blocked by numerous ISP’s automated systems as spammers. That is affecting other email services the Lab uses to communicate with users.