Jahr: 2008

About the fragmentation of viewers

There are still many fields in which Second Life gets new development,
a good thing, if you ask me. But since those fields are quite diverse,
there are now so many first look and beta viewers around, that it get’s
troublesome to test them all out. Don’t believe me? Well, for Windows,
there are those viewers beside the official one around:

  • the release candidate viewer (version 1.19.0.2),
  • the Windlight first look viewer,
  • the Dazzle first look viewer and finally
  • the beta test grid viewer.

Each viewer is spurting another feature the other one has not or is going to make it sometime into the official line of viewers. So we got now a quite fragmented field of beta viewers. Wouldn’t it just be better to roll up all those beta features into one beta line and hand this one out to people feeling adventurous? I strongly believe so.

Don’t trust the Lindens alone to keep your data safe!

Many people, like me, have been suffering an annoying error message since months now – "Missing object from database."

It comes upon you without warning. You login, want to rez your favorite chain, skin, whatever, and you only get instead "Missing object from database." – Bam, you’re blasted! You even don’t get the name of the object at all, so you have to figure it out on your own what’s missing – bummer!

So, what can you do against this? Not much at all. This bug has been bugging residents since months, it’s spreading like a virus and still unfixed. The only thing you can hope for is that the Lindens are fixing it sooner or later, sooner would be better, of course.

There’s an entry in their famous JIRA system for it called SVC-553, take a look at it. Quite interesting read and for sure tell them what you think about it. This is such a fundamental bug, because it’s undermining the trust in the inventory and handiwork of the Lindens at all, that it’s a real shame that it’s still unfixed since August last year!

Oh, yes, external backup, anyone? No? New CTO, anyone? No? We’re all busted! Until this thing is fixed it’s unsafe to buy anything at all, because YOU could be the next!

Feeddemon now free as in free beer

I rarely comment on other software than Second Life here at all, this here is one of the rare cases.

Feeddemon, argueable the best RSS aggregator for Windows out there, is now free as in free beer. The company that bought it from Nick Bradbury a while ago, Newsgator, is now giving the fully enabled version away for free since the beginning of January. Before that you had to buy this version for 25 US$, which was also quite a good price if you take a look at the features and sheer speed this beast offers to you. You want a feature? Bet that in 99.9% of the cases Feeddemon has it and much, much more!

If you are really a news junkie, then this is the only program you’ll ever need! The same goes now for NetNewsWire, the standard RSS aggregator for Mac OS X, backed up by the same company.

The problem with the mainland

Consider yourself living on a nice, new sim of the mainland. You’re happy with your small parcel, nice seaview, perhaps, good neighbors and then happening this: a new club is opening its gates.

Worse, this club has many camping spots, to fake traffic and also quite some visitors with the result that its eating up all possible traffic alone for the whole sim.

The result? You’re busted. You cannot use your property anymore, because teleporting and even logging into your home becomes a new kind of adventure. "Is the sim already full or is at least one slot left for me to enter?"

So what can you do about it? Of course, you could tell the club owner to leave. "I am soo sorry, but I want to stay here, I like it and beside, I just own 4096 sqms of land and don’t have the money for a private sim." Bummer. So he’s eating up the whole traffic of the sim and making it unusable with just his teeny, weeny piece of it.

The next logical thing for you? To abandon or sell your land – don’t think you can sell it with profit, by the way, good buyers take a look at the sim before buying it – and move to a private living sim.

So what should Lindenlab do about this kind of behaviour? Simple: they should make the tier traffic based in such a case. Why should I for myself finance the sim when some kind of business maker is only paying also a small share, but makes it unusable for the rest of us?