Kategorie: General

Some changes under the hood here

You might have noticed it – I made some changes under the hood of this blog. I’ve switched the blog engine after over three years from Serendipity to WordPress. Why, you might ask? Because it was an interesting task to do, it was not nearly as hard to achieve than I thought it would be and finally since WordPress gives me more features and choices. The other reason: I wanted to be able to serve a mobile theme quite simply for people who are using Iphones and so on without reinventing the wheel – and that’s quite simple with the corresponding plugin here. Nifty!

I was able to import all entries and corresponding comments, including tags and comments. Thanks to some mod_rewrite-magic even the old URLs are still valid, so that Google does not need to reindex the whole thing. So for now… I am quite happy with it and enjoying the ride. Yeehaw!

Rezzingtest von Emerald, Imprudence und Viewer 2.0

Ich habe gerade ein wenig mit dem Client von Wegame herumgespielt, das ist mal eine nette Sache. Er zeichnet unter Windows völlig kostenlos Videos auf, die man danach beliebig kodieren und bearbeiten kann, was braucht man mehr, um Youtube mit Second Life Videos zu füttern.

Mir war mal danach, ein wenig die Geschwindigkeit zu testen, mit denen unterschiedliche Viewer dieselbe Sim rezzen. Mein Wahl fiel dabei auf die Sim "Stiletto Moody Bare", da es dort sehr viele Sculpties gibt und auch ansonsten der Viewer naturgemäß dort ordentlich zu tun hat. Die Einstellungen waren dabei in allen Viewern in der Grafik auf "Hoch", die Sichtweite auf 96 m dabei beschränkt und als Bandbreite in jedem Viewer 1.000 kbit/s eingetragen. Da als CPU hier ein Quadcore von Intel unter Windows 7 sein Werk tut, wurde zudem noch "Run Multiple Threads" aktiviert. Damit man es einigermaßen vergleichbar ist, wurde vor jedem Viewerstart der Cache gelöscht, der Avatar auf einer anderen Sim eingeloggt, dann zu der Testsim teleportiert und in etwa eine Minute direkt nach dem Teleport dorthin aufgezeichnet.

Damit hat man in etwa eine Ahnung, wie flott welcher Viewer die Szenerie rezzed – ganz vergleichen kann man es nie, da die Anzahl der dortigen Avatare immer ein wenig anders war und auch die Bewegung, aber man bekommt so schon einen guten Eindruck.

Als erstes führte ich den Test mit dem aktuellen Emerald Viewer in der Version 1.23.5.1632 durch. Er war für mich der Viewer, der am gemütlichsten zur Arbeit ging, wie man auf dem Video hier gut sehen kann:

Als nächstes testete ich den Imprudence 1.3-b2, der trotz einer langsamereren JPEG-2000-Bibliothek (Openjpeg 1.3) und seines offiziellen Status als Betaversion im Vergleich zu Kakadu bei Emerald einen äußerst flotten Eindruck machte:

Als letztes dann den aktuellen Viewer 2.0 von Linden Lab selber, auch der arbeitete äußerst flott, vielleicht noch einen Tick schneller als der Imprudence:

Fazit: wer auf eine gute Geschwindigkeit beim Rezzen wert legt, der ist mit Emerald in der aktuellen Version am schlechtesten bedient, andere Viewer arbeiten da (zumindest für mich) eindeutig besser.

Some things die hard… or not at all

The old fashioned votebox made by Alberto Linden

Some things in Second Life just die hard or not at all, even if they don’t serve any purpose anymore. For example, this vote box to the left was in former days quite a common sight in Second Life.

It is a scripted device, made by Alberto Linden, and consists of 13 prims. It was used in times before traffic (aka as dwell) was invented to measure the popularity of a parcel. People just voted for it, all boxes where polled once a day and that’s how they got their measures in former times. Parcel owners got some stipends out of it, if it was a popular place (or something/somehow like that). You could just take of a station standing somewhere a copy, so it was really easy to get one.

At least it had a task its existence. But when traffic was introduced, the old mechanism of getting traffic was disabled. So those voting stations don’t serve any real purpose anymore, besided doing some nice sound effects when you touch them and eating away your prims.

Newbies still tend to believe those stations are useful; they are wrong. There are, though, some newer objects around, which mimic the design and look of the old station to a certain degree, but just act as counters, telling the owner which avatar voted for them at which time and date and that’s it, then. But since old habits die hard I expect to see them still for quite long on the grid in many clubs, belonging to owners, which don’t know better or are fond of them.

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.