So, you know a lot about Second Life, right? You’ve got ideas, big ideas, and are tired of waiting around for Linden Lab to make it just so. The challenge of stabilizing, maintaining, and extending the Second Life Grid, and the dozens of services and thousands of machines it entails, excites you. If this describes you, you should check out our job listings!
Three of the prioritized positions are web developers, production operations engineers, and production operations developers, but many other openings are currently available. Read the rest of this entry »
I show you how to play parcel music in Second Life — including Internet radio stations — in less than 10 minutes! Yes, it’s really that simple, and along the way, I highlight good things to know.
00:17 - Setup Second Life for playing music 01:49 - Get a music URL from your web browser 02:44 - Play a music URL in Second Life 03:38 - Find Internet radio stations to play in SL 05:19 - View a playlist file to get the music URL (in iTunes) 06:29 - Get the music URL (in Winamp) 06:59 - Get the music URL (in a text editor) 07:29 - More radio stations to get music URLs 08:20 - Working URLs do not end in M3U or PLS 09:38 - Hide a music URL
We’ve just updated the Quality Metrics page, and the numbers show what you already know: April was not a good month for Second Life Grid availability. Our internal outage tracking tool estimates that about 630,000 usage hours were lost to global system failures over the course of the month, which is about 1.9% of the total (up from 0.06% in February and 0.22% in March), and resident surveys clearly indicate great unhappiness coinciding with these failures. (We define lost usage as how much time Residents would have spent logged in but did not, due to Grid failures; it is meant as a global availability metric and does not cover local failures like sim crashes, inventory problems, and the like. See actual[black] vs predicted[blue] concurrency graph excerpt, right.) I’d like to address the causes for this, and what we are doing about it in general terms.
Hello everybody! This week on KBAotW, I’d like to introduce you to a little feature called Media On A Parcel. With Parcel Media, you can share your movies, music, images, and even webpages with other Residents on your land. Movie night, anyone?
As always, if you have questions about Second Life, and you think the answer should be in the Knowledge Base, please stop by Documentation Office Hours today at 2pm PDT. We love to hear from you! You’ll find our valiant and scholarly Documentation team lounging on couches at our usual pier-shaped office in Beaumont.
Now open for Resident inspection — Bay City! Regions intended for a vibrant urban experience, double primmed for your pleasure. Roads, parks, a movie theater and city services are already in place, maintained by Linden Lab. Close to the offices and shops of Nova Albion, with broad canals usable for travel and tourism — but with broad, clean beaches and plentiful vegetation.
Rail and water trolleys carry the Residents of Bay City about; a balloon tour provides dazzling aerial views of the city. Connections to the world at large by ship, seaplane, dirigible, road and rail are available.
In just over a week, auctions will begin for the many attractive parcels in Bay City’s first twelve Regions. Ranging in size from about 512 square meters to nearly 2000 square meters, the parcels cannot be terraformed, joined or divided by their owners. Buyers will receive a package of textures and objects to help with their building projects.
Governor Linden said in a pre-recorded statement, “We hope that the Residents of this new city will produce interesting and attractive structures, in styles appropriate to the period 1930 to 1960 when most of our buildings were erected. In any case, the Residents of Bay City will form a unique and bustling community.”
Bay City — easily reached by Route 66 from Nova Albion, or by sea via the Straits of Shermerville.
“Bay City — the City by the Bay.”Directions Today: Bay City is so new it doesn’t show on the map yet, but it is there, and it’s worth a visit! To get there, open your Map in-world, search for Cape Haven, and teleport there. Bay City will be SOUTH of you.
You can open the Mini-Map to see which direction you need to go, just fly up above the water (in Cape Haven you land on the ocean floor) and then fly due South to visit the new Bay City — the City by the Bay.” [Edited to add directions for today, -- Katt Linden]
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 5:55 PM by: Torley Linden
Friendly greetings! Torley, enthusiastic teacher of Second Life skills here. For your ease-of-use, I’ve reorganized the big page o’ Video Tutorials so you can faster find what you want to learn. One of the new features is that when you view the lists for “Tip of the Week” (30+ of ‘em) and “Quicktips” (75+!), columns can be sorted by category! Also, I’ll be updating the main page regularly to show highlights from my most recent videos. Experience for yourself.
