Julianna Fashion

I happened to go searching for "busty" the other day. I saw "Busty's Beach Island" which I'd recently taken a very short trip to, and then saw "Busty Bitches Mall"--not a particularly enticing name, but I took the plunge and teleported.

They have a good bunch of shops there... but Julianna Fashion caught my eye, and I bought the Coral Silk Black Roses Long Dress. It came with two clothing layer appliers, one for (Implant Nation, I believe) Universal Implants, and one for Lolas. No problem--the Lolas applier got the clothing layer on the Foxbean Laboratories "Christina" breasts, and armed with the information from Maggie's excellent series in Busted, minor tweaks to the horizontal and vertical repeat factors had wonderful results:

I'll explore Julianna's main store as soon as possible.

New stuff, or "Wilkommen, Bienvenu, Welcome..."

Two new items:

• Foxbean Liebknecht has a blog! (/me fights the urge to sing "E-I-E-I-O"...) Don't worry. The link is there in the blog list so it won't disappear as this post sinks slowly in the west. Welcome to the world of blogging, dear friend. *hugs* I look forward to reading what you have to say.
• Speaking of reading what one has to say, there's now a "Translate" widget near the top of the right hand portion of the page. You can use it to read a translation, as good as Google Translate can manage (which is a darned sight better than Bing's translation manages), into any of the languages Google Translate knows about. Beware; it tends to translate names of people, web browsers, OSs, Second Life sims and stores, etc. (CarrieAnn Lemon turned into "CarrieAnn Citron" and "CarrieAnn Limón" when I tried the feature out a couple of times.)

I hope that the translation widget is of help. Second Life is a worldwide phenomenon; it's well past time that I should support that.

A view from behind

After writing about CarrieAnn Lemon's assistance with her Ellemeno corset tops, I should provide a photo...

"Solid."

If memory serves, that was the catchphrase of Linc Hayes on Mod Squad as portrayed by Clarence Williams III.

Solid state drives--not the very latest or fastest technology, but still far faster than hard drives that must sometimes wait over a hundred microseconds for an actual physical hunk of matter to rotate around to the read/write head!--have gone below the dollar per gigabyte price point. (Remember how excited we all were when rotating platter hard drives broke that barrier?) Today, as I type, there's a deal at Tiger Direct offering a 120 GB SSD for $0.67/gigabyte before rebate, $0.50/gigabyte after rebate.

Under Linux, you can install on the SSD and then symlink from /home/myname/BigDirectory to a directory on your larger capacity old clunky rotating hard drive to keep all your collections of music, ISOs, images, and so forth from filling up the SSD while still having your various configurations and such on SSD for rapid access. (Windows finally got symbolic links for NTFS, so it should be possible to do something like that there, too.) Since you can bound the size of your Second Life cache, it should be possible to keep that there, too, which I hope would speed up your Second Life experience.

(Discussion here seems to show that it does, though people in that thread also point out that a RAM disk is even faster, and avoids wear on the SSD--as flash EEPROM, it has a limited number of writes on any given spot--but OTOH, the point of cache is to stick around until you clear it; you'd have to do something to back it up before you shut it down and move it to RAM disk before you fire up the SL client.)

Should you decide to go SSD, be sure your OS/driver and SSD support "TRIM", and tell your OS it doesn't have to play the usual games of scheduling I/O to minimize read/write head movement. Take a look at the Arch wiki or AB9IL's blog for suggestions for Linux.

About that photo...

if you were to download the photo taken at Heart's Desire, you might notice it's 3072 x 2214. That's significant because I took it while running the current version of Armin Weatherwax's Teapot SL client. The last time I tried Teapot, it was an earlier version, and high-res snapshots were problematic.

Now, though, that's working fine... and Armin produces a real live 64-bit Linux version, which gets around all the streaming media problems with 32-bit Linux SL clients that LL and everybody else but Imprudence/Kokua seems more than happy to ignore. So, especially since lately Firestorm has been regularly crashing for me--sometimes with no alert save the "do you want to send info about the crash?" popup, sometimes with a popup with text that displays all as little boxes (which makes me think that the text was overwritten with junk that isn't valid UTF-8 or at least doesn't correspond to characters the font has),  and finally recently with an intelligible popup reading

We are sorry, but Firestorm has crashed and needs to be closed. If you see this issue happening repeatedly, please contact our support team and submit the following message: 

ERROR: llrender/llvertexbuffer.cpp(1642) : mapVertexBuffer: memory allocation for vertex data failed.

I will be loading up Teapot with Windlight setting files and running Teapot. I hope that someday I will meet you in-world, Mr. Weatherwax... when that happens, I will thank you and offer you a hug.

P.S. I am happy to see that I didn't refer to Teapot as Teacup even once!

