Ending a group

A few days ago, I got a notecard from Holli Thespian, asking whether she could send notices to the members of the Prim Breast Users group about her store and its clothing--she has started to make applicators for some of her tops to support prim breasts. (They're sold separately from the tops, if I understand rightly.)

This rubbed my virtual nose in the fact that I really haven't done diddly with the group. As with various other things, I had good intentions, but we all know the terminus of the road built from those.... and even with forty-two group slots instead of twenty-five, those slots are still precious.

So... I will shut down the Prim Breast Users group come September 1st. Thank you, everyone who joined. I regret not having served you as I intended. I urge you to do the following:

• If you haven't already done so, by all means join the Buxom Lifestyle group!
• Be sure to take a look at Holli Pocket, Ms. Thespian's store. Maggie's wonderful blog has an article about it and an entry in her database for the store, including a SLURL.
• Also take a look at Ms. Thespian's blog and in particular her post "Prim Boobie Infos [sic]". My photos and the things I write about tend towards the extreme, so I rarely mention an important point she makes in that post:

  I think a lot of us (including myself at one point) have this misconception about prim boobs, thinking they have to be over the top and ridiculous sizes-that's not appealing to 99% of people I know at least. This obviously is NOT the case and they can look fulfilling but still in my opinion, tasteful. They sure beat the standard lumpy/jagged looking default boobs in Sl and now it actually looks like I have REAL boobs!

  It's good to be reminded; to gain wider acceptance, prim breast makers must also cater to, and we must welcome with open arms, those who don't dream of having enormous breasts. (Prim breast makers understand this. If nothing else, purely economically, the L$ of those who mainly want the lovely shape of prim breasts spend just as well as mine. :))

Thank you, Ms. Thespian, for joining the growing group of clothiers who support prim breast users, and for nudging me to do the right thing.

UPDATE: Having to eject people one at a time is educational. Thank you to all ninety-five of you who joined. *hugs* to you all...

UPDATE: Some of the ejection messages were delayed for some reason, so my count was low. It's nearer a hundred of you. Love you all.

Watch your bandwidth

Anyone whose net connection is capped or billed at exorbitant rates past a certain point, or whose ISPs look askance at what they consider "excessive" usage, might want to check bandwidth usage when on Second Life.

The reason is described on JIRA entry SVC-8124. Under some circumstances, your SL viewer may be sent a lot of "ParcelOverlay reliable" messages. One user reports seeing 2 Mb/s (that's megabits per second) at certain locations. It only happens in some places, and one's viewing distance may affect it.

There is a fix, but it's not yet been rolled out to the main grid. Keep an eye out, either via the statistics bar in your SL client or via whatever means your computer's operating system or router, if it tracks data usage, provides.

(Boy, I have been out of the loop. This bug was submitted on August 9, and I only found out about it because I decided on a whim to see whether the Alphaville Herald was totally stagnant and on another whim to look at the comments for the most recent article.)

Ken Starks (helios) needs your help

How to start? Depends on the audience, I guess.

If you're a Linux user: Ken Starks, a man who has done a great deal to spread Linux where it counts, among the coming generation, needs your help.

If you are concerned about the "digital divide": Ken Starks, a man whose motto is "A child's exposure to technology should not be predicated on the ability to afford it" and who has worked tirelessly to back that motto up by providing that exposure to many children who'd not otherwise have it, needs your help.

If you're a kind person: Ken Starks needs your help.

Yesterday (as I type) August 16th began the countdown of two weeks until surgery goes from 80% probability of cure for the cancer he's fighting to effectively zero. In a governmental Catch-22, SSI disability disqualifies him from the programs that would pay for that surgery.

I have a link to the blog of helios on my blog; read it and you'll see how he's worked to get computers and net access to kids who wouldn't otherwise have them.

If you want to cut to the chase, head to this entry on Thomas A. Knight's blog.

Darn it, this is the second time in a short interval that someone I admire and greatly respect has found himself fighting cancer without insurance. I really would rather it not happen again.

ERRATUM: It helps to look more closely at dates. Sorry.

