Colin K's Blog

Monkey Karate

2008-04-14T19:59:00.002-04:00

MySql 5.1

2008-04-12T14:45:00.002-04:00

MySql is the database system that is used for all Second Life's databases, which have been the main cause of most of the problems that have been occurring the past few months. The release of MySql 5.1 is coming next week, and according to Sun it "should help MySQL compete in environments where performance and the ability to scale are critical." That seems to describe Second Life perfectly. Also, "5.1 has not only greater reliability, but a performance increase of 20 percent. It will be more in some cases and less in others, but there's a significant performance boost and scalability enhancements." So let's hope this update does something to improve the current conditions, and that it doesn't take LL two years to update to this new version.

Moving in SL using body motions

2008-04-12T14:37:00.002-04:00

SVC-1862 Fixed

2008-04-07T11:50:00.002-04:00

There was an update to the Mono beta regions today that claims to have fixed SVC-1862, the issue I reported about listener performance. I just ran my tests again and confirmed that it is indeed fixed. And it was fixed by improving the performance of listen events under Mono, not by crippling the performance of them without Mono :P

My Little Pony Troll

2008-04-02T01:13:00.004-04:00

I have been laughing at this so hard. It's a (pic of a) thread showing someone trolling a My Little Pony forum. Most of the troller's posts have been deleted by the moderator, but there are some priceless responses that are still there.

"How could you possibly know that Osama Bin Laden collects My Little Ponies? I think you're just making that up."

"...and your picture of Stalin riding a Year3 Limited Edition Starflower inside a German concentration camp was both upsetting and historically inaccurate."

"I don't know where you get your facts. The first generation of MLP's were made by Hasbro, not the Khmer Rouge. And Hasbro hasn't made toys out of human skulls since the 1960s."

Update: Well, I found a link to the Stalin pic...it's actually pretty gruesome, so much so that I wasn't going to link to it, but then I decided you can all make that decision for yourselves. But anyway, you have been warned. Link

C:SI Now Using Monthly Payments!?

2008-03-31T21:35:00.002-04:00

This has just been posted on the C:SI website. April Fools', right? That's what I thought, until my sword requested permission to take Lindens from my account. I choose "Deny" and it disappeared from my inventory! WTF? I hope the devs realize how many customers they are going to lose because of this.

Mono Listener Performance Update

2008-03-29T20:24:00.002-04:00

Time for some updates about SVC-1862, which is the bug I reported concerning listeners performing worse in Mono compiled scripts.

It has been marked as relating to SVC-1398, which is about link messages in Mono being 2 times slower. Link messages were something I was going to test myself until I saw that this bug had already been reported.
Lee Ludd commented that it might be related to Mono using 16-bit characters instead of 8-bit characters. I ran the tests again using different string lengths to test this theory, and there wasn't any noticeable change.
Gordon Wendt says he mentioned it during Linden Office Hours, so hopefully this is something they will look into soon. Still no comments from any Lindens on the Jira page, though.

Getting Back to Building

2008-03-28T20:10:00.003-04:00

I haven't done much with my Go board recently. Mostly because I am once again trying to switch to using a Linux environment as much as possible, but have been discouraged from using Second Life because of sound problems.

However, I now have three people who have expressed interest in owning one, so that has encouraged me to try to get back to work.

I'm thinking about changing the way my board handles the stones. Right now, each time a stone is played it rezzes a prim for the stone. The other option is to have an invisible stone fixed at each location on the board, and then when a stone is played make it visible and set its color. The advantages to the second method are that now the players can just click on the board to place a stone instead of having to type in the coordinates. Also, the stones can be grouped with the board so that if the board is moved, they will move as well. It doesn't seem like there is a way to group prims through scripts, so some other method that would most likely be more complicated and not work as well would have to be used to get the same effect.

The obvious disadvantage, and the original reason I went with the first method, is that the board will require 368 prims at all times. Using the current method, it only needs 7 prims when not in use, and if the players are only using a 9x9 or 13x13 size board, they won't come near 368 prims. Even on a 19x19 board, not all games will use 368 prims. As I think about it more, though, is there really an advantage to having it only take 7 prims when not in use? They will still need 368 prims available when they want to use it, and I doubt many people will want to have to return all their furniture or something each time they want to use the board, then re-rez it when they are done.

I have come across two other Go boards in SL. One of them uses this method I'm describing of just having invisible prims for all the stones. The other had the user click the board which would rez a stone, then the user had to edit the stone and move it onto the correct board position. I'm not a big fan of that last method.

Any suggestions?

Enough with the Frequent Problems!

2008-03-25T14:18:00.003-04:00

Second Life seems to have problems on a weekly (or daily?) basis. It wasn't always this way, although I think it's more that Linden Lab is being more public about the problems on the blog and SL isn't necessarily more unstable than it used to be (although that could still be the case). There have been announcements of problems today, yesterday, Saturday, Friday...I'm getting tired of linking, but there were also problems last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Along with many of these problems (including all of the ones I linked to) comes LL advising people not to make any transactions, which can significantly hurt business as some have pointed out.

This pattern has been going on for a while, and I'm starting to wonder how LL is responding to these problems. It almost seems like they are just working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, but in the process are not making any attempt to actually figure out how to prevent the problem from happening again in the future. With the frequency of these problems, and the fact that they have been going on for months at this frequency, I find it very unlikely that all of these problems are caused by unique issues. Some of them must be recurring problems that we have had before.

Now, with all the linking I have done back to the official Second Life blog, it's very likely that a Linden Lab employee will end up reading this post. I understand that you want to fix these problems as quickly as possible, but I, for one, would prefer to have the problem persist for longer if it means that you can take the time to diagnose the cause and make adjustments so that the problem isn't likely to happen again. I think in the long run this will make the users of SL happier and increase the uptime of your services in the future.

Linux Client Sound FAIL!

2008-03-24T22:03:00.003-04:00

I'm trying to use the Second Life client on Linux again, which I haven't done in a long time. I posted a while back about the differences between the clients, and in the last paragraph of that post I talk about the sound problems I have had in Linux. Well, the problems seem to have gotten worse. Now the sound stutters (like when you're trying to play a scratched DVD). Hopefully I will be able to find a way to fix it. At this point, I'm not even sure if it's a result of changes in the Second Life program or in Ubuntu.

Edit: The shell script that runs Second Life has some sound configuration options. After playing around with them, it looks like Second Life is using OSS instead of ALSA. This is probably the source of the problem, now I just need to figure out how to get it to use ALSA.

Second Life Command Line Options

2008-03-21T23:38:00.004-04:00

There are some useful command line options for Second Life that I'm not sure many people know about. To add a command line option in Windows, you have to right-click on the Second Life shortcut, choose "Properties" and then add the options to the end of the "Target:" line. Mac users...you're on your own. Maybe someone who owns a Mac can post a comment explaining how to do it.

-multiple
This will stop Second Life from preventing you from running more than one viewer at a time, allowing you to log on to multiple accounts simultaneously on the same computer.

-autologin
Bypass the login screen and automatically log on with the name and password that is stored. You can also use "-login <first> <last> <password>" to log in as any account without the login screen.

-purge
Clears the cache when it runs. This is useful because normally if you want to clear the cache you have to log in, click "Clear Cache" in the options, then log out and log back in. There might also be a case where the cache is corrupted and you crash before you can even get to the "Clear Cache" button.

-safe
If you set some options that now cause your viewer to crash immediately, you can run with this parameter to reset your options.

-local
This didn't work for me when I tried it, but it's supposed to run the viewer without connecting to the simulator. I was interested in seeing what that was like, and what exactly you could do without a simulator.

There is a full list of command line options here.

Go Board Updates

2008-03-17T19:53:00.003-04:00

I was glad to see that one of the changes for the new server code being updated this week is "Support for PRIM_GLOW in llSetPrimitiveParams - this will require a forthcoming viewer update to author and compile scripts that use this, however". I was looking for this feature a few days ago because I wanted to add a feature to my Go board that made the last move glow.

Speaking of that, I have been spending a lot of time working on it since my last post (though I've been focused on the Mono testing these past few days). Most of the work has been in things that aren't finished, aren't visible, or were dead ends (at least I was learning how NOT to do things). Here is a quick list:

The board state is now stored (storing 19x19 integers comes very close to the memory limit for scripts, so I had to make a script that is basically a data server and other scripts query the data through link messages).
With the board state stored, I can now report an invalid move if a stone has already been played there.
I added the board's rotation into the stone placement, so it no longer has to be aligned along the world y-axis to place the stones in the right place :P
I spent a TON of time fooling around with llSetCameraParams, trying to get the camera to face straight down on the board from above. This was in preparation for an idea for a HUD which would overlay things onto the board. Unfortunately, the camera controls don't really allow for precise placement. I was able to get the camera to face straight down on the board, but I could not control the "roll" of the camera (up vector in more technical terms). The SL camera always tries to keep its up vector as vertical as possible. When the camera is facing straight down -- so the up vector becomes completely horizontal -- it apparently always points along the positive x-axis. I could not find a way to change this after much tweaking of the llSetCameraParams arguments. I had to give up.
I started looking at HTTP requests. I had code for a multi-threaded web server from a networks class I took, so I got that running and was able to send a message to it from SL and get a response. It shouldn't be too hard to have it run copies of GNU Go and pass GTP messages back and forth.
I downloaded QAvimator and started learning how to make animations.

This Go board project is pushing me to learn a ton of different aspects of Second Life content creation. It's great.

LSL Listen Mono Testing

2008-03-17T12:56:00.005-04:00

I just did some Mono testing specifically with listeners, and came up with some interesting results. First I did a basic ping test. One object would start a timer and say "ping" to another object which would then say "pingback", and the original object would report the time when it received the message back. Averaged over 200 tests, without Mono the ping time was 0.066478 seconds. With Mono, it was 0.088936 seconds. I ran the tests multiple times, switching back and forth between Mono and non-Mono to make sure this difference was caused by Mono and not by other changes in the sim.

Next I took Robby's idea and had one object say "start" then "junk" 500 times then "finish". Another object would start a timer when it got the "start" message and report the time when it got the "finish" message. First, I used an unfiltered listener, so any messages sent on that channel would be forwarded to the script. The sender reported that it sent "finish" 0.600243 seconds after it sent "start". The receiver reported 33.476112 seconds between hearing the "start" and "finish" messages. I then recompiled with Mono and ran the test again. This time all the messages were sent in 0.178058 and received in 44.580690. The sending was over 3 times faster, but the receiving was slower with Mono.

