Barts Blog

Monatsarchive: Juli 2007

Here be GrieferWiki

Geschrieben am Von Veröffentlicht unter General .

Interesting what you can find under the hood if you’re following the
links of well known blogs. I have taken a look at the blog of the Patriotic Nigras and found a link to the GrieferWiki

To quote them:

Here be GrieferWiki, where griefers and trolls can amass valuable
information and scripts to aid other griefers and trolls. If you want
to add an article, put the desired article name in search, click go,
then click the edit button on the next page.

This makes the intention of the side pretty clear, hu? There are some scripts online to use for various attacks, if they work – who knows. But taking a closer look at this site, if it is growing in the future, could be a valuable source of information about how a griefer ticks and what he’s doing how.

Disclaimer: I don’t endorse or like griefers and their doings.

Attack on the grid?

Geschrieben am Von Veröffentlicht unter Programming .

Prokofy Neva and the Second Life Insider are both claiming that the problems we’ve been experiencing with the grid for the last two days are not the result of internal, technical problems but instead of a concerted attack of griefers at the grid.

The exploit used has been reported already at 12th February 2006 and still remains unfixed. They are claiming it is hard to fix, but hey, after more than a year and it being abused to attack the grid, it is time now to do something against it! Neva claims, that the purpose of those attacks is to make Second Life unusable for good use like the Relay for Life event last weekend. Hm, some logic in it, could be, for sure if it was attack this event could have been a worthwhile target for griefers.

What are the conclusions? We are never going to know, if those problems were a gridwide attack of griefers or not, until the Lindens are going to tell us. Some things are clearly pointing into that direction. But if it was a griefer attack, the Lindens should tell so and don’t leave us in the dark about it.

SL is a mess – again

Geschrieben am Von Veröffentlicht unter General .

Second Life is a mess today. Inventory is not loading or only loading slowly, teleports are mostly broken, money not loading, and the map is not loading, too. 

They are over it for already more than 10 hours and it is still unusable. It’s a frigging mess. This is the worst case of SL problems since months. Oh, and I forgot, friends lists not loading either, instant messages not always working and so on and on… if you want to spend time in Second Life, better do it after those problems are solved. Right now it’s unusable. Period.

Ajaxlife gone opensource

Geschrieben am Von Veröffentlicht unter Programming .

Ajaxlife, the web based SL chat client, has gone opensource and is available here. While it’s serving its purpose and working, I dislike the fact that it is being implemented in Mono, because due to libsecondlife. If it would be running under another programming language, there would be no need for a sandbox and it would take much less memory on a server, but then again we are all free to do better. 🙂 

Dudeism – the answer for everything

Interesting profiles #4

Vista support nearly ready

Geschrieben am Von Veröffentlicht unter General .

It seems the Vista support of Second Life is nearly ready and well. Well, quite a good thing for all the people out there who are using that operating system. 

Oh, and while we are talking about Vista: the CEO of Acer, Gianfranci Lanci, is disappointed with Vista. He’s telling that the expectations they had with the launch of Vista have not met at all. On the contrary, many customers of Acer are asking for Windows XP instead, especially in the business field. One of the main problems according to Lanci has been that Vista was still not 100% stable at its launch and he doesn’t expect that to change in the rest of 2007 at all.

Strange teleports

Geschrieben am Von Veröffentlicht unter Business .

I teleported today onto the Phat Cat’s dancefloor. Well, strangely it happened that I was teleported under the dancefloor, take a look at this picture here:

It seems that Dilbert Dilweg really wants to get rid of his club fast, the price for it already went down to 800.000 L$ or 3.000 U$. Why he’s selling it? Because he’s moving in with his love and having much less time for SL, then. Quite easy.

Under Phat Cat’s dancefloor.

Phat Cat’s for sale – again

Geschrieben am Von Veröffentlicht unter Business .

The biggest and most popular jazz club in SL, Phat Cat’s, is for sale, again, but this time for real, as it seems. The owner, Dilbert Dilweg, wants to get at least 1.000.000 L$ (equivalent to about 3.501 US$) for the whole private island including all buildings and objects.

Now I wonder if we are going to see the most popular place in Second Life at all according to Tateru Nino under new management soon…

Let me quote the in world sales pitch here:

Phat Cat’s is for sale. The sale is 1,000,000 Lindens and will include full transfer of simulator and costs.

Buy at time of tier payed and get 1 full month without having to pay tier.

All transfers will be completed WHEN ALL monies have been transfered.

Paying thru pay pal without Lindens is also acceptable payment. Payment should be the equivelent of 1 million lindens at current market rate the total would be US$3,500.72.

Cotact Dilbert Dilweg for purchasing information if you are seriously interested in buying one of the strongest clubs on SL.

The price is quite a bargain for such a well established and good running sim, if you ask me. Other sims with that kind of traffic have been sold for much, much more money in the past already.

And if you take a look at the finished land auctions at the mainland, a new sim without any content there is still being sold for around 2-3000 US$ there, so this price is not out of reach or far too much asked for it.

3rd party statistical tool: SLStats from SLBuzz.com

Geschrieben am Von Veröffentlicht unter Places .

There’s a 3rd party statistical tool available for free called SLStats over at SLBuzz.com. It works like that: you visit their in world store, get a sensor – one per avatar only is their policy. You need to get an account over there to make it work. Then you should place it at the main telehub of your place/sim and let it do its magic.

It’s submitting the statistics on a regular base and you can take a look at your statistics then on a login protected webpage. A sample report is visible here. It looks quite good and reasonable, well, more like a logfile analyzer for a web server like Apache than the normal traffic counts. But, of course, the weakness of all such external solutions is – it has no impact on the in world search, if not all major sims are using it to report their traffic, it’s still useful for the place/sim owner, but you cannot count really on the traffic comparison lists if there are major places still missing.

And, of course, there goes your data, and you don’t know if they are going to begin to charge you in the future for this service or not. Still, a very interesting solution. But also, if it should use a range based avatar scan sensor, something that can add up to the lag of a sim.

In the right hands and used right this can be a valuable tool.