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Second Life fashionistas declare war on bling
We've all encountered obnoxious bling in Second Life. There's the girl who blinks from head to toe, or the guy whose dollar sign neck chain lights up the entire room. Then there's the girl on the right, whose entire face has been obscured by her Rudolph nose.Celebrity Trollop, of Second Style Fashionista, recently polled her readers to find out their stance on bling. At this time, 153 residents have participated, with 64% totally hating bling, 27% merely disliking it, 7% liking it, and 2% totally loving it. Comments on the post include expressed frustration at attempting to remove bling scripts and complaints about the Linden Lab-endorsed jewelry line, First Bling.In order to combat this epidemic, Celebrity has taken a freebie bling script, originally written by Lyra Walcott, and modified it to be more tolerable. By default, her script has bling set to off, and it is menu driven. She's offering it full permission on OnRez.
Widespread problems reported on the Second Life grid
We're getting widespread reports of systems failure in Second Life as of a short minutes ago [approximately 12:20AM SLT (US Pacific)]. Since then, distressed messages are becoming increasingly widespread. Teleports not working, inventory and asset problems, high-levels of packet-loss, presence issues (affecting group IMs and the friends-list); all among the usual suspects for a central services or network failure. Reports began to trickle in sporadically, but there has been a flood of them since 12:50AM SLT - at which time Linden Lab statistical data feeds suddenly went dark. Related to the rolling restart late yesterday? Quite possibly. The last Friday afternoon update Second Life had led to a weekend of disasters. There has been no word from Linden Lab at this time. [Update: 1:05AM - Linden Lab's statistical feeds came back to life after 15 minutes of silence. This may be a sign that the problems are easing]
IBM's Chet Murphy joins CHTTP team
Chet Murphy, experienced distributed systems developer at IBM is to collaborate with Linden Lab and open source developers on the Certified HTTP project, one of the next generation technologies that will underpin the new Second Life architecture, and potentially be incorporated into many virtual worlds and MMOs in future. IBM has a solid history of participating in and contributing to open source projects of various stripes, and this marks the first direct, practical collaboration between Linden Lab and IBM since the announcement of their collaboration on virtual worlds standards approximately one month ago.
Linden Lab releases key JIRA statistics, calls for volunteer
Linden Lab's Rob Lanphier, their "open source busybody" released some numbers from the Public JIRA issue-tracker today as part of an evaluation of ongoing bug reporting/triage evaluation for Second Life . In the 7 days from 24 October to 30 October (inclusive), 87 issues were filed into the public issue tracker. Of these issues, 1 was misfiled, 13 resolved (or fixed internally), 8 were imported into Linden Lab's internal issue tracker. 65 haven't gone anywhere.
Second Life stipends stalled
Weekly stipends paid to Second Life premium account holders (on Tuesday mornings) did not go out as planned this week. Again, yes. Apparently the batch-job that Linden Lab uses to process the payments (which takes some several hours) stopped (or failed to run) and nobody noticed until relatively late Tuesday. Well, nobody at Linden Lab, anyway. Linden Lab says that the payments process is running again and that stipends should be paid out by morning. Overall, this isn't shaping up to be a great week in Second Life, from a technical standpoint.
Always boom tomorrow - Second Life update aborted and rescheduled
Today's attempt at an updates and a patch rollout in Second Life went really rather badly, with mass login failures and other unexpected side-effects during the preparatory phase. The Second Life grid didn't entirely shut down, but it was a near thing and the status page claimed (erroneously) that it actually did. "At around 11am, an issue that didn't show up in testing appeared which stopped the "login" servers from talking to the "presence" servers. Unfortunately, it also interfered with our monitoring systems" Linden Lab says that they're still trying to track down what caused the communications failure between systems, and are tentatively going to try to reschedule the same update for tomorrow, assuming they can isolate and fix the problem. The schedule will most likely be the same as the last one, with preparatory upgrades at around 10AM SLT (US Pacific) and a rolling restart at 1PM SLT.