Now I modified the script to only set up listeners specifically for "start" and "finish" messages. Without Mono, they were sent in 0.600193 seconds and received in 0.644574. With Mono, 0.133408 and 0.133169. All these numbers have taught me two important things: 1) USE FILTERED LISTENERS!!! 2) ESPECIALLY USE FILTERED LISTENERS WITH MONO!!!!!

Now comes the fun part. I copied the unfiltered listener so that there were 25 of them. Each of them ran at about the same time as the single listener. With 100, they still ran about the same. With 1000, still the same. With 10000 (I'm serious...screenshot below) it was finally a different story. First, the time the sender reported to send the messages shot up to 1.916057 seconds. From that number, I estimated it would take 10 minutes for the listeners to finish. I waited for 15 minutes, expecting a Linden to show up and wonder what the hell I was doing, and still there was no response from the listeners.Notice "Script perf" is 0 ips. I'm guessing they just haven't updated that to count Mono instructions.

With the filters, there wasn't much of a change until 400 prims (I increased the number of prims differently). At that level, the listeners finished between .133783 and .201377 seconds, but one of them took 45.042740 seconds, which is so close to the time for the unfiltered listeners it almost makes me think the server panicked and just started handing that one script all the messages. I doubt that's the case, though, because then scripts which used filters and as a result didn't have to check the incoming message would experience errors if they started getting unfiltered messages. At 800 prims, the range was .156157 - .224534, again with a single script reporting at 46.228270. At this point, I didn't go further because looking through a log of 800 messages was getting difficult. Looking back at the data from the unfiltered runs, there was similar variance in the times as seen here, but when it is taking 45 seconds it is much less significant.

One final weird behavior that I noticed while recreating these tests for the Jira issue (see below). I went back to the ping test and added filters for "ping" and "pingback". I didn't expect to see any difference, since all the messages sent are "ping" and "pingback" (on different channels, so that is already filtered). Indeed, there was no difference when not using Mono. But with Mono, it took longer! The time increased to 0.101741, which is an increase of about .02 seconds or a 25% increase.

In conclusion, I am definitely going to use filters all the time now. I have created a Jira issue about the performance decreases with Mono. Now what can I test!? :P

Benchmarking Mono-Compiled LSL

2008-03-17T01:34:00.004-04:00

After Robby's response to my post about listener lag, I had the idea to see just what sort of speed improvements Mono will bring. I made a fairly simple benchmarking script that does the following tasks:

Integer addition (7000 times)

Float addition (7000 times)

Integer multiplication (7000 times)

Float multiplication (7000 times)

Integer division (7000 times)

Float division (7000 times)

Grow a list by repeatedly inserting [0] (300 times)

Randomize a list and sort it (100 times, list size 300)

Break a string into a list of words and check whether each word is equal to "hello" or "world" (200 times)

The tasks are pretty basic. That last one is generally what a listener would do. I chose the number of times each would be repeated so that every task would take about 10 seconds.

In doing this, I discovered that the performance of standard LSL scripts is extremely variable. I configured the numbers so that each task would take 10 about seconds; at this point I was at my house on the normal grid. But when I logged into the beta grid and ran the script in a Mono sim (without compiling to Mono), the arithmetic tasks each took about 3 seconds. Thinking maybe for some reason normal LSL scripts also ran faster on Mono sims, I tried running it at various other sims on the Beta grid. In some it ran at 10 seconds, others 3 seconds, others 17 seconds. I couldn't really see a pattern (Havok1 vs. Havok4, Mono vs. non-Mono), although it was always 3 seconds on the Mono sims, but I did get 3 seconds once on a non-Mono Havok4 sim. The numbers fluctuated between sims, but if I ran it multiple times on the same sim, I would get about the same results. Are all the sims on the beta grid Tier 5? It probably just comes down to how much other stuff is going on in the sim. But the last 3 tasks were always about the same time...very strange.

Anyway, here are the results. For the non-Mono numbers, I chose the ones closest to 10 seconds.

Task	Non-Mono	Mono	% Increase	Times faster
Adding integers	12.356465	0.133350	9166%	92.662
Adding floats	12.643500	0.066761	18838%	189.385
Multiplying integers	12.310993	0.066601	18385%	184.847
Multiplying floats	12.556296	0.044415	28170%	282.704
Dividing integers	12.355354	0.066727	18416%	185.163
Dividing floats	12.555955	0.044925	27848%	279.487
List insertion	10.018719	0.000000	N/A	N/A
List randomize/sort	8.905011	0.000000	N/A	N/A
String tokenize	9.640886	0.138814	6845%	69.452
Total	103.343179	0.561593	18302%	184.018

So the claims that Mono is over 1000 times faster don't seem to hold up. But still...this is just amazing. I laughed out loud when the benchmark finished in under a second when I had just waited over a minute and a half for the previous one to finish. I especially like how the list operations were too fast to measure. I am going to make some changes tomorrow so that I can actually get some numbers that I can analyze. I also want to add some more tests that better simulate "real-world usage". If you have any ideas, please tell me.

Goban v0.1

2008-03-13T20:54:00.006-04:00

Back in November I wrote about building a Go board. This past week I actually started building and scripting it, and without too much trouble it now has the basic functionality.There are still a lot of things I need and/or want to add. The biggest thing is probably that when a move is made that would capture stones, the board does not automatically remove them (the prims have to be deleted manually). Adding this feature is going to require me to store the board's state, which means more use of LSL lists, which have a strange and not very elegant set of utility functions.I also need to figure out how to attach the stones to the board after I rez them. If the board is moved, the stones will just stay there and be floating in space. Also, does anyone if there is a way to prevent those particle effects when something is rezzed or an object says something?There are two "modes". Two avatars can click on the board and join the game, and then the board will have them take turns placing stones. There is also a "Free Mode" where stones can be freely placed. Stones have to be placed by typing a command on chat channel 1. In game mode, you can just type "/1 d12" when it is your turn. In free mode, placing stones resembles the GTP protocol (e.g., "/1 play black d12" or "/1 play w k4), but you can specify more than one vertex in a single command and it will place them all. I'd like to allow placing stones by clicking, but I'm not sure if that's possible. I would have to put an invisible prim at each vertex to detect the click.

The board can be changed to 9x9 and 13x13 as well as the normal 19x19 size.Feel free to drop by my house and try it out, or IM me if you want someone to play against or to teach the rules (despite my interest in Go, I have not played many actual games and am not very good). Any suggestions or bugs reports are welcome.

Why Do Listeners Cause Lag?

2008-03-11T14:29:00.003-04:00

This is something that I have never understood, and have always been a little skeptical about. I have heard many people saying that scripts which listen, especially on channel 0, are one of the biggest contributors to sim lag. Of course, anything that requires processing power is going to contribute to lag, but are listeners really one of the biggest contributors?

Even when there are tons of people around talking, the number of chat messages per second probably doesn't go above 5 on average. So each listen script would have the listen event triggered 5 times a second. For a computer that can process billions of instructions per second, I don't really see how that can have any significant impact.

Is there something I'm missing?

Update:
I just did a small test. I figure that most listen event handlers will tokenize the string and then check each token to see if it is a known command (probably will only check the first token, actually). Since in most circumstances, the message is not a command to that script, that is as much as it needs to do.

I wrote a program that tokenizes the string "This is a test message that will be processed by this program." and then checks whether each token is equal to "command", and reports how many times per second it is able to do that. Averaging over 120 seconds, it did it 101963 times per second. This is running on a machine here at school, and I'm not sure of the CPU speed. The OS is Solaris and the CPU type is Sparc. Also, my process was only getting 20% of the CPU.

Granted, this wasn't a very good test since there are so many unknowns, but at least it shows that there would have to be a lot of listeners to slow down the CPU.

Network Neutrality

2008-03-05T02:07:00.002-05:00

This is an excellent video about the issue of network neutrality. I didn't realize that basically the same thing happened with printing and radio, which makes me even more scared about the possibility of this actually happening. If the internet loses network neutrality, it will most likely spell the end of Second Life (among many other things), as I'm pretty sure Linden Lab doesn't have the money to pay the telephone companies.

p.s. (What? I'm just stating facts, I'm not pushing a specific candidate :P)
Obama is for network neutrality and has promised to make it a priority for his first year in office.
Clinton has said she is for network neutrality, but it is not something she has mentioned as part of her campaign.
McCain is either genuinely undecided, or doesn't want to publicly say he's against it. He has been quoted as saying, "When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment."
Sources: 1,2,3,4,5

Gizmondo

2008-02-26T23:33:00.005-05:00

Remember Gizmondo? Not Gizmodo, the tech site, but Gizmondo, the hand-held game device that was supposed to compete with the Nintendo DS and PSP? Neither do I. It was a huge flop and the company went bankrupt. But I came across this Wired article about a year ago, and I never get tired of reading it. The story behind Gizmondo is simply amazing. Here is the first paragraph to catch your interest:

THE BUMP IN THE ROAD that ended Bo Stefan Eriksson's fantastic ride is practically invisible. From 10 feet away, all you can see is the ragged edge of a tar-seamed crack in an otherwise smooth sheet of pavement. Only the location is impressive - a sweet stretch of straightaway on California's Pacific Coast Highway near El Pescador state beach, just past the eucalyptus-shaded mansions of the Malibu hills. On that patch of broken asphalt, there's barely enough lip to stub a toe. Of course, when you hit it at close to 200 miles per hour, as police say Eriksson did in the predawn light last February 21, while behind the wheel of a 660-horsepower Ferrari Enzo, consequences magnify.

This other article has more details about the history and especially the financial data of the company. After reading these two articles, I come to the same conclusion as one of the commenters on this article: "The whole thing was a front for the Swedish mafia to launder money."

And it looks like this story might not be over. From Wikipedia:

In November 2007 Carl Freer stated in an interview for the Swedish-American journalist Hans Sandberg that he was interested in starting up production of the Gizmondo again. The interview was published in the business news site Realtid.se, and a translated segment of the interview was made available on the author's blog The Nordic Link on January 23, 2008. The week before, Veckans Affärer, another Swedish business publication, had confirmed Realtid's story about Carl Freer's cooperation with the British company Plextek, who designed the original platform.

Skittles Commercial

2008-02-20T19:03:00.003-05:00

This commercial is amazing. I've seen it on TV a couple of times, but it was a shortened version that's missing some of the best parts.

