Second Life and the CLOUD

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Inara Pey has apparently sat through a dry video of Tara Hernandez’s, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab, presentation at Amazon’s Las Vegas promotion for their services. She has written about it here: SANSAR AND SECOND LIFE IN THE CLOUD: LL SPEAKS AT AWS RE:INVENT. The video is here:

That is a 34-minute video on YouTube. There are some gems in the video that interest Second Life™ people.

I had not realized the first iteration of SL used a graphics engine designed to circumvent the Windows graphics and go directly to hardware. This go-to-hardware was the early game-graphics optimization used by most of the industry. That is long gone. Now OpenGL is the optimization that interfaces with all the various graphics systems in use with SL.

Inara covers the main parts SL’ers will find interesting. But, the video is loaded with tidbits about Second Life and how they are changing away from the problems with ideas for Sansar. So, some seldom talked about SL things are described in the video.

There is about 10+ minutes of tech description on Sansar and how it works. And toward the end some words on how they plan to adapt Second Life for life in the cloud.

Second Life News 2017 w48

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Update: An hour or so after I post the Deploys thread gets an update.

Servers

There is no deploy post this morning (checked at 9:30AM & at 12:30PM). My region ‘restart tracker’ has not seen a restart on the main grid. So, I am assuming no restart or updates this week.

Cherishville and the way from the christmas tree
Cherishville and the way from the Christmas tree

That leaves the main channel running version #17.11.11.510664. As there were no new RC packages last week the RC channels are running the same package. And as there is no Sever-Scripting meeting this week, we don’t know what is planned for Wednesday, if anything. I am guessing nothing.

Update: The RC channels got an update to version #17.11.17.510835.  The big change is email.

  • IMs sent to an offline resident will only be sent to verified email addresses
  • Internal Changes to Outgoing Emails

The SL Marketplace is having issues. Item listings are disappearing. The Grid Status page states the problem is being investigated.

Viewers

The main viewer is version 5.0.8.329115, which was placed in service week #42.

Second Life Alex Ivy Viewer version 5.1.0.510354 – – No update, released week #44.

Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 5.0.9.329906 – No update, released week #47.

Second Life Voice Viewer version 5.0.8.328552 – No update, released week #42.

Second Life Project 360 Snapshot Viewer version 5.1.0.506743 – No update since week #27. We keep hearing an update is imminent…

Second Life Project Animesh Viewer version 5.0.9.329815 – No update, released week #46.

Second Life Project Render Viewer version 5.1.0.510604 – No update, released week #46. Last week’s article gives you the details of this project.

We are in the holiday season. Things move slowly.

Third-Party Viewers

Nothing new popped up in my Feedly.

So, while I thought last week was a slow news week, this week is shaping up to be even slower.

AvaStar News 2017 w48

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Loki Elliot has been running a series of articles titled AvaStar Unleashed (now part 7). The articles appear when Loki gets to it, meaning not a regularly published thing.

In this one, he has found a problem…

For sometime, Loki has been frustrated with AvaStar as it wasn’t doing what he wanted… or it maybe he just wasn’t doing things as AvaStar was designed to do them. I haven’t dug deeply enough into his workflow to know. But, I have been in the same place a number of times finding it was more me than AvaStar.

Frozen in time
Frozen in time

Often how we work and how AvaStar is designed to work conflict. The best way to resolve such issues is in the Blender AvatStar in-world group. Filing trouble tickets on the AvaStar site is great for reporting bugs. But, not that great for getting feedback. Feedback comes best from the in-world group.

In the current article, Loki has found the math precision problems that creep into Blender work from repeated operations on a model. He has a GIF image that shows the progression and eventual distortion.

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What is Net Neutrality in 2017?

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Ciaran Laval is on about Net Neutrality and the coming December 14th meeting of the FCC. Ciaran buys into to the mainstream media viewpoint things are getting worse with the pending rules change. I see it the other way. I take a long view and consider the principals that debatably created the greatest economic engine in history, the free market.

Cave Mushrooms
Cave Mushrooms

Ciaran sees current efforts in the FCC as something out of a “dystopian novel”. Well, if we were talking Atlas Shrugged I would agree, but we aren’t.

Quoting Ciaran,

The proposal is not consumer friendly, and consumers are letting the FCC know that. The proposal is not being welcomed by many tech companies and is a glaring example of how officials ignore consumers and fail to serve the public.

Is the proposal ‘consumer friendly’ or not? The answer depends on what you know about the proposal and the principals of the free market. On a purely personal, short-term basis the uninformed will think not. A deeper understanding of the free market gives us the clue that competition is always better for the consumer.

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Pine Lake – November 2017

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Pine Lake is a post-apocalyptic build in Second Life™.  I’m not that much into doing travel guide stuff for SL. But, occasionally I find a place that is like… Wow! Pine Lake is such a place.

PineLake_001 - Landing Point
PineLake_001 – Landing Point

You can get a kinda lame idea of what the place is like from their Flickr Group. The images there today do not do the build justice.

It is the attention to detail that impresses me. Wow! Just wow. The amount of detail is incredible.

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Second Life News 2017 w47

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Servers

The Main channel was restarted with version #17.11.11.510664. This update includes Internal Fixes and a fix for BUG-139176 Issue with OBJECT_REZZER_KEY reporting incorrectly after linking and delinking prims. This version has run on the RC channels for a couple of weeks.

The Fire Within
The Fire Within

There will be no updates to the RC channel this Wednesday. The next day is a holiday in the USA. So, the RC channels will continue to run the packed just promoted to the main channel.

The internal fixes are typically security fixes and data collection changes. Recent some of those changes had to do with various copy exploits. Simon Linden says they have caught a bunch of people trying to use those exploits.

However, there are still exploits allowing copying without the Lab being able to detect it. So, Simon asks that people keep filing JIRA and Abuse Reports. Lindens are still working on closing the exploits. So, the reports guide their work. Help by filing a report, if you have actionable information.

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