UPDATE: Wonderful news! A surgeon, a specialist in the procedure in question, has agreed to do it for the money raised so far. He also has Mr. S on medication that postpones that two-week deadline so he can gather the data needed to give the best chance of success. Read about it (and be sure to read the comments).

UPDATE: Still more good news, and Ken's thanks to everyone. As Ken says, now if you wish to donate, don't donate to the fund for his treatment--donate to Reglue (which The HeliOS Project is now associated with) instead.

Getting medieval...

By Eve has come out with medieval clothing, so I had to try it out.

There are two outfits, available in various colors. I got the "Pleasantly Peasantly" in olive, which goes nicely with some moss green Lassitude and Ennui shoes I got a while back. Then off to search for castles...

I had to skip a few; one was at a welcome area, and while the decor was nice, it was garishly lit. Then, success! The lovely RP area "Medieval Dreams" was the place to go.

Thank you, mizevangeline, and thanks to the creators of Medieval Dreams.

Bye-bye, playlist

playlist.com has decided to stop supporting players for one's playlist embedded on one's web page; you must now go to their site to listen to anyone's playlist... so I've edited out the HTML that once let you listen to my playlist. I'll put up a link to it on their site, once I find out how to do that.

First Valve, now Unity?!

From the OMG! Ubuntu! blog: "Mass-Market Games Engine 'Unity 3D' to Support Linux": "The viability of Linux as a gaming platform continues to grow, with today’s news that Unity 3D (no, not that one), one of the most popular games engines used by developers of all calibres, will be supporting Linux."

Why the switch? Google "unity 3d linux" and you'll find a bunch of links to Unity forum threads asking for Linux support, typically with people responding that there aren't enough Linux users to matter, etc. What changed their minds?

Well... Windows 8 isn't getting good reviews (google "windows 8 unmitigated disaster", or, more to the point, check out "[head of Valve] Gabe Newell Wants to Support Linux Because Windows 8 is a 'Catastrophe'"), but there's more to it than that. With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to make itself into Apple. It's putting out hardware (computers, not just mice and keyboards), and hence OEMs are worried. Most of all, it's moving towards an App Store as the way people get applications for their Windows computers, giving Microsoft control and making applications developers... in particular for this discussion, independent game developers, worry. (See "Why is Windows 8 'a catastrophe for anyone in the PC space'?" for more info.)

I am hoping this is the "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" scenario. I hope that the Unity people will work with (lean on? :)) graphics hardware makers as Valve has, making it even clearer that it's to their benefit to seriously support Linux. Things are, I hope, about to get interesting.

P.S. For non-Ubuntu users, the "no, not that one" aside above is there because Canonical, the makers (aggregators?) of Ubuntu, named their "let's impose a touch UI on everybody" UI "Unity", and it's had, at least until very recently, 2D and 3D versions.

Still having to choose

The Teacuppot Second Life client is a wonderful thing that Armin Weatherwax of the Imprudence/Kokua team is working on. Like Imprudence, it has a 64-bit Linux version, and sure enough, I downloaded, fired it up, and could hear streaming audio on Whimsy the way it should be.

So, flushed with victory, I went off to take pictures... and found that the currently downloadable version of Teapot suffers from the issue with high-resolution snapshots that plagued SL clients for a long time. I'm hoping that whatever was done to fix it will percolate into Teacuppot at some point, but for now I will still have to choose the feature that I think most important at any given time.

UPDATE: My sincere apologies to Armin Weatherwax for alternately referring to his work as "Teapot" (correct) and "Teacup" (which emerged from goodness knows where in my brain). If you want to try out Teapot, head over to where he has kindly placed it for download.

Another sad loss for SL

Amiryu Hosoi's beautiful four-sim region, Japan Kanto, is going away. The story is here.

SL tier is insane. The four sims come to $1,200 every month. Hosoi estimates a total expenditure of over $150,000 over six years. Unless you can sell a lot of virtual items or rent a lot of virtual land, that's a darned expensive hobby for anyone not seriously wealthy.

LL had better rethink its business model.