Framerate and Ping

2008-02-18T19:28:00.002-05:00

There's always a lot of talk in C:SI about improving framerate. I've also heard a lot of comments about how after a certain framerate, the human eye can no longer see any difference and so improving framerate past this has no point. Usually the number stated is 24 or 30 fps, because those are the framerates of movie projectors and televisions (NTSC), respectively. While the reasoning makes sense to me, it definitely seems like I can tell a difference between 30 fps and higher rates. I decided to see what information I could dig up about this, and found this interesting article. The article explains how blurred images and other techniques are used to make 24-fps movies appears smooth, and so these are actually not the limit that we can detect. According to the article, the question is actually extremely hard to answer, but it's pretty clear that it's at least 100 fps, and probably much higher than that.

The article also touches on the aspect of monitor refresh rates. Basically, your monitor can only redraw the screen a certain number of times per second, and that's probably lower than the framerate your eye can detect. It also mentions that it might actually appear worse if you have more fps than your monitor refresh rate can support, because it has to sync the frames by repeating some.

Ping time is also something that is often stated as making a difference in duels. I have personally tried fighting with ping times of over 2000 ms, and that definitely makes a difference. But what about more normal variations? I usually get a "ping sim" of about 70-90 ms. That is the time it takes an empty message to travel from my computer to the Second Life server running the sim I'm in, and then get sent back. What does this mean for dueling? From my experience during times of extremely high pings, I know that the way SL works is that when I press a key to slash, my client does not immediately start displaying the slash animation. That message must first reach the server, then a message is sent to both people telling their clients to display the animation. What this means is that if both of us have equal ping times, we should both see my slash at exactly the same time.

Usually people have different ping times, though. I've heard people in Europe saying they usually have pings around 150 ms. If I were fighting them with my 70 ms ping, that would mean that they see the animations 80 ms after I do, including their own attacks. Is 80 ms significant, though? According to Wikipedia, the reaction time for humans is between 150 ms and 300 ms, so it doesn't seem like that would really make a difference. But then again, it doesn't matter how quickly a person reacts, it will still be delayed by 80 ms in this example. But...will that delay in their reaction matter since their opponent can only react at 150-300 ms? I'm confused.

OpenSim and realXtend

2008-02-17T17:10:00.004-05:00

This started out as a comment I was writing in response to Robby's post about realXtend joining OpenSim. It grew so large I decided it was probably a better idea to post it here.

It will be interesting to see how Linden Lab reacts to this. I'm sure most of the features realXtend will bring are ones that LL would love to have in their own server code. OpenSim is released under the BSD license, which is one of the least restrictive open source licenses out there. It looks like the license only requires that any code or binary distribution be unrestricted in terms of copying and redistribution, and carry the same license.

BSD License:

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
* Neither the name of the OpenSim Project nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

But here's the thing: LL doesn't distribute their server code or binaries; they run them on their own servers. I'm not a copyright lawyer or anything, so I'm probably wrong, but it seems like LL might be able to incorporate the OpenSim code into their own server code without really having to publicly release it. That seems a little fishy to me, but I know that the BSD license is often criticized as not being a true free software license, and maybe this is why.

From the Wikipedia article on the BSD license: "The BSD License allows proprietary commercial use, and for the software released under the license to be incorporated into proprietary commercial products. Works based on the material may even be released under a proprietary license (but still must maintain the license requirements). Some notable examples of this are the use of BSD networking code in Microsoft products, and the use of numerous FreeBSD components in Mac OS X."

I'm a strong supporter of open source software, but the problem with OpenSim is that while they are going to be adding all these exciting features, there's probably not going to be a grid running OpenSim anytime soon that has the resources to support 60,000 simultaneous logins. That's why I'm kind of hoping for LL to "steal" the code (it's OpenSim's fault anyway...everyone knows you're supposed to use the GNU Public License :P)

Mono Refresh

2008-02-07T19:16:00.000-05:00

They made another update to the Mono Beta today. With the fix of "[SVC-1331] Floating point fed to conditional causes error", LSL/Mono is now even closer to completing the "basic things any programming language should do" checklist. As posted in the bug report, this basic script would produce an error:

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        if(1.0)
        {
        }
    }
}

See my previous post for more comments about this. Actually, the image probably won't load because the website hosting it is currently suffering from the Digg Effect. Edit: Nevermind, the pic should work now.

Dear Lindens

2008-02-07T05:57:00.000-05:00

Dear Lindens,

I have decided to evaluate your performance over the past few months.
Actually, that bike is working perfectly fine, they just need to change the sit target and adjust the link position of the front wheel.

Edit: I uploaded my own copy of the pic instead of linking to it, so it should load reliably now.

C:SI Stats Perl Script

2008-02-06T02:10:00.000-05:00

I wrote a Perl script that grabs avatar duel data from the C:SI website and calculates some useful information. It can be downloaded here. I know that most of you reading this probably have no idea what to do with a Perl script. If I had the resources, I would put it up on a web site so that everyone could make use of it. I invite the C:SI devs to take this script and use it on the website, or for Robby to do something with it on his blog (or anyone to put it up on the web, for that matter). It takes avatar names as command line arguments, and is especially useful if given multiple names (so that you can see the combined stats of your alts).

Example:

$ ./csiscores.pl Colin Kiernan Selene Corvale
Getting stats for Colin Kiernan...
Getting stats for Selene Corvale...

Colin Kiernan
 Total Wins Losses Ratio
Count 3323 1686 1637 1.0299 (102:100)
%total 93.13% 91.38% 95.01%

Selene Corvale
 Total Wins Losses Ratio
Count 245 159 86 1.8488 (184:100)
%total 6.87% 8.62% 4.99%

Overall
Total Wins Losses Ratio
3568 1845 1723 1.0708 (107:100)

Edit: Another thing you could do with this is list all the members in a clan and get the total clan score, how much each person contributed, etc. If you do that, I recommend promptly logging into SL and buying a few more swords to cover the bandwidth you've just used on the website ;)

Edit 2: I forgot to mention that it only takes the stats from the first page (30 sims). Since they are sorted in order of most duels, the sims omitted probably won't have that big an effect on the results.

Glasses

2008-01-29T02:55:00.001-05:00

One Year in SL

2008-01-25T16:48:00.000-05:00

A lot of people will post on their blog each year and do a "year in review" kind of thing. I could do that, but then this post would just be "I swung a sword around". Ok, I could probably write something more interesting than that, but I prefer to talk about technology and cool toys than my life, so instead I'm going to review the past year in SL in terms of new features.

Voice Chat
When LL announced this feature, there was a lot of criticism about it. People liked that they could keep real life completely separate from Second Life, and voice chat was somehow going to change that. Reading all this criticism, I thought it would really only be used for business/education and maybe at the SL clubs where people might be using SL to find people in real life. So I was fairly surprised at how many people in C:SI use it. I always have it on and listen (I really haven't noticed that it causes more lag as a lot of people who leave it off say), but almost never talk. It's not that I'm shy about people in SL hearing me talking, it's that I'm awkward about my roommates hearing me talking to myself in my room all the time (and also they are often asleep during the times I play SL).

Sculpted Prims
I remember one of my first reactions to SL was, "Why are the framerates so low even though it looks like a game from 5 years ago?" When I first saw the screenshots of the photorealistic fruit using sculpted prims, I was optimistic that these would vastly improve the look of the world. It turns out that after all this time (8 months?), they aren't really that prevalent. Sure, you see them around, and those Straylight trees look amazing, but it hasn't had the effect I had hoped for. I think the main problem is that it's so hard to create them. You need external software, most of it costing money, that takes time to learn to use. Also, it's not just the model for the sculpted prim that makes it look good, but also the texture. If LL adds some capability to create sculpted prims in-world, I think we'll see a lot more usage of them.

Let me take a little interlude here to mention something I've noticed about the builds around SL. I don't claim to be the best builder, or even a very good one, but when I do build there are two things I pay close attention to that very few other people seem to. Let me say that I'm mainly talking about buildings and architecture here, not prim clothing and accessories and such. First, I always make sure my texture repeats are adjusted. I have seen too many buildings where there is a long beam or pillar and a texture has just been dropped onto it, turning it into just streaks of color. Also, if I have adjacent prims with the same texture, I tend to adjust the texture offsets so that there isn't a visible seam. This brings me to the second point, which is placement of prims next to each other. I always position them exactly so they do not overlap. I hate that look when you have two prims overlapping and there's that flickering when you move the camera around. I see that all over the place, along with stretched textures, and it gives things a really unpolished look. Anyway, I'm done with my little rant.

Windlight
Ok, this isn't officially released yet, but there's been preview viewers out for months now, and I think it's getting close to being released (even thought the last update turned my Wave into airport landing lights). I think Windlight is fantastic, and I can't wait to see what they do with it after the initial release. My reaction to the first release way back in the summer (?) was, "It looks very nice, but it's so slow!" However, it looks pretty and seems faster. I have been running the Windlight viewers exclusively since they started releasing them again, and I've been pleased with the stability and quality (although other people seem to have had much worse experiences, so I guess I'm lucky). I'm really hoping for realistic shadows soon.

There were some other features released in the past year, such as the new search (I really like being able to browse what's for sale before I teleport there), and there's probably some others I'm forgetting. The three I wrote about though were definitely the most significant. LL has pledged to move away from new features and focus on stability, so I don't know how many features we'll see in the coming year. Havok4 is getting close, and it looks like Mono might be on its way as well. There are definitely a lot of cool things they can start adding onto Windlight and Havok4 once those are released, but who knows how much of that we'll see. While I like stability and not crashing, I'm also a little disappointed that we're probably not going to see as many features coming out once the ones in the pipe are finished.

There was one minor feature I kind of like that was there for about two days back in November, I think, and then disappeared without explanation. For those two days, friends on the minimap were shown in yellow instead of green. I kind of want to put this feature on a milk carton: "If you have seen this feature, please call 555-2419. Last seen November, 2007".

And finally, if you read my previous post then you can probably infer that my computer is now back to normal working order :D

We Need More Power, Cap'n!

2008-01-25T15:28:00.000-05:00

Well, today is my first Rezday. I was thinking of inviting people to my house for a party or something, but my computer hasn't been fully functional this past week so I wasn't on SL to send out notices and things. I may still log in tonight and see if I can get something impromptu going.

So here is the story of my computer problems (which I realize is the topic of a depressingly large percentage of posts on this blog). I previously mentioned getting a new graphics card, but that I needed to get a more powerful power supply before I could use it. I got the power supply last week, but found when I got home that it didn't have the right type of connectors. All my drives (2 hard drives and 1 DVD drive) have SATA connectors, but this power supply only had 1. So I ordered some adapters that convert the more common 4-pin connector into a SATA one. They were supposed to arrive yesterday, but now look like they might not come until Monday.

