Malware detected

To be clear, I think this is a “false positive” on the part of the virus scanner. But maybe this is a sign.

At the Second Life 7th birthday bash I happened onto a performance by The Follow and they blew my mind (and speakers). This is a band you might hear in a dark venue on Earth, but they manage to pull off the same kind of feeling in Second Life on a stage made of prims and just your ordinary set of poses and animations.

Between crashes I managed to snap a few pictures. Thanks to Cheyenne Palisades for giving me the heads up that they would be playing tonight.

The Buttons Menu

By default the bottom bar is full of buttons. They can take up a lot of space on a smallish (laptop) screen, making it difficult to increase the size of the local chat bar. Right-click on the bottom bar to turn as many of these off as you can. If you’re a fan of keyboard shortcuts, and you move your camera and avatar around with the mouse, ALT, CTRL, and SHIFT keys, you can save a bunch of bottom bar real estate by turning these off.

In fact, if you’re new to Version 2.x, I would encourage you to right click on everything in sight. There be gold in them thar clicks! Or something.

The Address Bar Menu

Right-click on the address bar to turn on parcel properties and coordinates. They look a little different from what you saw in earlier viewers, but convey basically the same information.

The Navbar Menu

With a right-click, you can turn the navbar off if you absolutely hate it. A mini-location bar can take its place. This also saves space on small screens. If you need it again for some reason, it’s easy to turn back on.

The Chat/IM Window and Icons

In my previous post on this subject I mentioned that you can show Group Chat/IMs in either tabbed or separate window modes. I’ve come to prefer the single-window view because, in my SL job, I need to post to many groups in a series. Clicking on an icon in the bottom bar will automatically open its associated group and give focus to that window’s chat input. Instead of blinking, the chat icon will display a speech bubble when there are new, unread messages waiting. The icon at the extreme right keeps a running total (up to 99) of all the unread messages.

Not pictured is yet another icon that will pop up to the right of the running total button — it looks like a mailing envelope — that will tell you when you’ve received a notice (those blue pop-down windows in earlier viewers) As I said before, right-click on everything you find… there are shortcuts to getting group info and other useful information.

I should apologize for all of the pixelization in that screen shot. I’m friends with a lot of criminal and shady-type characters.

That concludes my notes on this subject for now. I sincerely hope you found it useful or enlightening. Thanks again to Sterling (an upstanding citizen if ever there was one) for suggesting I write this up.

So… um.

I’m out of time. It’s not going to happen today.

But…

Wait! I could just write it up tomorrow and then back-date it as if it happened the day before tomorrow’s yesterday! It’s so crazy, it just might work.

*stomach growls*

I haven’t eaten since tomorrow morning.

Look, I think Emerald was/is the most feature-laden SL/OpenSim viewer ever. It really was/is quite fantastic in terms of keeping you abreast (see what I just did there?) of people near you — or two sims away from you! It has the Version 1 user interface (sort of). Fantastic viewer, really. Unfortunately the project was run by some folks who couldn’t seem to keep it together organizationally and who, on occasion, might have accidentally caused their users to participate in a distributed denial of service. It happens sometimes. People just explode.

So, they’re packing it up. Apparently the Lindens demanded that three of their developers leave the group in order to stay in the Lab’s good graces. Emerald leadership has known about these demands for a couple of weeks now but I guess it finally came to a head. All of this was initially very fun to watch but lately they’ve produced more drama than code.

The drama continues now in the comments on Arabella’s swan song on Modular Systems blog. Wait… I thought Modular had nothing to do with Emerald anymore. Maybe the server un-resigned or something. It’s all up in the air as far as anyone can know. Here’s a fine example from the comments section:

“…WOW LINDEN LABS.. YOU REALLY DID IT THIS TIME. I HAVE LOST A TON OF RESPECT FOR LINDEN LABS AND THIS ACTION TO SHUT DOWN EMERALD HAS DRAWN ME EVEN CLOSER TO SAY GOODBYE TO SECOND LIFE AND FIND ANOTHER ONLINE WORLD.”