New prim breasts from Foxbean Liebknecht: Christina

Careful observers who've looked at the pictures in "Kind of ironic", or at pictures I've put on flickr like this:

will have noted that these are not Foxbean "Nadine" breasts. Clothed Nadines show no evidence of nipples.

As someone once said, "Now it can be told." Foxbean has officially released new prim breasts, named "Christina" in honor of Christina Hendricks of Mad Men fame. (And hence you know also that I was given some for testing. I don't think it has affected my opinion, but the info is there for you to weigh as you will.)

The "Christina" breasts have several advantages over the "Nadine" breasts.  The breasts now accommodate remote control if one permits it, a feature that is important to a significant number judging by its presence in other prim breasts. The shape has differences other than the obvious--in this photo I have on Bad Kitty's gorgeous "Tied Up" top.

It may just be that I have gotten better at tweaking textures after reading Maggie's wonderful helpful articles in Busted, but in the past I'd have shown a blatant discontinuity between the edge of the fabric on the torso and on the breasts. (I must admit to having done some photos in profile in the past to conceal such issues.) Christina seems more accommodating to larger sizes than Nadine was. That's important to me--I have a tendency to push such things as far as I can.

The associated scripts are more efficient. There are differences in the UI; no more HUD. Instead you touch the breasts to call up a menu. The division between options under specialized menu control and the standard Second Life edit facility is different, and, I think, better; for example, the edit facilities for moving an object, which you now use rather than a menu or HUD give one much finer control than a menu or HUD typically does, while on the other hand, scaling remains under scripted menu control, avoiding the "OK, I've stretched it...drat! Now I have to move it back into place!" problem of the standard stretch. 

I've yet to check Christina out without clothing. We'll see how that goes; I really liked the Nadine "torpedoes" model for use without clothing... From all I've tried so far, though, I am quite happy.

UPDATE: I forgot to give links. *blush* You can find them in SL Marketplace and in Foxbean's in-world store, which I give a SLURL for in the right-hand column on this blog. (BTW, I had to do a double take when I went from Foxbean's store, which is what the link goes to, to the specific entry for the "Christina" breasts; apparently in SL Marketplace's categorization scheme, breasts are genitalia?!)

Maps and Bumps and Why They're Important

The folks who bring you the Exodus SL client have undertaken to add normal maps (aka "bump maps") and specular maps to Second Life, and some other stuff as well. Here's a video showing what we're talking about:


Normal maps let you create objects with more detail without having to proliferate polygons. (The map is created from the high-detail object and applied to a lower polygon version--the high-polygon version will never actually appear in Second Life.) Specular maps let different parts of an object have different reflectivity.

Two things of note:

• This is open source. I hope this means that it will make it into TPVs.
• These features will make it possible to create very good-looking objects that don't put nearly as much burden on graphics hardware as would otherwise be necessary to look that good; games (I mean game games) have used these techniques for quite a while. BUT: things will have to be created to use these maps. Old objects without them won't suddenly look better.

So as time goes on, new builds can look far better--perhaps even living up to the expectations of gamers--and, I hope, old items can be recreated using the new capabilities. 

Many, many thanks to the Exodus developers, and thanks to Hamlet Au, who wrote about this in NWN.

UPDATE: Blender Cookie, a source for Blender tutorials, has a tutorial on making normal, specular, and diffuse maps. (Thank you to Laverne Unit in the SL Universe fora for posting the link.)

P.S. ObBreasts: Two words: Montgomery tubercles (two more: link NSFW!). (i.e. that's the sort of small detail that can add verisimilitude but would, without normal maps, involve adding to polygon counts more than they're worth)

Kind of ironic

So today I went looking for a beach to take some pictures... TavWear makes really nice swimsuits, and I'm overdue for some pictures. Down through the search results I went, and came to one called Busty's Beach Island.

Sounds promising, right? I headed there, and found the billboard with the rules, and near the top: "No overly-sized or un-natural [sic] body parts."

As I took a picture of the billboard, the lady whose island it is asked me, with impeccable courtesy, to remove my prim breasts. I told her I'd just seen the billboard and was headed home. She thanked me, and I said it was no problem. 