At this point, I haven't said anything about why my computer isn't working right now. I can just leave the old power supply and graphics card in until I get my connectors. Yes, that is what I should have done. Being impatient, however, I decided I didn't want to wait to play with my new graphics card. The new power supply has one SATA connector, so I can plug in the hard drive with Windows and go without Linux and a DVD drive until my adapters arrive. So I begin the process of removing the old power supply. My computer is a Dell, and while they've made it really convenient and easy to add new PCI cards and drives, they obviously never expected someone to replace the power supply. Some of the cords went underneath the massive CPU fan, and turned out to be hard to remove. I first just tried pulling them through, but the plugs were too big. I had two choices at this point: remove the CPU fan to get the cords out, or cut the cords. I didn't want to risk damaging my CPU or fan, so I decided to cut the cords. This decision is why I now have computer problems ;) Ok, so I remove the old power supply and put in the new one, hook up my Windows hard drive, turn it on, and...nothing. I get a flashing cursor on a blank screen. Then I realize because I dual-boot, the boot data is probably on my Linux drive. So I unplug the Windows drive, plug in the Linux drive, turn it on, and...GRUB error. I guess I need both drives plugged in to boot, which isn't possible right now. And guess what? I can't put my old power supply back because I destroyed it XD

But wait! I can plug in my DVD drive. What can you do with a DVD drive and no hard drives? Linux Live CD! While it's annoying because I have to download and install it each time I boot, I've actually managed to play Second Life using this method. I keep finding more and more reasons why I love Linux.

So while I was writing this, I got a call that the adapters arrived, so hopefully I will have my computer fully functional soon. Now that I've been on SL for a year, I want to write a post about the new features that have been released since I started. First though, I want to get my computer working again. So the next post will either be "A Year in SL" or "How I Ended Up Completely Destroying My Computer Installing 2 Adapters".

Ravenous Moths Decimate Gorean Markets

2008-01-16T01:23:00.000-05:00

WWW.PRIMTIME.INFO NEWS SERVICE -- Latest Headlines
DATELINE: Tue Jan 15 12:34:02 2008

"Gorean slaves are being forced to borrow burlap burkahs from the Al-Andalus sim following an invasion of moths devastating silk stocks. The future of Gorean culture is uncertain.

"I'm not worried," says Master Overlord Magnitude, who asked to remain anonymous: 'The hoes can wear Darth Vader outfits as far as I'm concerned. I'm not in it for the fashion, I'm in it for being a dick.' Overlord Magnitude couldn't comment further because dinner was ready."

I bought an Nvidia 8800 GT graphics card today so that I can shoot Windlight directly into my veins. After installing it, I turned on my computer and heard a deafening high-pitched whine. From looking on the internet, it is most likely because my power supply is not providing enough power. I will hopefully fix that tomorrow.

Raft

2008-01-08T20:41:00.001-05:00

I am going to try to start doing more building/scripting. Today I built a raft and was able to get it semi-functional as a vehicle. Click the pics for bigger versions.

Congratulations

2008-01-06T20:58:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to the winners of the first Tokugawa Kumite! The tournament was divided into four sections based on rank. The first place winners were:
Novice: Kiky Lusch
Intermediate: Rae Giggan
Master: Meludo Anatine
Ancient: Hibiki Osumi

Windlight and Release Candidates Disabled

2007-12-29T15:29:00.000-05:00

From the Official Linden Blog: "If you are using our Windlight or Release Candidate viewer, you might have noticed that you are currently not able to login or download the latest version of either. We have found an issue concerning both of these viewers, that required us to disable them for the time we need to fix the problem."

Every time you log into Windlight, God kills a kitten.

Away from SL

2007-12-20T21:24:00.000-05:00

I am away from home for the holidays, and won't be able to sign on to SL until January 3rd. I thought I would be able to sign on with this laptop, since I was able to in the past (but only at about 3 fps). Apparently at some point since I last used this laptop, my hardware stopped being supported. Now it crashes whenever I try to sign in. Not that big a deal really, since I don't really have much time to spend on SL. You can still IM me and I can respond through email. I might even give out my email address or AIM/MSN if you ask. Happy Festivus everyone!

Speeding up Windlight

2007-12-05T19:22:00.000-05:00

I just discovered that if I turn on the "Hardware Skinning" option in the windlight viewer (which requires that "Basic Shaders" also be enabled), I get a fairly significant framerate increase. Where I'm currently standing, I go from about 29 fps to 40. This is having all options as low as possible, then turning on the skinning option. I am in Windows right now. The person here with me has a Mac, and says the option drops his framerate, so this might not work for everyone. I have yet to test it on Linux. Let me know how this option affects you, and what sort of system you have.

PS3 Home Preview

2007-12-02T20:13:00.000-05:00

Check out this 25 minute preview of PS3 Home. It's kind of boring, he just goes through every possible thing you can do. In some ways, it seems to be a lot like Second Life, but there are some missing features and I think it's those features that make Second Life what it is.

What's missing (I think) is user-created content. Without it, it's really just a 3d chat room where you can own a house and put furniture in it. It's true that what I just described is how a lot of people use Second Life, but it seems like most of those people aren't really ones who play other video games. I doubt many of them own a Playstation 3. I think the people that do own PS3s won't really be interested in this.

LSL Free Software License?

2007-11-19T11:33:00.000-05:00

If you haven't figured out already, I'm a pretty strong supporter of free software. I haven't really seen any LSL scripting being done under a free software license, and that got me thinking about whether existing licenses would be applicable to the SL platform, or if a new license should be written to address certain aspects specific to SL.

In Free Software Foundation's formal definition of free software, they state that all free software must have the following four freedoms (numbered starting from 0 because these people are computer scientists ;P):
-- Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
-- Freedom 1: The freedom to study and modify the program.
-- Freedom 2: The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor.
-- Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Freedoms 1 and 3 require the code to be "open source". In SL, this means the scripts must be modifiable. Here is the problem: Let's say you buy an object containing scripts with a free software license. In order for the license to be fulfilled, the scripts would need to be modifiable, which means the entire object needs to be modifiable, which shouldn't be necessary. SL currently doesn't allow the scripts inside an object to be modifiable but have the rest of the object (prims, textures, etc.) not be modifiable.

Another option is that the creator could make the object no modify and just package the script files with the object. I'm not sure if that fulfills the terms of the license, though. The scripts would be open and free to distribute, but the scripts inside the object could not be modified. With SL's current features, it seems like this is the only feasible way to do it, but it's unclear to me whether it is meeting the requirements of free software.

It seems like this might be a similar case as cell phones running open source software. The software in the phone should be modifiable and copyable, but the hardware of the phone isn't. Does anyone else have thoughts on this?

More Windlight

2007-11-14T21:30:00.000-05:00

Is that a sunset, a sunrise, or did someone just get nuked?

Also, we have found a pretty significant bug in windlight. For many, but not all, if you are in mouselook and you jump...you crash. Very weird. It happens right when you reach the top of the jump and start to fall. Unfortunately Jira is having issues and won't let me log in.

Impostors!

2007-11-14T20:43:00.000-05:00

The Windlight First Look is back. An interesting new feature is what they are calling "Avatar Impostors" which claims to lower framerate in large crowds. I was wondering what this was, and when I saw what they meant my first reaction was to start laughing:

It looks like Hibiki jumped right out of an original Playstation game and into Second Life. Apparently they just create a low-resolution sprite of the avatar and then paste that in instead of having to render the avatar.

But does it actually work? My framerate was around 24 with it on when I was taking these screenshots. I turned it off and it dropped to about 17.

Animal Groups

2007-11-13T20:34:00.000-05:00

I thought this was fun. Here are the correct ways to refer to a group of certain animals:

1. A shrewdness of apes	12. An exaltation of larks
2. A battery of barracudas	13. A troop of monkeys
3. A kaleidoscope of butterflies	14. A parliament of owls
4. A quiver of cobras	15. An ostentation of peacocks
5. A murder of crows	16. A rookery of penguins
6. A convocation of eagles	17. A prickle of porcupines
7. A charm of finches	18. An unkindness of ravens
8. A skulk of foxes	19. A shiver of sharks
9. A troubling of goldfish	20. A pod of whales
10. A smack of jellyfish	21. A descent of woodpeckers
11. A mob of kangaroos	22. A zeal of zebras

Wow

2007-11-13T15:28:00.000-05:00

This bug I posted back on May 31 was finally triaged!

Gmail's Spam Filter

2007-11-13T10:16:00.000-05:00

I think this is the first spam email that has made it through Gmail's filter and into my inbox in at least a year. You can see some of the things it does to trick the filter. Overall, I think Gmail's spam filter is very good. I currently have 1632 messages in my spam folder, and they are automatically deleted after 30 days. So Gmail gets a score of 99.939% for this past month. I've also never found a message marked as spam that was actually a legitimate email.

------------------
Subject: Your baby-maker needs to be bigger in order to perform its functions well

market, particularly the Japanese bond market, where yields morepercent since October 8, suggesting that Soros had lost $100 million of
He was torn. Should he go back to Duquesne? Or take a chance and

Do you believe in miracles? We dare say you're likely to answer negatively.
We hadn't believed, either...until the moment MegaDick was introduced!
What this wonder medicine does to a male dic'k cannot be called otherwise than a Miracle!
Just picture to yourself, that your meat stick suddenly becomes longer
and thicker and makes women tremble with desire!
It's fabulous!

So, don't miss it out, accomplish a miracle in your life with this wonder-medicine![was a link]

of Japan was tightening its monetary policy. Seeing the handwritingLike Soros, Druckenmiller, a Philadelphia native, had attracted virtually48.5 compared to 17.3 in England and 19.7 in the United States. Sorosto $10,432.75 a share. This was even larger than the 17 percent drop in
-----------------

This Fall

2007-11-08T18:36:00.000-05:00

Every so often I will go to create a new SL account to see what names I can make from the new last names. Usually I'm disappointed because all the good ones are taken. I started out this time with more disappointment, as it told me that Paper Clip, Movie Clip, Charles Darwin and Steve Wozniak were all taken. Then I got to Fall and while "Next Fall", "Last Fall" and "Snow Fall" were taken, "This Fall" was not! So I am now the proud owner of an alt named This Fall. I have no idea what I'm going to do with him, though...

On another note, I was looking up "w/e" at urbandictionary.com and the second definition was hilarious (anyone can submit a definition):

w/e

A slang used by fucktards who don't want to take the bloody effort to type "whatever", mainly because it pisses off good people like me.

