Server Update Week 15

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Tuesday saw the usual rolling restarts and new software. Again it is bug fixes and a few new features.

Users are unlikely to see any changes. With a stop watch one might… might… notice a speed up in inventory download speed. Parts of the gzip feature have made it to the main grid and some parts are still in testing in Release Channel areas only. However, only the related project viewer uses the feature. It will be some time (a couple of weeks?) before we see this feature used in viewers.

No word on XMPP chat changes. As far as I know now, that is still in testing on the ADITI grid. I know group chat really sucks right now. A large percentage of my chats in groups return a can’t connect. Very annoying.

 

 

 

Second Life Concurrency

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Well… everyone is talking about the decrease in the number of concurrent users. I have certainly noticed the currently online numbers displayed at login decreasing. In 2009 I was seeing 80,000 and climbing. Now it is rare to see 70,000 and common to see around 40,000 to 65,000 with the median generally reported to be about 52,000. So, is SL dying? Is the sky falling?

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Photobucket Down

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Photobucket has been down a couple of days now. Apparently it was down a couple of weeks ago. E-Bay users are pissed. Tinypic is also down and I understand it is owned by Photobucket. Photobucket went down some time last night. It’s been down all day so far.

You can see which pictures I host in my blog and which I host from Photobucket. I may have to rethink where I host images.

What happened is unknown. I know the notices say maintenance. But, when I noticed that Photobucket was down there were no ‘maintenance’ notices. I got 404’s or time outs. That is not the behavior of an orderly maintenance shutdown. All we can do is speculate.

Yay! I came back up! 4/13 about 5:30 PM PST.

Dolphin Viewer 2.5.6.15005 Review

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Second Life
Dancing at Neveriven

A new version of the Dolphin 2 Viewer is out. The released planned for this slot was to be a 2.6 version. But, things change. Bug fixes, features, and the load of changes coming out of the Lab seems to have pushed this release out the door. It may be several weeks before we see the next release. There is lots to upgrade going into 2.6. The Development viewers are coming out in 2.7 versions.

 

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Second Life Regions Closing

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I see today that AM Radio’s regions are going to close in 6 months. (See: AM Radio Regions Closing Down In 6 Months – by Daniel Voyager)  It seems every week or so some region is closing. I have to wonder how many regions are closing and if the closings are a Second Problem or just the natural evolution of the grid.

Second Life
Live Regions in SL Grid - Statistics @ Metaverse

Metaverse publishes stats on the number of live regions available on SL. Since December 2010 the number is static. Growth can be said to have reached plateau… or stopped depending on how one wants to spin it.

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Second Life 2.6.3-225584 VS2010 Review

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The tools used to build our viewers are not the hot topic among most residents. However, the VS2010 in this latest project test build is all about the tools. VS2010 means Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Getting to where this tool can be used to develop the SL Viewer has been a main topic in the viewer development circles. Why is this important to you?

Second Life
Celtic Myst

It will be a big deal for those with newer computers. First, the VS2010 is a tool much like Microsoft Word but for programming. Developers use it to write programs. It enables links to programming libraries, like Word has Thesaurus and Dictionary. It has syntax checking that is very much like spelling and grammer checking for word. Imagine if you could literally not read a document, it scrambled all over screen,  just because a comma was in the wrong place. That is the level of precision with which programmers must write. VS2010 provides lots of help and support. While that is nice for the programmer, the benefit seen by residents is faster updates and bug fixes.

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