Heart's Desire

After reading about Ellemeno on Maggie's blog, I went to check it out... and found several things I had to have.

The tops I will try later on today, but I want to show you the teal formal dress. The photo was taken at the Heart's Desire ballroom.

UPDATE: I had the good fortune to meet CarrieAnn Lemon. She's a wonderful lady, and I look forward to seeing what comes from Ellemeno in the future.

UPDATE: About those tops: they are the corset tops that Ellemeno sells. As I've said, I tend to push the limits on things like hair length, leg length, and breast size. The latter, when the breasts are (collectively!) sufficiently wider that the torso, can cause skin where the breasts rejoin the torso on either side to be exposed that should be covered with cloth. I've seen this on several outfits from various clothiers, and this proved to be the case for the corset tops. I suppose I should have pointed this out the first time it happened some time ago, but I never have--until, when Ms. Lemon struck up a conversation with me, I said something about it happening with the corset tops. I would have understood had she done nothing... but she asked for a photo. I sent one along to show the problem. Could I come wear a texture laid out with a grid and let her see? Sure!

Later that day (if I remember the time rightly) I was pointed at a texture by UUID; could I try it? (Actually, I couldn't, until I found out how you can see (modulo alpha issues) a texture via a URL that's a function of the UUID. Grab it, GIMP the transparency back into existence, and put it on...) I sent back with a shout of glee that it was wonderful--the corset top proper has a baked-in shadow along the sides, and the texture matched that at the edge, but I had the size cranked so that the darker color was covered, leading to a mismatch--I could live with that, and it would be perfect for the vast majority... and back came another texture. How about this, Ms. Lemon asked? Perfect! I replied. She said that once RL permitted, she'd send textures appropriate for the "chubby pack" I'd bought, and they were waiting for me before I was able to get back on the grid.

I apologize to other clothiers--I am at fault in not mentioning this issue to you right away when it has happened to me before, to give you the option of taking action. I promise to give you that option in the future. I mean no disparagement to anyone; I just want to say that Ms. Lemon, when I gave her that option, went above and beyond to be of help.

Vacillating in style

A week and a half ago, hot weather had returned to Iowa after an amazing stretch of temperate climes for the Iowa State Fair, which is often oppressively hot and humid, with people standing in front of fans taller than they are in the Agriculture Building for a few seconds' relief. I escaped from it in Second Life.

This past weekend was cool, giving a taste of fall to come... and of course, I wanted what I couldn't have. (We have our stereotypical prerogative, don't we?) So off I headed to a virtual beach...

I should have put on the bikini, but the urge to walk out into the lovely clear water was strong.

At that point, it occurred to me that both these outfits are from VOOH Designs. For the fall foliage, it was "Seasons Green". (I love sweaters...) On the beach at Paradise Falls, it's "Floratta 4". (After spending so much time confined to solid colors for dresses and tops that I could adapt with my non-existent texturing skills, I am a total sucker for lacy and flowery detail. If you're reading, designers, any chance of paisley? *bats eyelashes*)

I hasten to add that these photos don't do the flexibiity of these outfits justice. I didn't have the wonderful Seasons hat on, and Floratta gives you both a dress and a bikini. Both include shoes.

So thank you, VOOH Designs, for the lovely work you do. When RL weather fluctuates, I can vacillate in style in Second Life.

Isolation

I forget what the buzzphrase is. A dictatorship maintains strict control over communications, so that each person thinks he or she is alone in thinking things are fundamentally wrong. When that control cracks, and people realize that they are not only not alone, but in the majority, they act, and the dictatorship falls. (Ah, that's what it's called: "preference cascade".)

I couldn't help thinking of that when I read about changes to the Second Life JIRA in a post in Tateru Nino's essential blog, Dwell on It. You can now only see JIRA entries that you yourself have submitted. Not only that, once it's been triaged, you will no longer be able to comment on it.

Before, people could say "go look at [link to JIRA entry] and vote for it/follow it/comment if you've had this problem". Goodness knows I've done it with VWR-1258, for example. No longer. If you've tripped over a bug someone else reported and just happen to have a log file with the needed information to show its cause, it won't help unless you report the bug and someone recognizes it in the flood of entries that will come because don Fulano de Tal can't see any other reports of the bug he shares with others.

This change to JIRA behavior is not something that someone actually wanting SL to propser would do, IMHO.

More early clothing--yay!

Eira Kalil of Tiny Things has come out with a new dress, "Tudor". It's gorgeous, and like all Tiny Things products are amazingly inexpensive. Can you believe this is L$35, including shoes?

I am such a pushover for beautiful lacy detailed textures... so this dress makes me a seriously happy camper. Thank you, Ms. Kalil.