Do you like cheese?
w/e
Dammit, TYPE WHATEVER, YOU DUMBFUCK!

Building a Go Board

2007-11-08T11:36:00.000-05:00

One thing I've wanted to do for a while in SL is make a Go board. The major design problem is that the game is played by placing stones on a 19x19 grid, so if I was just going to have a prim rezzed for each stone, that's theoretically 361 prims. I don't really want to make something that requires having that many prims available to use. Of course, stones aren't placed on every space in a normal game, but it's usually over 200 and games exceeding 300 moves aren't that rare. I've seen one Go board before in SL, and it just used this method.

The first idea I came up with was to have textures for each possible configuration of a small portion of the board, then repeat that to make the full board. I realized that this wasn't going to work when I started figuring out the details. First, how big do I make the sub-sections? I discovered that 2x2 is probably the biggest that is feasible, and even that requires a pretty big number of textures. Each space can be either empty, have a white stone, or have a black stone. So for 2x2 sections I'd need 3^4 textures, or 81. If I went 3x3, that becomes 19683. But I'd also need different textures for the edge and corner pieces, because the grid lines would need to end at the edges instead of sticking through. Finally, there's the problem that 2x2 sections don't fit evenly into a 19x19 board (in fact, 19 is a prime number, so no possible section would fit evenly). This means I'd also need to have some different shaped sections (like a 1x2 and 1x1) . So the final tally is:

- 81 textures for the middle 2x2 sections
- 81 textures for the side 2x2 sections
- 81 textures for the corner 2x2 sections
- 9 textures for side 1x2 sections
- 3 textures for the corner 1x1 section

So 255 textures, plus I wouldn't even be saving that many prims. I'd need a 9x9 grid of 2x2 sections to make the 18x18 board, that's 81 prims. Then another 19 for the edge to make it a 19x19 grid. And I haven't even mentioned that all these different sizes and types of sections would make for a coding nightmare.

So the solution I'm considering now is to have one prim for the whole board, and have the board send an HTTP request to a web server that would take the current board configuration and send back a texture for the entire board. The texture would need to be generated on the fly, as storing all possible textures is literally impossible (even if I could store a texture on a single atom, there aren't enough atoms in the universe to store them all).

This last option seems the most feasible, even though it involves some things I haven't done before, such as HTTP requests with LSL. And there's also the issue of the HTTP server. I can run it on my own computer when I'm building this, but unless I'm just going to use the Go board for personal use, I'd need a dedicated machine to run the server.

If anyone has any insights about this or other methods, please let me know.

3D Desktop!

2007-11-05T13:29:00.000-05:00

I've got to go see The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D just so I can get the glasses and have a 3D desktop:

New Toys!

2007-10-30T18:12:00.000-04:00

Well, I think I've solved the problems I've been having with my roommate's internet usage making C:SI dueling impossible. One solution mentioned was taking turns. I suppose that would work but as a computer scientist any solution that involves social interaction is always a last resort :P I ended up upgrading to a better router. It supports the QoS protocol, which basically lets me reserve a portion of the bandwidth for a specific program (like SL). Actually, I haven't had to set this up yet, as it seems to have fixed the problem by just having more capacity to queue and send out packets. I'd say this is the perfect solution for a computer scientist, since it involves expensive new toys and the opportunity to throw around fancy jargon like "protocol".

The long awaited C:SI update came out yesterday! But I haven't yet gotten the change to try it out yet. The infamous block bug is advertised as fixed. It will be interesting to see if this helps or hurts me, lol. There is a new feature to challenge someone to a duel. If the person accepts your duel, then your sword will not harm anyone but them until the duel is over. I'm actually not sure when I'd want to use this. I don't think I've ever been fighting and thought, "I really wish I couldn't hurt anyone but this person I'm fighting with." But as I was typing that, I remembered being accidentally killed while an innocent bystander in Shrouded ;) The new duel feature reminded me of something I was thinking about a while ago. If I ever get up the courage to dive into the SL Viewer code, something I want to do is create a sort of "duel mode" that will only render you and your opponent. My framerate drops about 5 fps for every person on the screen, so I think that would help a lot. Another great new feature is practice mode, which turns off damage on your sword. I think this is something I will use a lot when I'm teaching students. The problem with doing drills is that someone would drop dead after a little bit.

Not Again!

2007-10-24T10:42:00.000-04:00

Gmail finally has IMAP support! I have been waiting for this for years.

On another note, I am once again having problems with extremely high lag in SL (ping times are 1000 - 2000 msec). This time it's not due to the Wrath of God, but rather to my roommate using bittorrent. Yes, I could do things like disable port forwarding on the router so that bittorrent doesn't work anymore, but I'd feel guilty doing something like that. I mean, we all split the cost of the internet connection, so he has as much right to use it as I do. If anyone has any suggestions for how to improve this, I'd like to hear. I've been trying to look into possible ways of limiting the bandwidth bittorrent can use, but I haven't been able to figure out how.

24

2007-10-09T11:37:00.000-04:00

It's my birthday today! I liked having my age be a prime number, but now I have to wait 6 years until that will happen again. I wont have to wait quite that long to have interesting ages, though, because the year before that, my age will be a perfect number (a hyperperfect number, even!); the year before that, it will be a powerful number; the year before that, it will be a deficient number (ok, so most of the ages I've been have been deficient numbers); and the year before that (next year), my car insurance will go down, as will the price of renting a car.

I had a sad realization today, though. The last time my age was a sublime number, I was too young to realize it, and now I will have to wait quite a while for that to happen again.

Numbers

2007-10-03T22:16:00.001-04:00

I was wondering about the numbers involved in creating a life-size Earth in Second Life, so I did some calculations. It would require 7,782,984 sims. That would cost $13,036,498,200 (13 billion) initially, and then $2,295,980,280 (2 billion) a month or $27,551,763,360 (27 billion) a year. Assuming each sim is run on a separate computer, that would be about 18,834,821 kWh of electricity. If Linden Labs became it's own US state, it would be ranked 36th (above New Mexico and below Idaho) in electricity consumption. The current size of SL is about 1/5 the size of Rhode Island. If SL continues to grow at the rate it grew between July and August 2007, it will reach the size of the Earth in 711,149 years. By that time, there will be 501,087,718,847 residents, so probably about 3,276 unique users.

The Future of Video Games

2007-10-02T08:30:00.000-04:00

I was reading this article about the next 25 years of video games. It talked about PS3 Home (which is Sony's attempt at competing with Second Life, or more probably with imvu) like it was some new type of entity that has never been seen before. "Sometime in the Spring of '08 Sony will break ground on the kind of virtual world that has been predicted by, well, about 40 percent of the science-fiction stories written in the last 50 years." I guess if PS3 Home will "break ground" on these virtual worlds, then Second Life "acquired the building permit"? And then it gets worse: "...but even if PS3 Home dies on the vine, it will, at worst, serve as the blueprint the next virtual world is built from. It could be the Model-T of what could, generations later, turn into something close to The Matrix." I think that, at worst, it will be remembered as that Second Life rip-off that sucked and no one ever used. Anyway, the article is pretty interesting despite the author's ignorance of certain things. He also did one of my biggest pet peeves by saying about Spore "They're planning on half a million stars with millions of planets orbiting. When we say 'infinite,' we mean it." Actually, you don't mean it, because you just clearly stated finite numbers. The worst is when people use the term "literally" when they really mean exactly the opposite. I mean, if you were literally so scared you jumped out of your skin, you wouldn't be talking to me right now, would you?

And now for something completely different

Crackbook

2007-10-01T17:20:00.000-04:00

Some people have put together a hilarious parody of Facebook. Make sure you see the news feed, applications, profile, and real profile.

Robby Wins

2007-09-28T23:20:00.000-04:00

I went into the Beta Grid to test the C:SI swords with the new Havoc engine. The following error appears when slashing: "Unable to create requested object - Parse failure." This happened with my Musashi Black Rose and Ashes Cursed Spirit, and Kasumi said it happened with her Archanox sword. However, the Wave Katana didn't produce this error (hence this post's title). Regardless of the error, all the swords could damage another avatar, however only the Wave could do damage to the practice dummy I have, which uses collision detection. Kicks did damage and produced no error messages with all the swords, but they didn't push the opponent. We were in a sim with llPushObject restricted, though.

Jumps are different. You can't move around as much while you're in the air. The effect this has on dueling is that when you jump slash, there is no way to avoid landing right behind your opponent (if they don't move) instead of far away from them like people often do.

For all the swords, the avatar didn't move during a special. They still did damage if someone was nearby, and Kasumi actually managed to hurt herself with one.

There was one bug we found that was hard to reproduce. After dueling, both of us were sunken into the ground. We fixed it by teleporting each other. During the next fight, I sunk so far into the ground that I got stuck in my falling animation and couldn't move. I tried to reproduce this by running around, jumping, and doing sword actions while out of mouselook, but it wasn't happening.

Google's Virtual World

2007-09-27T08:33:00.000-04:00

It looks like Google may be launching their own virtual world by the end of this year. It will probably use the data from Google Earth, i.e. be a virtual replica of the real world. It will be interesting to see what Google does with it. Since it doesn't look like there will sword fighting any time soon, I probably won't abandon Second Life, but knowing Google they probably have some pretty cool stuff planned. At the same time, it appears that Linden Labs is working on opening up Second Life as much as possible:

"We imagine a future where Second Life is able grow beyond the borders of Linden Lab. We see regions running on open source, alternative simulators. We see web services that allow people to build mash-ups of Second Life and the Web. We see organizations being able to integrate their members and their members’ avatars. This is the vision of future Second Life Grid that we want to develop."

So it's possible we will see a future where the best parts of Google's new virtual world are integrated into Second Life.

Google is also going to announce on November 5 a new API that will be similar to Facebook's application API. Basically, web developers will be able to leverage social aspects of Google's tools such as Orkut and Google Talk on their own webpages. This is pretty huge, as it has the implication of turning the entire internet into a social network if the API is used extensively. The Google Talk API, for example, could be used to easily create an area in a webpage where everyone currently looking at that page could chat with each other. Imagine if this new social internet was completely accessible from and integrated into Google's virtual world. I think the next 5 years should be pretty interesting.

p.s.: Didn't Google try to buy Linden Labs earlier this year?

Jokes

2007-09-26T11:01:00.000-04:00

I found a list of computer science jokes. I was a bit disturbed by the guy pointing at me and laughing.

