Jahr: 2008

Nicholaz Beresford quits making his browser

Nichlaz Beresford, a resident well known for his own sat of patches for the official browser, quitted some days ago very frustrated providing them.

Many residents mourn about the loss of this talented programmer and his browser, because for many people his browser gave far more better gaming experience, meaning mostly stability and speed, to Second Life than the official does for them. His work has been well appreciated in the community which used his browsers.

The reasons listed by him for quitting making a better browser are mainly:

  • he wanted to create his own vision of browser, but has been unable to do so since he was mainly busy ironing out bug after bug after bug,
  • the Lindens don’t really care for bug fixes coming from third parties any more, most times they just plainly ignore them and
  • considering the bad state the browser and platform is in now he would have start all over again.

So, the community loses a quite talented programmer who probably would have been a very good bug hunter and much, much more. That’s sad.

By the way, there’s still no new CTO at Lindenlab, so it seems. Wonder how they manage to run so long without someone leading the techies.


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How to handle the mob…

Since my last post Second Life hasn’t been really much better. Lindenlab is still good at producing what’s their own speciality – lags over lags over lags and ah bad gaming experience.

Well, to top it even, all logins to Second Life are disabled because the ISP of Lindenlab is having problems with their infrastructure and handling all the traffic, so they tell. Well… might be even right, who knows, stuff like that happens, but good hosting providers have got backup lines just in case for that, redundant connections, they are running if big enough a system called BGP with an autonomous system which even adds more to the reliability of a system.

Well, because Lindenlab quite well knows what they got on their blog when an issue like that opens up again – thousands of angry comments – it became lately their policy to just disable comments for such postings.

On the last case, though, one comment from Second Aimee made it through, before they closed it. She encouraged the people to comment on her blog instead, which the people are now gladly doing.

So this is quite a good chance again to get an unfiltered picture about what are people thinking about Second Life, opinions, which aren’t really showing up on the corporate blog anymore.

One asks for example:

Why is SL always screwed up on Weekends Grrrr

Simple – because weekends mean usage peeks and the most stress for the system, which it is unable to handle.

Another one just finds interesting prim objects in real life:

WHAT IS THAT 1 PRIM OBJECT IN THE CORNER OF MY ROOM AND HOW DO i SCRIPT
IT?? SOMEBODY CALLED IT A TELEVISION ONCE. THINK ILL TURN IT ON..

But most are just plainly annoyed right now and venting off some steam, like:

yeah UP YOURS Linden Labs!!! I have over 200,000 dollars(Lindens)
invested in my freakin inventory alone,and that isnt including what I
spent on my Avi, like are u freaking kiddin me? All I get back is a
bald head, a freakin boot up my ass that wont even come out even if i
click detach and now I cant log in to pull the boot out of my ass and
find my hair??? WHAT did I do to you besides spend real cash for this
crap?? Thanks!!

So… the typical collection of comments on such a matter. New CTO, anyone? /me sighs.

Fix SL, damn it!

I’ve had enough! Since I joined SL back in 2006 the service only went down, down, down the hill… reliability is laughable, key components (asset server, transactions, teleports) are getting worse and worse from day to day, and they fail to work when you need them most! 

I wonder if in my lifetime Lindenlab is going to be able to fix all those annoying bugs or if they are going to go bankrupt. Argh!

The trouble with Dazzle

I guess in the lights of the well hailed OnRez Viewer Lindenlab was tempted to build a renovated version of the viewer on their own. The result is the Dazzle first look viewer.

Dazzle looks quite blue, when you use it, but aside that it’s still the old Lindenlab viewer, all the same menus and such, nothing new in it. Yet.

That’s the difference with the OnRez Viewer. When it became public available, it had some innovations in it like the in-built webbrowser, the renovated search and others. OnRez itself was innovative, Dazzle on its own is just a new skin for the client, nothing more.

But what the client really needs is a rearrangement and rethinking of some menus, interfaces and much more, which hasn’t happened in Dazzle – yet. So in that point Dazzle is simple disappointing at the moment.