In addition, I’m continually working on longer-term plans for easier searching of vidtuts, including getting more of them in our Knowledge Base and plugging them in other places as-needed; it’s good to have lots of knowledge, but even better to be able to find it.
With that being said, it’s only fair I share 20 more quick tips with you! Filmed in Second Life 1.20 Release Candidate, most of these have been suggested by some of you (thank-you!), and they’re a delicious assortment of hints ‘n’ tricks that you’ll learn something new & useful from! As I like to advertise,
“Short on time? Quicktips deliver your knowledge in 2 minutes or less, guaranteed.”
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 5:01 PM by: Ramzi Linden
There is a new Release Candidate available, and a shiny new format for our Downloads page to get it!
A new Second Life 1.20 (RC6) Release Candidate viewer is now available for download from the Test Viewers page (this is the bottom section of the page, not the primary installer in orange at the top of page).
Reminder: Release Candidate viewers are optional viewers that contain the latest round of bug fixes in the upcoming next version of the Second Life viewer. If you have been using the 1.20 (RC5), you will be required to update that installation to this latest version (RC6). But the Release Candidate is always an optional version that you may choose not to use — or better– to have installed side by side on your computer with the main viewer offered on our Downloads page or http://get.secondlife.com.
In 1.20 (RC6) Release Candidate, we have isolated and resolved the SmartHeap library error message that occurs on exiting Second Life. We’ve also patched the problem of property lines showing through avatars, objects and the ground. Here are the latest notes:
Changes:
* Changed the descriptor in Group Information window > Notices tab to “14 days” instead of 30
* Removed menu option Advanced > Character > Show Collision Plane
* Property lines are are now hidden behind objects, avatars, terrain, and water by default. When in Build mode, if ‘Tools > Show Hidden Selection’ is enabled, property lines will become visible through objects, etc.
Fixes:
* Fixed: VWR-6389: Runtime Library error after quitting Second Life
* Fixed: VWR-4580: Property lines are visible through avatar, objects and through ground
* Fixed: VWR-6896: Crash when selecting Advanced > Rendering > Info Displays > Lights (and other Info Displays)
* Fixed: VWR-7042: Incorrect tooltip for “Use built-in web browser” option
* Fixed: the spinners are broken in the snapshot UI when upload a snapshot
* Fixed: Create tool’s last 11 shapes are not the proper height (”sphere” looks like an “egg”)
* Fixed: Typographical error in Transfer permissions alert dialog
* Fixed: Crash selecting Edit > Land Owners with Basic Shaders disabled
* Fixed: crash on LLFloaterWorldMap::buildLandmarkIDLists
* Fixed: 3dConnexion device does not default to enabled with 1.20 RC 5
* Fixed: Settings in the Joystick Configuration window reset to defaults on each launch when a SpaceNavigator is connected
Localization Fixes:
* Fixed: XML resizing to repair truncated text in 1.20 localizations
Known Issues:
* As the first release of improved Joystick and 3D input device support, there are minor known issues with camera behavior and/or button-mapping behavior when using the 3dxconnexion SpaceNavigator in a combination of “Flycam” and Build modes.
* IMPORTANT NOTE: There is a known issue in the 1.20 Release Candidate on Macs using Apple’s USB Mighty Mouse and a 3dxconnexion SpaceNavigator. The Mighty Mouse will be erroneously detected as a joystick where the primary mouse button will toggle “Flycam” with unusual behavior. Therefore the support for the 3dxconnexion SpaceNavigator in Second Life does not yet extend to Macs using a USB Mighty Mouse.
We expect this to be the final Release Candidate in the 1.20 viewer series, barring any Showstoppers that you may find. Please of course continue to report any new issues large or small in the Issue Tracker, and be sure to set “Affects Version/s” to “1.20 Release Candidate”.
Thanks to all of you who participate in the RC cycle — posting reproducible steps and system environments, responding to questions, and clarifying and linking — your help to improve the Second Life viewer is greatly appreciated!
