Second Life

Things about SL

Linden Fix It

by

You may or may not have noticed the Lindens are talking more about what is happening behind the scenes in Second Life. See: Tale of the Missing ACK. The article is a good example of the troubleshooting often needed to find a problem.

Server Update #2 Week 7

by

Thursday we had a surprise roll out to the RC channels of the main grid. The package was a fix for a security exploit. Friday early in the morning the update rolled to the main channel of the grid. So, what was going on? The details were published by April Linden ‎2016-02-19 11:18 AM in the … Read more

Server Update Week 7

by

We were not expecting any updates this week. But, we got one. The RC channels have been updated in a surprise roll out. We will likely see the package roll to the main grid as soon as the Lindens are confident the software is working well. This departure from schedule is due to a security … Read more

Firestorm Team Thank You

by

Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.

Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.

Firestorm Support Jacket - Link farther down the page
Firestorm Support Jacket – Link farther down the page

You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.

Read more