Last of the class 3 servers
Jack Linden, honcho of Second Life's land team, announces today that the last of the Class 3 servers are on the way out, to be replaced with Class 4 servers. While there are increased costs for owners of simulators running on older hardware to migrate to the top-drawer Class 5 servers, the upgrade from Class 3 to Class 4 does not represent any additional one-time or ongoing monthly cost. However, current Class 3 owners can upgrade to a Class 5 for a one-time fee of $200USD (plus the increased monthly fees for Class 5 hardware). The implication in the notice is that Class 3 owners who are upgraded to Class 4 servers will no longer be able to take advantage of the upgrade offer. If you are a Class 3 owner who wishes to upgrade to Class 5, you need to file a support ticket before close-of-business on Friday 16 November. The last of the Class 3 servers are expected to be decommissioned by late today or early tomorrow.
Second Life transaction history failure
In the wake of the transaction reporting problems that started just before midnight on Sunday night, transaction reporting for Second Life accounts has stopped ... well, reporting transactions. As per usual, the data is most likely still down in there somewhere and unharmed, but the reporting interface itself or connectors to that data are not functioning. Linden Lab tells us that the web devs are looking into the problem. Hopefully it won't be too long before the interface is back in service, but it is traditional that it tends to lag behind a bit after being repaired. (Footnote: The Second Life/Linden blog is apparently still reporting times in PDT - apparently not having switched timezones with everyone else back to PST - but that might be okay, considering the post is timestamped an hour in the future) [UPDATE: This is now reported as fixed as of 10:30 am]
The Value of Second Life
This TechCrunch article lets drop that one of Linden Lab's early investors, Catamount Ventures, sold ten percent of their stock to a third party for an undisclosed amount that was valuated at 'above half a billion' dollars, as stated by an anonymous source with knowledge of the company.What surprises me most about this article, beyond the massive amounts of money being mentioned, are the mostly positive comments after the article. Having seen rather a lot of these go by, I expected a ton of lame duck jokes about the value of Second Life being virtually nothing, etc. but by and large people are taking it seriously. Of course, for me and thousands of others, the true value in SL is its social component. Without that one-to-one connection, there truly is little to value.(Via techcrunch.com)
More network problems on the Second Life grid
At 12:55AM SLT (US Pacific) this morning, with 29,353 Second Life users online, Linden Lab suffered a network failure between the San Francisco and Dallas colocation facilities that house the servers that make up the Second Life grid. Roughly 1,400 simulators became inaccessible, and approximately 3,000 users were disconnected. The problem was resolved at 1:35AM SLT, and the grid has returned to smooth operation.
Public UI bug triage meetings discontinued
Benjamin Linden, User Experience Designer for Linden Lab's Second Life said today on the SL developers list that the public user-interface triage sessions where UI bugs are assessed for severity and importance will be discontinued as of today. User Interface bugs will instead be handled during regular bug triage sessions for the main viewer and the release-candidate viewers, handled by Aric Linden and Bridie Linden. No reason for the change was given.
Short notice rolling restart to bring fresh server code
Second Life servers are being updated with fresh code tomorrow, Tuesday 6 November. There are two phases to the update, and neither one involves taking Second Life down or additional downloads. Phase one starts at 10AM SLT (US Pacific) and involves unspecified updates to unspecified central systems. We're told this may cause "slight delays to log-ins and to online notifications" (Stop laughing in the back there. We presume they mean in addition to normal).
Second Life Governance team commences public office hours
Linden Lab's governance team will be holding public office hours in Second Life five days each week, starting this week (the first session was today). You can find the governance team for approximately one hour on the island of Kremer at 10AM SLT (US Pacific) Monday to Friday, though they suggest that they will try to make other time-slots available for those who can't make the 10AM sessions. Members of the governance team will be there to discuss issues, plans, and answer questions - but not to take your abuse reports or to listen to you grumble about the neighbor's build overhanging your property line.