Quality Metrics

2007-09-20T22:21:00.000-04:00

Linden Labs now has a page showing Service Quality metrics. Right now, it just shows a bar graph of planned and unplanned interruptions since March. The trend doesn't look good. Hopefully the fact that they have made this information publicly available indicates that they hope and expect to improve it.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

2007-09-19T17:09:00.001-04:00

I've never been very good at pirate talk. Let me give it a try.

"I can burn you a copy of Spiderman 3 if you want."

p.s.: I realize the bold I added in my last post isn't very visible. I added underlining to make it stand out more. If you missed it, my final comment may not have made much sense.

ToS Problem Resolved

2007-09-18T21:05:00.000-04:00

Ok, I got my alt working again by going to live chat support a third time. I spoke with "Patrick" again, but this time convinced him to actually fix my account. I got this amusing email when they fixed both of my accounts. I emphasized my favorite phrase in bold.

Dear Colin Kiernan,

Greetings from Second Life. Occasionally, Linden Lab needs to determine the cause of bugs, simulator slowdowns, and various other occurrences that you may have experienced while in Second Life.

While fixing a bug, we were able to trace it to something that your avatar may have been doing, or something they may have seen. For this reason, we have disabled your ability to log in to Second Life while we examine your logs and try to determine the cause.

Your account will be returned shortly (usually within a 1/2 hour), and no changes will be made to your character or account other than those required to resolve the problem.

Your account will be restored as soon as we resolve the specific issue, and we will notify you via email when that happens. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please feel free to contact us if you have further questions.

Best Wishes,

Linden Lab

"Sir, we have tracked the problem with your account to last Friday, when your avatar witnessed a double homocide involving a pregnant woman and a kitten. It was extremely traumatic."

Comments from the Official Linden Blog

2007-09-18T18:55:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I wonder what percentage of Linden Lab's employees take anti-depressants.

"…we value free expression, bla bla bla"

"How about the account history page NOT updating for hours…a problem that exists since last thursday?

Good morning Linden…hope you guys/gals had a good rest - at least your sleep seems to be very sound !"

"It’s posts like these that make me laugh quietly to myself."

"WOW…… right now i can’t remember any of the bugs i was working around all the time that HASN’T been fixed!!! GREAT WORK!!!"

"You know this may be alittle OFF TOPIC - but you keep on with this new CRAP! I WANT YOU TO FIX THE SOFTWARE FIRST ! I have crashed 24 times today - get that LL 24 friggin times. This time EVERY NIGHT (LISTEN NOW) EVERY NIGHT I start jerking and jagging and stuttering and slobbering all over myself. I push 8md bandwidth !!! HEAR THAT LL ???? It’s not on MY SIDE> I am damn tired of it. You charge me $9.95 every friggin month “ON TIME” cause that’s the only software you HAVE that WORKS!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am sick and tired of friggin posting here cause you never fix crap - you never answer OR resolve “BUG REPORTS” you do nothing but introduce new crap that screws things up more. You are loosing premium members and “gaining” newbies that don’t pay crap!!! I am sick and tired of you not addressing the issues brought up in the blog replies. You whistle and bell us and give us a story. LL you have some SERIOUS ISSUES to address. Some of which are SECURITY ISSUES>which I have told you about the bugs in your software and you ignore. You take our money - on time. When your “cracked” software allows avatars to poof objects and manipulate other avatars and access my funds - you have a serious problem -YET YOU PAY NO ATTENTION TO IT OR ANSWER MY REPORTS!!!! That’s “good” business! You pay absolutly no attention to “bug” or “abuse” reports except send me an email. I can use your online support fine “that works” half the time to waste 70 minutes to get no where and cut off. Your relationship with PayPal - well let’s just say PayPAl don’t like you. Straight up!!! Everytime I do PayPal I call to call you - on MY DIME to set it straight - let me hear you explain that LL. It does get straight but it costs me another 5 bucks long distance to do that. How many lindens it that LL? You can remove this post if you don’t like the truth."

"/me laughs at yet another half-done pseudo-effort of problem solving."

These are all from the past few weeks or so. Some of the best ones were from the Wednesday maintenance posts back when they shut down the grid every two weeks. I might go back and look through those if I find myself with nothing better to do.

Can LL change anything without a bug?

2007-09-18T16:07:00.000-04:00

LL made a change to the Terms of Service today. The nature of the change isn't the topic here, although it appears to be beneficial. The problem is I now can't log in to SL as I have to agree to the new ToS, but the dialog is stuck on "loading..." and won't let me choose to agree. I have tried restarting the client. Grr...

Update: I went to the support page on the website and connected to live chat. "Jake" asked what my problem was, I told him, he said "I will fix this" and then a few minutes later "fixed". I successfully logged in (I didn't see the ToS box). So...I avoided agreeing to the new ToS...?

Update 2: I am having the same problem with my alt (who I haven't introduced yet, that post is coming), but since my alt doesn't have a premium account, I can't use live chat. I went back to my normal account and back into live chat, telling them I was having the problem with an alt. This time "Patrick" said they knew about that problem and were working on it. I asked if there was a work-around, and he said they were asking people to just wait a few minutes until it loads. I think I have been waiting close to 10 minutes now. Where is "Jake"!?

Tagging Inventory Items in SL

2007-09-13T11:51:00.000-04:00

My inventory in SL is a nightmare, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who has trouble keeping it organized. I just sumbitted a feature request to Jira to add tagging support to objects, as seen in Gmail and many other services.

I think a very useful feature that seems easy to implement is to allow tagging of inventory items. By tagging, I mean assigning one or more keywords to objects. This can be seen in many of Google's services such as Gmail. This feature would make it much easier for a resident to find items in his/her inventory, which can be rather difficult for residents with large inventories.

Currently, a resident must either spend a lot of time organizing everything into folders so they can easily find what they or looking for. Otherwise, they need to remember the name of the object they want, which is sometimes hard.

Assigned tags would be transferred along with items, so that people wouldn't have to tag each new item they got, which isn't any better than having to move it into the proper folder. Ideally, the tags would be pre-assigned by the creators and previous owners. This would make it much easier to find specific items. For example, I might have a shirt with "mens", "goth", "shirt", "short-sleeved", "black". If I felt like wearing a goth outfit, I could just look at all the items in my inventory with the "goth" tag. Maybe I want to show off my new tattoo, then I can search for the "short-sleeved" tag. There could also be tags that SL maintains, such as "added to inventory in the last 30 days" or "rezzed/attached/worn in the past 7 days", etc.

If you think this is a good idea, go and vote for it and then spread the word!

Wha?

2007-09-10T16:37:00.000-04:00

It occurred to me how strange certain computer geek terms must sound to outsiders.

"Gooey" programming?
You mounted a hard drive?
You used "eunuchs" for your project!?

I'm sure I'll think of a lot more.

Google Sets

2007-09-10T10:49:00.001-04:00

There is an experimental Google project called Google Sets that is fun to play with. You give it a few words or phrases, and then it comes up with a list of related items. For example, if I give it "red", "green" and "blue", it generates a long list of colors (and "unleashed07", for some reason). As the list goes down, the terms seem to be less and less related. I can see a way this might be useful. Let's say you don't like iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media Player. Type those into Google Sets, and it will give you a ton of other music playing programs, such as my favorite, Amarok (only for Linux...until Amarok 2 comes out). I was also able to stump it. I gave it "Oda", "Takeda", and "Shimazu", which are three clans from Sengoku era Japan. I expected other clans such as Mori, Uesugi, Hojo or Imagawa, but instead I got nothing.

Comparing Second Life on Windows and Linux

2007-09-09T21:13:00.000-04:00

Here's something I found interesting. I logged into Second Life a couple times when I was still running Ubuntu, and I noticed something about my framerate. (Unfortunately, Blogspot appears to convert any image uploaded to a jpeg, which makes it hard to see the individual red dots in the screenshots.)

You can't see the dots very well, but there are two distinct columns on either side. On my old computer, I used SL in both Windows XP and Ubuntu, but I never saw this. My framerate is oscillating between about 35 and 42 fps, forming those two columns. Usually the distribution is more chaotic. It might have something to do with the dual-core CPU, or could just be that I'm running it on a much newer Ubuntu installation without a lot of other software installed. I thought maybe it had something to do with the window manager, so I ran SL without a window manager to see what it would look like.

Now we see a much more steady framerate. It also looks like this if I switch to fullscreen mode, but am still running a window manager (GNOME).

Now that I'm running Windows, I decided to do the same experiment. There's no point in comparing the actual framerates, as I wasn't always in the same place when I took these screenshots (but I did make sure I wasn't looking at any avatars or anything that was moving and might cause fluctuation).

In windowed mode, there's is a lot of fluctuation, and it tends to be all over the place. What's shown here is perhaps a little more extreme than the norm.

Fullscreen is better, showing slightly less fluctuation than Linux in windowed mode.

On a side note, I have probably used SL about equal amounts in both Ubuntu and Windows XP, so I'm going to write a short comparison for anyone who's interested. For me, it always feels smoother in Ubuntu, although when I actually look at the framerate there doesn't seem to be any significant difference. The Linux viewer also seems more stable. A downside to Ubuntu is that there is no support for video playback in the Linux viewer (which is why it is still tagged as 'alpha'), but I don't need that very often. One thing that always annoyed me in Ubuntu was the sound. I won't go into the technical details, but there are two options. If I just run SL normally, the sound is delayed about 1 second from when I should hear it. This is kind of annoying, and might actually hurt my dueling ability since a lot of my reaction is based on sound. If I edit the script that runs SL by commenting out a certain line, the sound delay is fixed, but there is a side effect that SL doesn't allow anything else to play a sound. There are times when someone will post a youtube link or something like that, and I can't watch it without logging out. It also makes it so I can't listen to music while I'm using SL, which is something I do a lot.

Chat with Dell Tech Support

2007-09-09T18:06:00.000-04:00

Here are parts of my conversation with Dell tech support. I saved the chat log, but that turned out to be unnecessary as they emailed it to me a few minutes later.

09/07/2007 06:33:15PM	Session Started with Agent (Harshavardhan_77570)
09/07/2007 06:33:27PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "Thank you for contacting Dell XPS Premium Support. My name is Harshavardhan and my rep ID number is 0177570. How may I assist you today?"
09/07/2007 06:34:08PM	Colin Kern: "I have just installed Windows XP on my XPS 410, but ethernet and sound doesn't work."
09/07/2007 06:34:22PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "I will assist you with the issue."
09/07/2007 06:34:40PM	Colin Kern: "Thank you."
09/07/2007 06:36:29PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "When was the first time you had this problem ?"