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 8:33 AM by: Jack Linden
We are delighted to announce that the old Land Store has now been switched off, and the new Land Store made available for the puchase of normal islands and Openspaces. However, as part of our gradual rollout of this new tool, we will not be enabling it for all residents immediately. Instead, we will be enabling it for two specific groups like so:
Those that recently ordered or have expressed an interest in ordering or who we know have been waiting for the new Land Store to go live. Those on this list will be enabled automatically and should receive an email from us once the new Land Store is enabled for them.
Anyone who applies for access, and wishes to buy a new island or Openspace, and is comfortable using beta software.
In this way, we will be able to control the traffic hitting the new store and watch for any early problems. We will be closely watching how the early orders go and will correct any issues we find. If all goes well for a week or so, we will then open it up to all residents.
How to Gain Access to the Land Store (beta)
To add your avatar name to the LandStore Beta access list, visit www.secondLife.com/support and make sure you are logged in with the correct account. Then, click the “Submit a Ticket” button on the right hand side of the page. On the ticket page* select “Land and Region issues” and then “LandStore Beta Access”. Fill in all the fields and we’ll add you to the access list. It will take ~24 hours for your request to be processed.
Residents with Basic accounts will be taken to a knowledgebase article and will then need to click on the “Click here to submit a ticket.” link to be taken to the ticket page. On the ticket page, they should select “Special Questions - Basic account or Guest Login” and then “LandStore Beta Access”.
Just to be clear, as the old Land Store is being disabled, if you need to buy an island or Openspace you will need to apply for and use the new Land Store. Applicants will be added/enabled within 24 hours.
Edited for Clarity: Sorry for the confusion. The new rules do not prohibit a group from sending more than 200 messages. They do mean that if a group has more than 200 notices stored, starting with the 201st, the group can expect those notices to be regularly removed from storage in the database.
Group messages older than 14 days or in excess of 200 can be expected to be deleted from the database (once each day.) – Katt
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As part of our ongoing effort to provide you with the highest quality Second Life experience possible…we have identified and tested an issue that should help alleviate load on the databases.
Starting Tuesday, 6 May, 2008, all group notices that are older than 14 days will be removed from storage in the database. (Notices were previously held for 31 days.)The reason for this change is to help reduce load on the database. Note: Nearly *every* group that uses notices in Second Life will be effected by this change, which will be ongoing.
Groups will now be limited to 200 notices *per group* each day. Older messages, over the 200th, will be regularly removed from storage in the database. There are about 135 groups we expect will be impacted by this limit. The owner of each of these groups should see a message in-world Tuesday, notifying them of the change.
Please note that in both cases this process would remove the *oldest* notices, if any. This will start on Tuesday 6 May, 2008, and is intended to help stabilize the databases.
As part of our ongoing effort to provide you with the highest quality Second Life experience possible, part of our process is to ask ourselves, periodically, if we’re working on the right things.
Today we’d like to let you know we’re seriously considering whether Linden Lab should continue supporting Mac OS X 10.3, “Panther.” Our tracking shows that very few of you, about 1/4 of 1 percent of all of you, the entire base of Residents, are still using Apple’s Mac OS X 10.3 when logging into Second Life.
We’d like to let the Linden engineers stop working on supporting an operating system released in 2003, and instead move on to other work which will benefit a much larger group of Residents.
If we do stop supporting that version of the OS, it would not be until 60 days from now, to make sure there is plenty of time for the news to spread.
To briefly review the last five years of Mac OS: Panther, OS 10.3, was first released in October 2003, and updated to 10.3.9 in 2005. Apple has followed Panther with two more recent versions of the Apple OS, “Tiger” (OS 10.4,) released in April 2005 and “Leopard,” (OS 10.5,) released in October 2007 and updated Feb. 2008.
What would it mean to “stop support”? Eventually we would stop developing for the SDK (software development kit ) of that operating system, and we would also stop doing QA testing on OS 10.3.9.
What would you notice? If you are one of the few logging in with that OS, you would still be able to do so the day we stop supporting it — for some time. Exactly how long we couldn’t guarantee, because we would no longer be testing and developing to make sure it does work.
Jeremy Linden
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