Second Life News Week #16

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This past Friday there was a third-party developers meeting. There wasn’t much new news. But there was a discussion of the teleport disconnect problem many are experiencing. More about that later.

Servers

Bugsly Linden made the Deploys Post this week. It is still marked as a ‘placeholder’…

The main channel is to be on version #19.04.09.526122, an update over last week (15).

New Personal Lighting in EEP – 4/2019

Last week a number of us had the impression the rollout had fixes for the teleport disconnect problem. And the week before that the RC’s had a version with such a fix. At the dev’s meeting, the Lindens were surprised that is what we thought. Well, DUH! Can’t imagine where we got that idea.

However we came to that idea, it is wrong. The Lindens do not have a fix. What they were rolling out is improved logging to detect the problem. We are seeing that this week’s update has more logging targeting the problem. From the discussion at the dev meeting, I have the impression the Lab is putting a lot of effort into tracking down the problem. Oz Linden is on it, which I think is something.

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Big Black Hole – How big is the picture?

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It is making the news in various places that we have the first picture of a black hole… sort of. The part I find interesting is the size of the hole and of the picture, yeah, the size of the picture is impressive. More so than it looks

First Image showing Einstein predicted black hole. 4/2019

The black hole is in the constellation Virgo. The app Skyview (Android and iOS) or StarDate.org will help you find Virgo in the night sky. But you can’t see the black hole with your eyes. At 55 million lightyears away the hole which is 6.5 billion times heavier than our sun (10 billion kilometers in diameter – the diameter of Neptune’s orbit is 9 billion km) is too small to see.

To photograph it 8 radio telescopes located in Hawaii, Spain’s Sierra Nevada, the Chilean desert, and on the Antarctic ice sheet were used to create a huge virtual telescope. Each scope took images totaling about a petabyte of data (or 1 million megabytes). At that size, it was faster to fly the stacks of disks via FedEx to Massachusetts and Germany for processing by a supercomputer called a correlator rather than try to ‘upload’ the information. According to MeridianOutpost.com a petabyte of data would take 15,770 hours on an OC3 (155Mbps) connection (over 2 years).

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Second Life News 2019 Week 15

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The Lab has posted “THIS IS A SCHEDULED EVENT Apr 10, 05:00 – 07:00 PDT”

Apr 8, 12:12 PDT
Scheduled – Second Life will be undergoing scheduled inventory maintenance from 5:00 AM to 7:00 AM PST on April 10th, 2019. During this time, residents may have issues with any inventory related activities including building, logging in, as well as avatar and object rezzing. Please refrain from rezzing in-world, in addition to transacting in-world, on the Marketplace, or on the Lindex during this time.

This coincides with the grid update in the RC channels. So, expect problems. PS: Maybe not. Deploys says no rolls Wednesday.

Servers

Why am I crashing constantly… is a growing thread in the SL Forum. I’ve been hearing of this problem since about December-January. Then it was only older computers and viewer versions. However, it has been growing. With the last main channel grid update, the problem seems to have exploded. The Lindens have commented on it, Darn Teleport Disconnects (4/8).

On my own-
On my own-

People currently have various ideas as to what is happening and how to fix it. There currently is no fix. So, don’t be doing drastic things; clearing cache, reinstalling, clean reinstalling, reinstalling Windows… none of these things are going to fix it.

Depending on who you talk to it is Animesh that is the cause or Enhanced Environment Project or the upgraded OS the servers are being updated to or it is the move to the cloud (we aren’t there yet). Take your pick. All causes have people unaffected by the it-is-this-cause.

As some users and the Lindens understand the problem it is server side. So, all viewer brands are going to suffer the TP disconnect problem. I’ve seen it with Firestorm and the Linden’s SL Viewer.

Restarting the computer and router/gateway may help a little.

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Who is having SL Photo fun?

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Fun Photography – Every so often I mention the SL Forum thread ‘How does your avatar look today?’ (page 665 – Looks for short) In it, someone (name withheld to protect the guilty) posted a picture with their avatar in bunny custom… not the furry kind, the Playboy kind. So sexy.

The picture started a thing… my tail is cuter than your tail… no… not competitive just fun… people curious to see how they looked as bunnies and some probably were influenced by a bit of exhibitionism and took the opportunity to show off. I suspect some measure of that fun and look-at-me stuff runs through those all peeps posting in the thread. My hand is up.

The Bunny Pictures

However, there is a thing in the group about getting together for group photos. Probably one of the more fun things people in the thread do. I think of it as girls behaving badly… I’ll leave the interpretation of the term ‘badly’ up to you. Those older and younger than I seem to have different meanings for it. I intend this as the fun type ‘badly’.

Whatever, that ‘get together thing’ got Saravendi thinking (post). Seems things weren’t working out for people to get together in their bunny outfits. So, she very nicely PUT them together from the photos they posted. That was a hit. The idea grew, lots of Me-Too-Please posters followed. So, lots of additions and a growing picture which Saravendi was neat enough to keep editing.

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Google+ Gone … to MeWe?

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You probably know Google+ is gone, closed, poof… It didn’t work out for Google. So, the Second Life™ community using Google+ needs a new home. Daniel Voyager is suggesting MeWe.com. There is the website for the desktop and a mobile app.

It is sort of free… they want your whole list of email contacts. You have to know servers cost money. So, a free service to you typically means YOU are the commodity being sold. Well, you and your friends. Thus, the nag to upload your contact list.

QAnon

They have my email as part of the signup process. But, I’m not giving them my friends email addresses.

I’m not sure how much I’ll use MeWe. I’ll play with it for a time and see if it helps my blog or I find some handy feature.

Or… it might just be they think all those contacts are needed to get you working on MeWe. It’s like, what is Facebook if you have no Friends? Boring! So, they try to hook you up. But, then how do they make their money? The MeWe store isn’t going to cut it, IMO.

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Second Life News 2019 w14

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There was lots of detailed information in the third-party dev UG meeting last week. We got a bunch of information on what is happening with a couple of problems. Currently, disconnects and detachments are front lines.

Servers

From ‘How Does Your Avatar Look Today?’ 4/2019 – Click

The main channel rolls to #19.03.15.525315. This is the OS upgrade. It includes the EEP support.

The RC channels Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum will be the first version with UDP asset fetching disabled or removed. See the Tools & Tech section of the SL blog Obsolete Asset Fetch Disabled for more details.

The UDP change will mean older viewers using UDP asset fetching will stop working correctly. Avatars are likely to not render or render as Ruth/Roth. Sooner or later you will have to update…

Disconnects

The RC channels will have a change that is hoped will help with the disconnect problems people are experiencing, which seems to have started in December or January. Some think EEP is causing the disconnects. EEP is coincidental with the disconnects. The current analysis of the problem suggests it is in the TCP communication between the viewers and servers.

In the March 29, Third-Party Dev UG meeting Oz talks about the problem and why it took the Lindens so long to notice. Video Basically, the problem is not showing in the performance stats the Lindens watch.

The disconnects seem to fall into groups, those occurring during a teleport and those that are periodic (disconnect every so many minutes). People trying to chase the problem down are having problems reproducing the disconnect. They have the problem rated as #1 & #2 and have lots of people on it full time plus a QA team of remote users, meaning far from the Lab distance-wise.

There are rumors about different things one can do to stop the disconnects, change the WL/EEP sky, cancel a TP mid-teleport (cancel, open World Map – find destination region – wait for it to come up and you pop in), and others. For others the key is location, Blake Sea is a problem and Heterocera is not a problem.

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