AgeLock: age verification by residents, for residents
I will assume, for the sake of this article, that you know nothing about the age verification issues Second Life has undergone. It's thorny, and Linden Lab's system still isn't in place, despite how gung-ho they were about getting it up and running pretty much post-haste. In the meantime, a group of residents have been quietly working on a homebrew system called AgeLock, and while there's a full description of the way it works on the referring site, the best part of the site's description is this: 'How does this system prevent children from accessing adult content?It doesn't. It won't. It can't. As parents ourselves, we really do care about the importance of protecting children but this is not about protecting children this time. In this instance, our goal is to provide a sense of security for the adult community.'And there you have it, the heart of the matter. There are without a doubt, non-adult residents with accounts on SL. There is no foolproof way to prevent someone who shouldn't be on the Main Grid from nevertheless creating an account for themselves. The AgeLock system at the very least protects an adult sim's owner from liability issues. This is a step in the right direction; whether or not Linden Lab works off of this remains to be seen.(Thanks, Allana!)
Second Life transaction notification problems
We have some reports (and I've also experienced it myself in the last couple of hours) of L$ payments not showing up immediately for Second Life users this-evening. The money is there, but account balances in the top corner of the screen are not updating until you've paid someone at least one L$. More confusingly, L$ transactions of L$1 and higher dated 4 November SLT (US Pacific) tonight are not necessarily showing in the transaction history unless you include at least November 2 (or earlier) in the search range. Some users say that the transactions show up after an hour or so, some have to increase the search range several days in order to see L$ transactions that took place this-evening. [Update: 11:30PM SLT (US Pacific) - We are starting to receive reports of problems with inventory transfers as well. No word from Linden Lab at present]
Yesterday's Money: 3rd November
Yesterday in Second Life we: Spent US$1,439,000 at an exchange rate of L$272.2 to US$1 Exchanged US$280,000 at an average of US$11,700.0 per hour. Market buys were US$182,000 Market sales were US$98,000 Limit-limit buys were US$1,000 The busiest time was at 1pm when about US$21,000 was exchanged. The quietest time was 10pm when about US$7,000 was exchanged.
WSE announces Midas Group are bankrupt
Following the calls in Second Life by the Midas Group to boycott Hope Capital and WSE for failure to pay on bonds, WSE today declared the Midas Group bankrupt.The full statement (below the fold) makes interesting reading in one paragraph saying "the reasons are not our concern" and in the next explaining why they think the bank went under. Nothing to do with late payments from their own bonds of course. The value of the various Midas Group bonds have been transfered to the WTF rescue scheme, straining it yet further.[UPDATE: Midas Group have responded. Their response is also below the fold]
Linuxworld on the Second Life viewer
Linden Lab's Second Life viewer, is available for a variety of platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux in varying degrees of support) - and the source code is out there. There's a Solaris version kicking around out there somewhere too. Linuxworld takes a brief look at Second Life, and a rather longer one with the viewer, speaking to notable open-source community members as Jason Giglio and Callum Lerwick, Tofu Linden of Linden Lab. The piece touches on licensing issues that are impeding voice support under Linux, blocking issues with closed-source video drivers (most notably with ATI, though nVidia are also implicated), OpenJPEG versus JPEG2000, codebase-forking and more.
Linden Lab CFO question and answer, this Sunday
Linden Lab's Chief Financial Officer (CFO), John Zdanowski (better known as Zee Linden) will be taking questions for one hour on Petunia Island in Second Life on Sunday, 4 November at 11AM SLT (US Pacific). If you've got questions about Linden Lab or Second Life that only the CFO can answer, prepare your questions and come along. Be prepared, Zdanowski is apparently going to be present with video and voice, rather than in his avatar as usual - so there's not much point in showing if you don't have the network or equipment to support it.
Metanomics discussion with Gene Yoon
On Monday, 5 November at 11AM SLT (US Pacific), Professor Robert J Bloomfield, JGSM, director of the Business Simulation Lab at Cornell's prestigious Johnson Business School will be discussing Linden Lab's economic policies with Gene Yoon (much better known as Ginsu Linden) in Second Life. Yoon is the Vice President of Business Affairs at Linden Lab and was formerly General Counsel. The talk is part of the Metanomics series of discussions and talks, focusing on business and policy in the "metaverse" of virtual worlds. The Metanomics audience includes game developers; executives managing real-world and virtual-world businesses; and scholars of business, economics, law and sociology. Residents of Second Life follow the Metanomics series particularly closely, as many events focus on issues arising in Second Life's vibrant business community.