To the anonymous ALLCAPS whiner: OMfG! Yes, the Lindens and their (metric? imperial?) TON of respect literally forced devs on the Emerald team to act in ridiculously irresponsible ways until even they could no longer turn a blind eye to the miscreants building SL’s most popular viewer. Shame on the “LABS.” FOR SHAME!

(That was sarcasm, by the way.)

Calm the hell down, go to the Third-Party Viewer Directory and select again. I’m guessing there will be even more choices showing up there over the next weeks and months. My goodness, nobody died!

You can call up the preferences tab from the menu (Me -> Preferences) or you can hit ctrl-p. I prefer to use shortcuts if and where I can but again… that’s a preference.

The General Preferences Tab

On the General preferences tab, I set my content ratings to General, Moderate and Adult because, honestly, I don’t want my filth to be that clean. I like dirty filth! I set my start location to where ever I was before I crashed… I mean, logged off… and I make the choice visible at login. I set my Away timeout to “never,” because I want to choose when I go away… unless I crash first.

The Graphics Preferences Tab

On the Graphics tab, I’m just showing off here. Yeah, I gots da gear to run on ultra.

*/me flexes*

How you like me now?

The Privacy Preference Tab

I think by default all of these things are checked but note that I have changed the chat log directory to something I can easily access. There’s a secondary reason for doing this: when you uninstall Viewer 2.x, it has a nasty habit of taking the chat logs if they are stored in the default location. I really don’t like that.

The Sound & Media Preferences Tab

The most important change I make on the Sound and Media tab is to the “Allow Media to auto-play” option. You’ll want to disable this too if you don’t want your ears blasted every time you TP to a new location. One other change I make is to mute the “Ambient” sounds. SL can seem empty enough at times without the sound of wind rushing by. Cue the tumble weeds.

The Chat Preferences Tab

Here on the Chat tab, I have enabled plain text IM and chat history. The “un-plain” versions take up extra space and can sometimes make it difficult to accurately select for copy. You can turn on Version 1.23-style IMs by selecting “tabs” at the bottom there. However, I’ve learned to take advantage of Version 2′s group/IM “chicklets” at the bottom right hand of the screen to select and move between chat sessions. It’s not perfect, but I prefer it to the old sliding tabs… particularly when I have ten or more chat sessions open. Oh and… please… in the name of all that isn’t Holy, disable “Play typing animation when chatting.” This is 2010.

The Notifications Preferences Tab

I didn’t change a thing from the defaults on the notifications panel. Included for completeness. Items move from the upper to the lower pane as you tell notifications not to notify you anymore. I let this happen over time as they come up.

The Setup Preferences Page

I increased the “Maximum bandwidth” setting here because, at least for me, I find it smoother to have my ISP throttle my throughput than to have my computer do it. Basically I want SL to have all the bandwidth it can have. I have changed the “Cache location” from the default because I use another Version 2-compatible viewer and I’d like it to benefit from any textures I might have already downloaded. On my desktop, I point the SL cache to a striped RAID volume. (If you don’t know what that is, never mind.)

Also: use your own browser for webpages… You know, the browser you’ve set AdBlock and all the other goodies on, right? Cookies all in one place.

The Advanced Preferences Tab

Finally, on the Advanced tab, I de-select “Automatic position for: Sidebar” so that the sidebar “slides over” the world rather than “squishing it.” That’s just how I roll… er… slide. I also set a function key for my voice mic toggle.

I’ll do another blog tomorrow about some tweaks I make to the user interface to make it easier to manage. Until then… happy preferencing!

Old-school tools, such as my Mystitool reported names just as it always had. So as I approached another resident — let’s call him Famous SLBlogger — it reported that I was approaching Famous SLBlogger, not “famous.slblogger” (even though that would be his username at login.)

Changing Display Names was fairly straightforward: Open the profile sidebar and click on “change name.” A sim-wide announcement would go out (maybe it was only parcel-wide) afterward saying something like “Whatcha Eaton (whatcha.eaton) is now known as Euphrates Kat.” If you examine the profile of any user, you can see their Display Name and username right there at the top.

