Second Life

Things about SL

Gwyneth Llewelyn’s mADness

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I like Gwyneth’s writing because; her ideas are clearly expressed and her thinking rational. Her latest is about Linden Lab starting to use Google’s Adsense advertising and people’s reactions. It ranges from estimates of how much the Lab may be making to the psychological aspects of SL and the freedom available in SL that IS NOT available in other social sites/games/networks.

Gwyneth points out the details of how the Lab is using the advertising. She compares it to how other services use advertising. The Lab is certainly atypical in their use of Adsense.

The basic idea many people have is that paid services do NOT have advertising. But, that is not accurate. Consider cable and satellite TV. Those are paid services that have a load of advertising. Newspapers and magazine that we purchase have a load of advertising too. We pay to go into a movie and then sit through ads for coming movies and local services and products.

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Viewers Update 2013-10

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It has been a while since I took a look at a number of viewers. Rather than post them separately, I’ve lumped them together, except for Nirans. I had not used it for months, so I expected lots of changes.

SL Viewers

The main Linden Viewer is still at version 3.4.5 (270263), pre CHUI (Chat Hub User Interface). I seldom use the Beta Viewer now. It is more of a fall back viewer for when a Development Viewer version has problems. This morning the Beta is at version 3.5.0 (271345). The Development Viewer had been at version 3.5.1 (270826) for about 10 days. Today it updated to 3.5.1 (271386).

I am still fighting with the CHUI update to keep it the size I WANT IT. Other than sizing problems I like the new CHUI. The new build 271386 seems to have some of the sizing problems fixed.

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Second Life Region Crossing Problems

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This week we have seen region crossing problems pop up. Some are commenting about them and reporting details. The Lindens have acknowledged this is a problem. They have some idea of what the problem is and what to do about it. So, we should see a fix, hopefully, roll into an RC region next week.

See Deploys thread: 2013-03-04.

See: BUG-1814 – No object updates from vehicles after some region crossings. Filed by: Aeon Voom.

Problem Repo Description: Fly mesh aircraft with vehicle engine and relative high amounts of individual parts (~ >80). It also happens to sculpty vehicles and mesh vehicles with a low number of individual parts, but far less frequently.

While this is a possible crash mode it was hard to find out what is actually causing it.

Maestro Lindens explanation in BUG-1707 gave us a good idea where to look and search and we made some interesting findings through that. 

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Nirans Viewer Review 2013-10

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Niran has said he would stop building Nirans Viewer… So, there is a new release out as of March 7, version 2.1.2 Beta (3.4.6-2512). If you don’t know, Nirans Viewer is an ongoing experiment in user interface design. Niran has a talent for figuring out new ways to do things. Sometimes the ideas are better sometimes worse, but that is how people find the good stuff. I have a challenge finding things after the menus get changed, which is why I am not a frequent user.

Nirans Viewer Preferences - Presets at Top
Nirans Viewer Preferences – Presets at Top

This version of the viewer was much easier for me to use. The defaults are more like the SL Viewer, so I am good until I need to dig into the Preferences.

One of the interesting things in this version (new to me) is the ability to save Preferences settings as different sets of presets. I think this is a great idea. Those of us that move from shopping to exploring to photography to role play… can definitely make use of this feature.

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Aditi Problems

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Starting in mid 2012 we started to have inventory problems when logging into ADITI, the preview/beta grid. Recently the Lindens have been working on getting the problem resolved. I’m not sure how successful they have been as several of us have recently had problems.

Monty Linden has been posting in a forum thread about the problem. See: Beta grid login failed.

The problem can pop up when you change your password. Monty reports they are having a problem with inventory import when passwords change.

The ADITI grid uses the same asset servers as the main grid, but uses different inventory servers. There is a problem with the database on the ADITI inventory servers. Seems they tend to fill up. The solution is not as simple as buying a bigger hard disk. Inventory is a huge database handling complex data queries. Upgrading the hardware is apparently a complex and expensive thing. So, Simon Linden, I think Simon, told us that the hardware change evolved into a fix-the-process thing, which is in progress now.

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Second Life News 2013-10

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The main channel of server software got a new package from the RC channels. This package ran on all three RC channels last week. It is a crash fix and not much more.

New

The Blue Steel and Le TigreRC channels are getting Baker Linden’s object rez performance improvement. This is a multi-threaded object rez addition. Simon Linden says, “There was a laggy bit of work the server used to do when rezzing objects that has been moved into a side thread.” Paraphrasing Simon, people will notice it most with complex objects and link sets with lots of scripts.

Apparently we may not see it speed up the rez… but, it will have less impact on the simulator as the sim won’t stop to process an object. I take this to mean any single objects will not necessarily rez faster but more objects should rez in less time. This can be thought of as changing from rezzing one after the other to parallel rezing, rezing several at once.

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