Notice it was a about 2 minutes of silence after I stated my problem before he asked that question. Also notice I have already answered it in my initial statement.

09/07/2007 06:37:37PM	Colin Kern: "I bought the computer from Dell with Ubuntu Linux installed, and everything worked fine then. But I have just installed Windows XP, and the sound and ethernet don't work."
09/07/2007 06:39:02PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "Have you made any software or hardware changes?"

Umm....I'd say I made the biggest possible software change? Also, notice the almost 2 minute delay again.

09/07/2007 06:40:35PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "Have you tried any steps from your end to resolve the issue?"
09/07/2007 06:41:53PM	Colin Kern: "I looked in the device manager to try to diagnose the devices, and they did not appear in the list, so I believe the problem is that I don't have the drivers."
09/07/2007 06:42:15PM	Colin Kern: "I looked at Dell's support website, but was confused as to which drivers I need to download."

I like that I was asked what I had already tried, instead of the normal tech support experience where they take you painfully through everything you've already tried in mind-numbing step-by-step instructions.

09/07/2007 06:43:13PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "All right."
09/07/2007 06:43:34PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "Can I take the control of your system to check with the issue?"

Now, if you read my previous post, you know that I put a wireless card in the computer. But he didn't know this, so I don't know how he was expecting to be able to connect to my computer. I had already told him one of my problems was with ethernet device. Luckily, I did have the wireless card. The Dell software to do this failed the first time, but it worked on a second attempt. After connecting, there was a delay of a few minutes, followed by him opening Device Manager, then another long delay. A total of 12 minutes after he connected to my computer:

09/07/2007 07:13:59PM

Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "You need to install the drivers on the computer."

I waited for more, since I had stated above that I was pretty sure this was the problem but that I didn't know which ones to download. I finally asked where to get them and he said he'd give them to me; then navigated to the driver download page and began downloading. It was going to take 40 minutes, so I told him I had a slow connection and that if he just gave me the URLs to the drivers, I could download them and install them on my own. He gave them to me, and even asked me if I wanted him to call me the next day to see if it worked. I told him I'd just contact tech support if it didn't. I guess this was a pretty good tech support experience, compared to others I've had. From beginning to end it was 1 hour and 15 minutes, but during a lot of that I was waiting for a response, and could watch TV.

Finally!

2007-09-09T10:38:00.000-04:00

Ok, here's how I finally got Windows on my computer.

In Ubuntu, I was able to apply the SP2 update to the files I had copied from the CD using Wine. The problem was with burning it back onto another CD. I extracted the Windows boot image, but it wasn't in a normal format, and as much as I searched on the internet, I couldn't find a Linux tool that could do it. I burned a few duds that contained the data but weren't bootable. The next thing to try was running trial versions of Nero or Roxio with Wine. Neither would run with Wine, so it was finally time to install Windows XP on my laptop. I got back to the point I was at before, and then got the trial version of Roxio. But guess what? The trial version doesn't allow the option I needed. I tried Nero and found out the same thing. So it was back to the drawing board. I finally discovered a program called nLite, which does everything for you. I downloaded it and had my slipstreamed CD within fifteen minutes.

So I went to install Windows with my new CD...and I still got the blue screen of death. The error was different, though. I wrote down the important information (some hex numbers) and then started searching around on the internet. I finally found out what the problem is on the Dell support website. My motherboard settings were set to "RAID on", and I needed to switch it to "RAID autodetect/ATA". When I went to change it in my motherboard, I noticed it said that switching could decrease performance, even if I only had one disk (if you don't know, RAID is a method of using multiple disks to either increase performance or backup data). It's interesting that they had this option set for Linux, but it doesn't work with Windows. I wonder if I should try to get a RAID driver and switch back to it. Anyway, once I had changed the setting, I was able to install Windows without a problem. Unfortunately, not everything worked when I booted it up.

The first thing I noticed was that I had no network devices. I noticed later that I also had no sound. The problem was obviously with drivers, but upon getting to Dell's driver download page I couldn't figure out which I needed to get out of the about a hundred that were listed. They were categorized, but there were still something like 5 for networking and 8 for audio. At this point, I was using my laptop to look for the drivers with the intention to transfer them with a USB flash drive. I decided it would be easier if I took my wireless card out of my old computer and put it in this one. I did that and then started running Windows Update. There was an updated driver for my wireless card that I selected to have downloaded, but when got to installing it, there was a flash of BSOD and my computer restarted. Windows booted up, BSOD after a few seconds, computer restarts, repeat. I got into safe mode and uninstalled the wireless card. Rebooted and still had the problem. I tried rolling back the driver, but it said it didn't have any previous versions stored. Instead of spending who knows how long figuring out how to fix this, I just reinstalled Windows. After this, I was very frustrated and just wanted to get things working. I went to Dell's support website and was able to chat online with a technician who eventually gave me the drivers I needed. Look forward to another post containing this chat session. So after getting the drivers, everything works, and I am being careful to not let Windows download that updated driver. I had a similar problem with my old computer, where it always wanted to download an updated driver for my sound chip, but it would always just break sound and I'd have to roll back.

So hopefully this will be the last of these types of posts for a while, as I can now enjoy a working computer. On another note, I have 2 other posts I want to do, and I'm thinking of a 3rd. I'll try to space them out, maybe save some for tomorrow. But expect more posts in the near future.

The Void

2007-09-09T10:27:00.000-04:00

Here I am in the void after sitting on something. I'm sure this has happened to everybody before. This time was strange, though, because I seem to have taken someone else's attachments with me. You can see my Wave on my back...so what's that other sword I'm sitting on? and that necklace thing? I've never seen that before in my life. That green/red glow (mostly red in this shot) is the multitool that most people have. It does that when it gets rezzed and not attached for some reason. All my attachments seem fine, so I can only assume that belongs to someone else as well. When I returned from the void, I looked around for these accessories but didn't see anyone wearing them. Very odd.

Freezing & Crashing

2007-09-08T16:48:00.001-04:00

There was an article today in the Second Life Herald that had an interesting graph of some data from the recent key metrics release. It showed that about 24% of sessions are ended "abnormally". I'm not sure exactly what this includes...obviously crashes or freezes. I find this number surprisingly high, as I would estimate 5% of my sessions, at most, end in freezes or crashes. Since my internet problems have started, however, I'm sure I've been contributing to this number from all the times my connection has gone out on me while I was logged in. This makes me wonder how many of these abnormally ended sessions are actually not the fault of Second Life, but something on the user's end.

How often do you freeze or crash? Are there other ways your sessions ends "abnormally"?

p.s.: I am writing this from my new computer which is now running Windows XP. I was finally successful in getting it installed, and I may write about it. Right now, though, it's something I just want to forget.

The Fate of Second Life

2007-09-05T09:50:00.000-04:00

Will Second Life still be here next year? In five years? To answer this question, let's first take a look at Linden Labs financial situation.

It's important to realize that revenue is not profit. Many people see that Second Life is generating millions of dollars a month, and then don't understand why LL doesn't upgrade their network infrastructure and servers to be able to support the growing population. The fact is that LL doesn't have millions of dollars to spend, because the cost of maintaining the grid at its current state is extremely high. An article published in the Second Life Herald this summer looked at the sources of income for LL and their costs, and found two important facts. First, that while LL is making a profit, it is a very small one; and second, that about 1/3 of their revenue comes from selling servers (private islands), and this doesn't include the monthly fees of those private islands, but just the setup fees. This means that unless LL significantly changes either their sources of revenue or their costs, Second Life is only profitable as long as it continues to grow at its current rate. This is basically what caused the dot-com bubble and burst. Internet companies assumed that the growth of the internet seen in the mid-late '90s would continue at that rate indefinitely. There are only so many people in the world, so obviously the growth is going to have to slow down at some point. For the dot-com companies, this happened around 2000. When will it happen for Second Life?

It was around the time I started SL that so many companies began experimenting with marketing in Second Life. If Second Life became an effective marketing tool, LL might be able to get support from companies to boost their profits. LL announced in their blog today the launch of a website focused on assisting companies and other organizations in creating a presence in Second Life. However, I began to see articles popping up a few weeks ago (I get email from Google whenever news stories with the term "Second Life" appear) reporting that many companies are now abandoning their Second Life projects. I think at this point it's too early to tell if and how companies will use Second Life.

There is an article I read earlier this summer I found intersting. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find it again. The author speculated that LL might not care about Second Life continuing for years to come. Why? He saw the trend of LL releasing new features one after the other while the quality of the grid degraded, and recognized a strategy that has been used by companies before. The idea is basically that a company spends all their money creating features (which they patent) and don't care about the actual product failing. Other companies will create their own versions of the product, and now the original company will be able to collect royalties on their patents. So in the case of Second Life, it might fail but if anyone else creates a virtual world with, for example, integrated voice chat, LL will collect royalties. The caveat to this theory is that LL doesn't appear to be patenting like crazy. I personally don't think this is what's going on, but you never know.

From what I've seen, it doesn't look good for Linden Labs, but I don't think this means the end of Second Life. Even if Linden Labs loses all its money, declares bankruptcy, and the grid is shut down, there is still the open source viewer and OpenSim. People will start creating their own grids using OpenSim. It's even likely that the employees of Linden Labs would start contributing to the open source projects (I can only assume they are as obsessed with playing SL as all the normal residents are). But these new grids won't all be linked together in a monolithic "main grid" like the current SL. Instead, there will be numerous grids for different purposes: A C:SI grid, a Gorean grid, an underwater basket weaving grid, etc. I think this is a good thing. Smaller grids are cheaper and easier to maintain. Also, because both the client and server are open source, each grid can have specialized viewers and server code for whatever service they are providing. In fact, I think that once the OpenSim project becomes more mature, what I've just described will happen regardless of whether the main grid goes down or not. I think that people will want to specialize the software to fit their needs, as has happened with almost every open source project out there.

But it's expensive to buy server machines and rent enough bandwidth to maintain your own grid. It seems like these new grids would have to charge lots of money to stay running. If you look at Second Life now, though, there are tons of private sims that people have provided free of charge, and those sims are pretty expensive.

Still there are some other problems that will have to be addressed. For example, what happens to our accounts? Will we have separate accounts for each grid we want to log on to? Perhaps someone will maintain an account server that the grids can talk to, so that we can maintain one account across all the grids. What will happen with money? Will we revert back to a pure barter system (I'll give you this exploding egg for that dancing cow)?