Of course, it's her island, and she can establish the rules she wishes... but it seems kind of ironic for "Busty's Beach Island" to forbid prim breasts. I had to smile just a little. I did find a beach, though, and got a picture or two. Not being actually in the water, I had on a wrap skirt.

Yay Valve!

As I often say, I am not a gamer... and therefore I hadn't heard of Valve. Now I know, though, and I am deeply grateful to them!

For those who, like me, aren't gamers: Valve is a company that develops games (including many that even I have heard of) and ways to distribute them (Steam). Valve recently confirmed that it's working on Steam for Linux, and we're starting to see some of the results, which will benefit us all.

Evidence? It's on the Valve Linux blog, in particular in the post "Faster Zombies". Left 4 Dead 2 now runs faster on Linux than it does on Windows.

OK, that by itself is meaningless to us on Second Life. It's how they did it that is important.

I am among those who are royally urinated off at nVidia for their lack of support for open source drivers. (It's bitten them in a sensitive place; a few days ago a security hole in their driver was made public. Had the driver been open source, how long ago would it have been fixed?) Unfortunately, nVidia doesn't care what I think... but it does care about a serious game company like Valve. (Such companies create the vast majority of the market for their hardware.) Because it cares, it's willing to work with Valve on issues with Linux drivers. (So is AMD, owner of ATI, and Intel.) That should mean better graphics performance for everybody. (Yes, even Windows users--while trying to figure out why the speed increase, Valve found an inefficiency in Direct3D that they can work around, or maybe Microsoft will do something about it... Whoa, I must be in a good mood to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.)

So, don't despair. To the extent that things not in Valve code improve, we will all benefit.

UPDATE: Second Life will be distributed on Valve's Steam network. (Thanks to Hamlet Au for posting with this news and more.)

Another reason to use Firestorm...

...can be found here.

Basically, the Firestorm developers have found the problem with operations that load or save files that cause the Second Life client (not just the LL client, I hasten to add) to hang in Linux if you try to save a photo to disk.

Now to go over and see whether I can be a beta tester if I make puppy eyes at them. :)

UPDATE: No need. I am now running Firestorm 4.1.1.28744, and I can save a photo to disk. Please, people responsible for other SL clients, adopt this fix ASAP.... and thank you to the Firestorm developers. The grid is in your debt.

Height inflation revisited

Mock Cosmetics has one of the "show your height" objects that you click on, but alongside it are three objects whose labels you can't see in this photo, but which should be by every single "show your height" object in the entire grid. From left to right:

• Average height for American women, 5'4"
• Average height for American men, 5'9"
• The height of Robert Wadlow, the tallest man who ever lived, 8'10"

Alas, they are behind a counter, so I couldn't take a picture showing them in their entirety--that does magnify the differences as per Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie with Statistics, but I didn't have a choice.

Things are so askew in SL that avatars of RL average height or even taller get accused of being child avatars. Maybe this sort of display would help were it more common.

(No discussion of scale and height in Second Life should be without a reference to Penny Patton's "A Matter of Scale". If you've not read it, I hope you will.)

For my European friends...

Please read "This Week We Kill ACTA - Or Get Locked Down in Monopolies for Decades" at the Torrentfreak web site, and consider emailing to the address mentioned in the article. The passage of ACTA would be a disaster.

Yay Blogger!

I don't have to go back and edit HTML to just get one blank line between paragraphs instead of two now! I guess the folks at Blogger finally noticed, or had it pointed out to them.

I am a happy blogger.

Happy news from Shayna Korobase

Shayna's found a prim breast-friendly nude beach! (You'll recall that she, and others, have found that some nude beaches, amazingly, are very unfriendly to busty avatars.) I will make a point of visiting the beach, named "The Island of Bare-Naked Angels"--it's important to support those who support us.

Actually, she has a lot of happy news at her blog, especially about her wonderful creations. Check it out.

Coming back

I've not been inworld for a while. Part of it is RL having to take precedence, and part is that it's very easy once you get out of the habit of doing something to not do it.

I'm back now, and that makes me happy.

Nobody's normal...

