It’s been a while since the last town hall meeting has been held, it was back in January about opening the source code of the client and such.
Since the new addition of voice that is going to come to us all on the main grid very soon now is another milestone in the evolution of SL that is going to affect everybody I wonder if and when there is going to eb a townhall meeting about that kind of topic.
There’s an art exhibition right now in New York City with relevance to Second Life. They’re featuring the "13 most beautiful avatars" there on big, big prints.
They’re featuring only portrait shots of them, digitally printed out on 36×48 inch canvas (that’s 91,4 x 121,9 cm, folks). So the things are quite big, you could buy it and hang it over your fireplace, bed, whatever.
Frankly, I don’t know how they were chosen, it seems the taste of the photographers was the judge on it. Some of the avatars, like Aimee Weber, are really well known and I think it’s at least for her more about branding herself and her name than anything else. I also know more beautiful avatars than those on the exhibition, but that’s just my taste, of course and YMMV, like always.
Frankly said, I would not buy such a portrait and hang it anywhere; instead I would try to spot them and make a photo of them myself (haha, just kidding). Well, I spotted Aimee Weber a while ago in the Avastar building, in which she was evolved – whatever.
No, but really I would buy – if so – or print something from the IRTC instead. For example, something like this picture here. They all have a more aesthetic value than anything that can be taken on SL at all, since it’s about raytracing there.
Pham Neutra is asking in one of his blog post what’s so outstanding about Second Life that so many people are criticizing it right now. He only knows one another thing where the discussion about it is equally emotionally heated – nuclear plants.
Well, so why are so many people criticizing it? Because it’s new, it’s hip to criticize it, they don’t have a clue. Just take a look at earlier things like Rock’n’Roll, Skateboards, whatever – when they first became mainstream, many criticized them, there’s a thick, red line of such debates in history. Period.
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.
I’ve found by chance another terrain editor, this here works under Windows and its name is Bailiwick. It’s being used to postprocess terrains made with Photoshop or Terragen, you can define parcels, permissions and so on with it. Looks also very interesting to me.
I’ve found two tools which can help you in the respect of building things in SL:
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.
How about fixing the bug or spreading the word to render this device unnecessary, again? This would be great, don’t you agree?
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.
Ok, this has got nothing to do really with SL, but it was too funny to bypass, so here is the Mad TV parody: Apple introducing the iRack!
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.
Bartholomew Gallacher