Regardless of these problems, I think the future of Second Life is bright, even if LL goes out of business.

Monkey Wrench

2007-09-04T20:37:00.000-04:00

I went to the "Technology Solutions Center" on campus to buy Windows XP today (see my previous post), but it turns out I have to order on their website and wait for shipping; they don't keep it in stock. Being impatient, I started looking for alternative methods of getting an install CD of Windows XP with SP2 (other than pirating it). I came across this, which I am going to try. Basically, it involves copying the contents of the install CD into a folder, downloading the SP2 update and applying it to the folder, then burning a new CD. First, I am going to try doing it on my new computer in Ubuntu, using Wine and other tools. I would love to be able to say I took an old Windows XP CD and created a (legal?) up-to-date CD using Linux. If I fail (which is likely), the backup plan is to use my laptop and create the CD in Windows. That will be more annoying because I use Ubuntu on my laptop and so I will have to backup files, install Windows, create the CD, then reinstall Ubuntu, i.e., to get Windows on my desktop, which has Ubuntu, I have to install Windows on my laptop, which I want Ubuntu on, so that I can install Windows on my desktop, and then install Ubuntu back on my laptop.

Worse than Dial-up?

2007-09-03T19:13:00.000-04:00

It's story time again. This one is about the horrible internet connection I've been living with all summer.

For the past year, we had Verizon DSL, which was fine, although rather slow (downloads were about 90 KB/s on average). The problems started towards the beginning of the summer during a lightning storm. I was at my computer, on SL, and there was a popping noise accompied by my computer restarting. I don't remember there being a lightning strike or anything at that moment, but my only guess is that it was a power surge. When my computer finished booting (thank god it booted, the popping noise was not unlike that of a capacitor taking on too much charge), I noticed the internet was not working. I went down to the basement and saw that all the lights were off on the DSL modem, except for the power light which was flashing, and all the router's lights were off. I unplugged them and plugged them back in, tried other outlets around the house, still the same thing. I called Verizon, they sent a new modem, and I bought a new router.

With the new equipment, we could get back online, but the internet was unreliable. We kept losing our connection (dsl light on the modem would flash green, which means it isn't getting a signal from the ISP). It would come on and off, sometimes just for a few minutes, other times for hours at a time. Also, when it was on it was about half the speed as it used to be. I made multiple frustrating calls to Verizon tech support. Finally I convinced one of them that the problem couldn't be fixed by trivial methods such as turning off the modem and turning it back on, but that there was actually a more serious problem. They put in an order for a technician to come out and find the problem.

The technician came out and said that the line going out of our house needed replacing. You'd think he would then go ahead and replace it, but that would be wrong. Instead, he set up another date for someone to come out and fix it. Are these people really so specialized that one person is trained to diagnose a problem, but then someone else needs to actually fix it? So the line was replaced, and I hoped everything would finally work. Wrong again. The speed seems better, although still fluctuated, and the internet still goes on and off (notice I'm switched to present tense, as this is still the current situation). I didn't bother calling Verizon again, as it's like pulling teeth to get them to do anything other than the basic troubleshooting steps they always go through. Also, I'm now fairly sure the problem is with the internal wiring in the house. Fixing that is something Verizon probably wouldn't cover.

Obviously, this makes SL rather painful to play, which is why I haven't been around as much this summer. Let's take a look.

Now, it's not always like this, just when it's downloading something. So it's like this for maybe 5 - 10 minutes (remember, slow connection) after I teleport somewhere or log in, and maybe 30 seconds whenever a new person arrives. If you're not sure what a ping time of 6476 msec means, it means that if I push a command like 'w' to walk forward, I won't actually move forward until ~6.5 seconds later. The high packet loss rate ensures that a lot of my key presses never even make it to the server...but of course I don't know that until 6.5 seconds later. Add to this the sporadic total loss of internet connectivity, and you have a pretty hostile environment.

Things will finally be fixed when we switch to Comcast cable internet. They are scheduled to install it on September 13th.

How I found C:SI

2007-09-03T17:01:00.000-04:00

In response to Robby's post, I'm going to tell the story of how I found C:SI, which is actually linked to how I found Second Life, even though I was on SL for a month before coming to C:SI.

The person who showed me SL was my (at the time) girlfriend. I had read a book called Snow Crash, which is a sci-fi book from the early '90s that describes the future of the internet as basically Second Life with virtual reality (in the book it's called the Metaverse, which happens to be the name of a newspaper distributed in SL). Anyway, I had lent it to my girlfriend who liked it a lot, and her Dad had mentioned SL to her (he doesn't play it, but he had read articles about it). She logged in to try it out, told me about it, and then the next day, January 25, 2007, I got my account. She logged in with me and we spent about an hour wandering around as newbies. After that, she never logged in again. She was disappointed that it wasn't exactly like the Metaverse from Snow Crash, and that she couldn't be exactly like the main character, who is the self-proclaimed greatest sword fighter in the world. Also, she recognized it was something she could get obsessed with to the point that it would consume her life. Unlike me and everyone else I know in SL, for which it HAS consumed their lives, she was able to get out while she still could.

I kept coming back, though. Until C:SI a month later, I spent all my time at a place called the Shelter, which is a dance club for newbies. I think what interested me about SL was the social aspect of it. I started graduate school a year ago in a place I had never lived before. All my friends from high school and college were hours away, so I didn't have any friends close by. SL was a place where I could make friends, which is hard when you aren't living in a dorm anymore and just going to campus for classes. One day at the Shelter, a girl showed up with a katana on her back. "Maybe this is more like Snow Crash than I thought," I thought. I asked her where she got it and she gave me a landmark to Samurai Island. I went there, was confused (I don't think I'd bought anything before in SL), and left.

I went back to the Shelter for a while, but I kept thinking I wanted to try the sword fighting. I don't remember exactly what prompted me to actually go out and try again, I think I was just bored one day. I ended up at Bare Rose (I don't remember how, maybe I searched for "katana"?), and asked one of the people working there where to buy a sword. She showed me where they sell them, and I ended up buying a Cursed Spirit. She also gave me a landmark to Shrouded.

I unpacked the sword, read the instructions, and tried swinging it around for a while. Then I went to Shrouded and watched some people fighting. I later realized one of them was Shidji (you can't forget a scary robotic death woman), but I don't remember who the others were. It didn't take long to realize there were clans, and that one should join a clan. I came back the next day and asked someone about joining a clan. That person happened to be Xiang Hifeng (or Kasumi as she is more recently known) who had just started Oda. I joined Oda and the rest, if you'll pardon the cliche, is history.

Fighting against a Naginata

2007-09-02T12:11:00.000-04:00

I'm going to expand on my comment here about the naginata in C:SI.

First, I'll just post the comment here:

Things have changed with the naginata since I started C:SI back in February. It used to be generally believed that someone with a sword fighting someone with a nagi would usually win, unless the person with the nagi was much more experienced. Now, though, people seem to think that the nagi is stronger in general. I’m not sure why this is. It could be that people such as Mayan and Jane actually advanced the art of the naginata, so people are better with it now. But it could also be that people just aren’t taught how to fight against it. It’s been awhile since I’ve fought a nagi, so I can’t say which I think is true, but I used to be able to fight pretty well against nagis. You definitely can’t win if you do the exact same thing you’d do against a katana, but if you adapt I don’t remember there being any advantage to having a nagi.

The two main strengths of the naginata are range and power. Its weakness is speed. A basic idea that can be applied to any fight is that you want to try to take advantage of weaknesses while trying to eliminate strengths. There really isn't a way to take away the power advantage of the naginata, but you can take away the range advantage easily. As long as you stay within katana range of your opponent, then it doesn't matter that they have a longer range. Once you are in range, you can easily use your speed to get in strikes whenever they lower their guard. Unfortunately, most people won't tank against a katana if they are using a naginata. Still, you can catch people off guard by trying to stay close. I think they expect the opponent to try to stay away from them, but doing that would allow the range advantage to come into play.

I think I'll stop here and try to fight against some nagis when I can get back on SL, then post a follow up here of what I learn. Most of my experience fighting naginatas was a while ago, when it was more a sort of novelty. I don't think at that time anyone used it as their main weapon or considered it their specialty. It was more that people were just trying it out for fun because it was different.

The Circle of Life

2007-09-02T11:14:00.000-04:00

I broke my computer last week. I was moving my memory into another slot to see if it would stop making the annoying noise it has been making, but something went wrong. I built this computer myself, meaning that the inside is a massive jungle of IDE and power cables, mostly centered over my memory slots. As a result, I couldn't see the slot very well and was doing most of the work my feel, which turned out to be a bad idea. I thought the memory was in all the way, but it wasn't. This resulted in smoke when I turned the computer on and a few of the metal connectors on the RAM had burned. I'm pretty sure putting any other RAM in that slot afterwards would have had bad results. I could have bought some new memory and maybe a new motherboard, but I just decided it was time for a new computer. After this experience, however, I didn't feel like building one.

I came up with a plan that would allow me to get a better computer than I had before for relatively cheap. First of all, I bought a new LCD monitor last spring, so I didn't need to get a monitor. That's about $250 off the price tag. The second part of the plan was to buy a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu Linux. Linux is a free operating system, which means another few hundred dollars off the price of the computer because I don't have to buy a Windows license. This is my gaming machine, though, and so I actually want Windows on it. I have my old Windows XP CD that I can use to install Windows once I get the computer.

I got the computer yesterday, and discovered there was a flaw in the plan. I boot up the computer with the XP disc and after it loads the necessary drivers it attempts to boot into a minimal Windows XP to do the installation, but crashes with a blue screen of death. After trying some things and searching around on the internet, I finally figure out what the problem is. My Windows XP CD has the original release on it, without SP1 or SP2. It wasn't until SP2 that XP supported PCI-E based graphics cards (all new computers now use PCI-E instead of AGP). So now the plan is to buy a new Windows CD. My plan still saved me money, though, because I can get it pretty cheap through the University. I just wish it wasn't Labor Day weekend.

Welcome

2007-08-27T13:40:00.000-04:00

Well, here's another attempt at me keeping a blog. I started a Livejournal my first year in college, and posted fairly regularly for about two years, but then I started posting less and less. 2 posts so far this year and a whole 8 for all of 2006. We'll see if I can get into the habit of posting more on this blog.

As for the content, it's going to be whatever I feel like posting about. Since so much of my free time is involved in Second Life, I'm sure there will be a lot about that, however be prepared to also see ramblings of a computer geek or liberal rants about the ineptitude of certain world leaders.