SL Herald, Plastic Duck and so on

The Second Life Herald is running an article about Plastic Duck’s job inquiry at LL and how the CEO responded. Well, beside the obvious commentary from Prokofy Neva (gna… if he’s so horrible, just shut up and sue him!) it’s a rather heated debate.

Well, from the point of view of Lindenlabs Plastic Duck must be somewhat hard to come by. He’s caused much trouble all over, but also seems to be a very good programmer who knows, what he’s doing. But would it be wise to hire him from LLs point of view, if he really wanted to join LL? I guess not. Therefore it seems he’s done too much in the past to be accepted by the community. Period.

Two buildings utilities

I’ve found two tools which can help you in the respect of building things in SL:

  • A terrain file editor for OS X only named Backhoe. Looks pretty good and snappy to me on the screenshots and if you ever get your own island it looks like a very good way to make a terrain file to give to the Lindens.
  • A script to be able to rez objects made in Maya in Second Life called „Maya -> Second Life: Beta version.“ Maya is one of the best professional 3d editors around there, for many in the industry the 1st choice actually. So how does itwork? It gives you in Maya a new tool box with the prims of SL and the same options. You basically built your shapes in Maya, when you’re finished with it, you export it to your clipboard. Then you login to SL, equip one object with the rezzing script, load the clipboard’s content on a notecard into that object and let it rez the imported structure for you. Then you can texture it and so on and on. That’s it, basically.

Making money with unfixed bugs

Well, the teleporter bug in the client is still unfixed (don’t we love it all?), how to work around it, was explained by Torley Linden in the knowledge base. Simple: press Ctrl-Alt-V, then you’ve got the button back again.

But well, not everybody reads the knowledge base or spreads the word around, many are still complaining about this unfixed bug. Some are trying to make money with it, selling their own teleportation tools right now.

TP Hud

How about fixing the bug or spreading the word to render this device unnecessary, again? This would be great, don’t you agree?

Finding out every stream URL you always wanted to know

Gentle reader, you always wanted to know from which URL the music is streaming into a hip location, but the owner of it is sitting on this like a secret and using network sniffers like Wireshark is beyond your capabilities? Fear no more! I’ve got the solution right for you, it’s plain and simple in your standard client, just a view fingertips away!

So, this is inspired by a post of Torley Linden about the still outstanding teleporting issues and what to do against them, since this is know to be buggy since quite a time.

So, the first step you should do is simple – just press Ctrl+Alt+V. This gives you access to menu entries in the client, which are normally available to Linden Lab employees only. It’s safe, since those are not going to work for you anyway, but this step is crucial.

The second step is simple: just go to the location, of which you want to know the stream URL, open the „About Land“ dialogue and go to the media tab. The stream URL is now going to be displayed to you no matter if you are the land owner or not. That’s it, it’s so simple.

And as a demonstration how this might look is here an in game snapshow of the stream URL of Phat Cat’s; the most vital part is grayed out by myself in this screenshot, since I don’t want to spoil the URL here. But trust me, it works, give it a try, if you’re interested in.

PC stream URL

Fun with crashes

It’s nowadays not funny anymore to do business or events in Second Life. The rule of the thumb is: the more people are online the same time, the more instable and slower the grid becomes. We had an event yesterday in the garden, the sim is able to hold 40-42 people at the same time. The owner even requested a reset of the sim one hour before the whole thing started.

And what happened: About 30 minutes after the event started, the sim was full, the whole sim crashed. We were lucky it crashed only one time, though, other sims have been reported to crash several times on Saturday while being full, e.g. for a wedding.

So, what are the consequences you should make? Well, it’s obvious, though SL is an excellent platform, that it has got major scaling problems at the moment. So, if you really want to do events in it or make serious business or teaching, better find dates where not so much people are online, to get a better experience of the grid. It’s probable that when there are many people online that the grid is going to behave strange and has hiccups, again, and this is getting worse day by day at the moment.

Another critical article about SL

Mario Sixtus, a well known German freelancing journalist, wrote a very critical article about Second Life and the hype around it in his blog. Translated it’s called somewhat like „My ultimately last words about Second Life“.

His message is basically this: modern web platforms have reached today an abstract level, that constantly refuses to be compared with RL equivalencies. Journalists actually have to learn something new if they want to write about those services.

On the other side there’s Second Life: nice, colorful pictures, you can actually show nice movies of the world in your articles, no need anymore to show boring sequences with someone just hacking onto his keyboard, and, oh, look, how convenient, it’s all about sex, so let’s write about it! Ah, a millionaire already? Let’s write about it!

It’s also no wonder, according to Sixtus, that the industry is hailing SL as it’s saviour, since old strategies did not work very well in the WWW and you actually have to learn something new.

In Second Life it’s just like in the good old times[tm]: making ads, opening branches, having nice launches and so on and on… and even better, this time you’ve got the press on YOUR side! Amazing!

Sixtus‘ conclusion is: Second Life is not the internet, it’s a biotop, a bubble for people who fear the future.  So it’s target group is for people who still think in terms of the old century; it’s basically the past, but not the future.

It’s nice to have dreams…

…like the CTO of Lindenlabs who dreams of an infrastructure that can support 10 millions of concurrent logins or like the CEO of Lindenlabs who dreams of 1.5 billion people online in Second Life or virtual worlds (the statement is in the current Avastar) but at the moment I and most other people would be very glad already when SL would scale better when more than 30.000 people are online at the same time.

This seems to be the magic number at the moment after which SL goes haywire.