Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Trend Micro has announced Apple is ending support for QuickTime™. (Reference) No more security updates. Along with that announcement the Dept. of Home Land Security (DHS) published an advisory that Windows users should uninstall QuickTime.
Today I was logging into ADITI, the preview grid. It has had its problems. Today was a mess. A combination of things happening on my computer and the latest Bento Project Viewer combined with ADITI problems meant I ended up spending 45 minutes getting logged in.
We knew from people’s experiences last week that AGNI and ADITI inventories were getting confused. So, today I set my Project Bento viewer up to use a cache separate from the main and RC viewers. I’ll use the Bento exclusively on ADITI. The main, RC, and other project viewers I’ll only use on AGNI.
I must be cursed. I seem to have problems getting to the Project Bento meeting. Today it took me 45 minutes to login because of viewer updates and other computer issues. Fortunately Inara was there and will have more coverage than I do.
There were some fun avatars at the meeting. You’ll see them in the viewer.
Let me know if you start having problems with this site. I have been upgrading the security. About 2 or 3 PM each day I see the site slammed by remote sites sucking gigabytes of content out of my site. I’m not sure why they would want it. Nor do I mind that they take it. I do mind that they overload the web server I use and make the site way slow. So, I come in each day and disconnect those that are behaving like bots… continuous dozens-of-requests per second.
I’ve been changing robots.txt and adding ‘slow down’ instructions for search engines. That helps with the big well mannered engines. But, not the problem bots that have been hitting.
I’ve been blocking the networks the most abusive bots use. But, doing that without restricting legitimate users is complicated. So, it isn’t a good solution. Neither is blocking individual IP addresses. The bad guys just change IP.
So, now I am trying some new software. It is in learning mode. So, I’m ‘completely’ sure what all it will decide to do.
In my reading I came across this article on the Intel Developer site: Unity Tip: Using Second Life As A 3D Modeling Package.
Quoting:
You may need to use 3D modeling to create objects for your project but do not have the technical experience yet to do so, or find that your package of choice does not provide the feature that you need (for example, creating spheres in SketchUp is very difficult). There is an alternative, user-friendly solution though. You can create your objects in the online virtual reality world Second Life
I think that is pretty interesting…
Even more interesting is they promote the Firestorm Viewer as the viewer of choice. Their reason for recommending Firestorm is the Collada export feature found in Firestorm.
The article provides a tutorial on how to export 3D items from Second Life™ using the Firestorm viewer.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote Second Life: Aditi Inventory. This is about a problem those of us that use the Preview Grid, ADITI, have.
The original problem was passwords were not updating and there were problems with inventory in ADITI. The Lindens have been in the process of fixing those problems. In the process they ran into a new problem. The fix came from trying to synchronize your main grid’s (AGNI) inventory with your ADITI inventory. In the previous update process the ADITI inventory was just replaced with the AGNI inventory. Sync’ing is way better.