Wut sporting a Display Name and username

The local chat log was kept in a kind of colon-delimited file (llsd extension) that I had to drop into a word-processor to see. It is nearly human-readable and contains the Display Name and key UUID for each person or object that speaks. I’m hoping this is a temporary format but, who knows? Note that with the key it is possible (but not easy) to determine who was speaking even if they had changed their name to something crazy or misleading.

I met several creative folk there who were changing their names to things like “Torley Iinden” and other variations on spelling that at first appear to be the real deal. With the inclusion of Unicode characters it was possible to toss in accented characters to form words such as Lìnden. My favorite was “I like π.” Basically: this is going to get gamed to death at first and then it will get better and pretty soon we’ll all get used to the idea that looking under the tin is the only way to know what is inside.

No one likes change. I’m not at all jazzed about this but, as I’ve said before, there’s not much we can do about it. LL pretends to listen and then does whatever it was they wanted to do in the first place. Ironically you can turn it all off with a checkbox in preferences. If only the Lab provided us with a button to turn off everything else they’ve done that we haven’t asked for.

What bothers me the most about “Display Names” is that we are about to lose the one thing we have previously though to be unique. I’m not hopping mad about this (anymore), but I am concerned for all of the reasons Gweneth sited and more. In-world we have always been able to assume that if someone named Jon Appleseed IMed us or posted something to a chat group, it was really the same Jon Appleseed we’ve known before. We’ve never questioned this because, despite being able to change our appearance with abandon, our names have remained constant. This constancy is engrained into the culture of Second Life (and yes, I’m aware that not everyone agrees there even is a Second Life culture.)

The new constant will be the user name (in the form of firstname.lastname for us oldbies), and that user name will be visible if we go to the extra trouble of looking into a user’s profile. On the surface, however, we’ll see whichever name an avatar has chosen to display. As I said earlier, I understand that this change is coming and that there is nothing at all we can do to stop it. So I’m not beating a drum or a dead horse (or some other animal that sounds like a drum) to get this stopped. I think that both LL and the resident community will be in for a bit of a shock when our well-ingrained assumptions go out the window. Haha, I kid! LL isn’t aware of anything as far as I can tell.

I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere else, so I’ll do it here. What happens to in-world games that rely on the assumption of uniquely assigned names? I’m thinking specifically of (but the problem is not limited to) Tiny Empires, wherein our names are used as identifying (and unique) tokens. I realize that it isn’t Linden Lab’s responsibility to prevent script and game breakage in every instance, but it would seem some sensitivity on their part would be in order. Here comes this groundbreaking, assumption-wiping change that potentially break things like door locks, security systems and name-based games such as Tiny Empires and Bloodlines. What up, Linden Lab?

According to the LSL Wiki, there will be some new functions — llGetDisplayName() and llRequestUsername() –added to the language once (or before, I hope) Display Names are released on an unsuspecting world, but I fear this will mean my Tiny Empires title will read: “The Very Hungry whatcha.eaton.” Boo!

UPDATE 20100831 07:57 SLT: Tiny Empires creator Ultralite Soleil tells me that, using the current LSL functions, existing TE players will retain their current names but that new users (those who join SL after Display Names is enabled) will be named “Username Resident.” He added, “…which obviously sucks.” I would tend to agree.

As a user, I’d like to read about source code trees, merges, proposed
features and bug fixes on opensource-dev.

Oh… and I’d like the search box to take focus when I press ctrl-i
for the inventory side-bar.

-Wut
(makes more popcorn)

We’ll see what sort of “feedback” I receive. :)

My enjoyment took a downturn yesterday when someone decided to rant in group about how they lost their parcel on an openspace sim because the owner failed to pay tier. Now, I feel sad for this person but I don’t think LL can really help them and… OH YEAH… the mailing list is for Viewer code discussions. In typical hyperbolic Resident reaction mode, the list is filling up with arguments on one or two or three sides. *I don’t freaking care!* Move on.

Gah.