If you think that all it would take for Second Life to go mainstream and life to be happy forever after is for Linden Lab to get those people off the grid, read "Going Mainstream Means Letting in the Weirdos" by Tateru Nino. (Even if you don't think that, it's worth your while; she's a wise lady.)

Encouraging stories

BetaBeat has an article that's worth your while: "Eight Real Tales of Learning Computer Science as a High School Girl". Despite its subtitle, the tales either write about the gender divide not at all or only in passing, as an initial misconception that "CS is for boys" that experience erases. I find that extremely hopeful. Ganbatte!

Ride the invisible pony

There's a strange combination of slider settings that I've seen occasionally. They make one's hips and legs look sort of like slightly padded versions of the copper pipe figures from those commercials for some drug to control incontinence.

Apparently it's sort of a trend in some circles; see this SLUniverse thread. Those who have their avatars set this way are referred to as "riding an invisible pony".

Having heard too many sea chanteys at Renaissance fairs, I immediately thought of this:


It wants to be filked. (It's only fair; "Donkey Riding" borrows the tune from "Highland Laddie" which got it from "If thou'lt play me fair play".)

RIP Ray Bradbury

I am remiss in not mentioning the passing of Ray Bradbury. I think others have written of him and his work far better than I, but it merits mention that some time back he turned his imagination to a virtual reality room rather like the ST:TNG holodeck in his short story "The Veldt". If you haven't read it, you should.

Important notice

Please read this post on Maggie Bluxome's blog concerning Essentials Breasts, especially if you received a full-permission version of them during these past few days.

It's sad news. I do not know what this will mean for those with legitimately purchased Essentials Breasts, and I hope that we'll see a return of breasts with the Essentials shape--Jennifur does beautiful work.

Very pretty!

Boho Bikini makes some really lovely RL embroidered bikinis. I wonder whether there's similar fashion in SL? (If there are any for the busty community, that would be even better!)

They're singing what?!

If you have always wondered just what the whole "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi" thing was all about and what the heck they were singing... well, this won't help you at all, but it's hilarious!

Seriously, there's more to Carmina Burana than Orff's setting. Take a listen...

Happy birthday, Busted!

Busted magazine has come out with its second anniversary issue, and it is glorious.

It features photos of those who make the magazine possible--those of the always impeccably-dressed (OK, in one case impeccably undressed) Maggie are especially beautiful. The first part of Angel Eulenberg's writing about her experiences as a busty kajira in Gor is not to be missed. I very much look forward to what is to come, for Angel's experiences and for the magazine as a whole.

One sometimes hears of a project referred to as so-and-so's baby. The analogy needs to be tweaked a little bit, because instead of the "terrible twos" I think "terrific twos" the more accurate characterization for Busted.

Thank you once again, Maggie!

A very cheesy workaround

As we await a solution to VWR-28846 it turns out that there is a kludgy way around the problem: mail snapshots to yourself.

If you know of a way to mail yourself a snapshot in PNG format (which doesn't do lossy compression), let me know. I don't see that knob.

Thank you!

The folks at Chounyuu (link NSFW!) have done something I consider a great honor.

Chounyuu is a web site for people interested in large-breasted characters in manga and similar art. A while back I found that there was a thread in their forum about Second Life, so I took a look around and posted some images that I thought they'd appreciate.

Recently I got some email asking permission to place some images of me in the set that the site randomly selects from as page header images, and I happily approved. Sure enough, a week or so later I found myself there atop a page--again, they're randomly selected so it's like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates.

Thank you! I hope we'll see other images from Second Life there soon.

Second Life for Linux... does anyone at LL care?

If you run 64-bit Linux and use Second Life, chances are that you are having to get along without streaming media. (Fedora has RPMs for installing 32-bit gstreamer libraries on 64-bit systems, and worst case you can peek at the URL for streaming audio and fire up VLC or something in another window.)

That's been true for a long time; as far as I know, as long as there's been a Linux SL client. More recently, a problem's shown up for 64-bit and 32-bit Linux: VWR-28846, "Viewer 3.3.1 freezes on picture taking attempt". There are actually two issues here. On 32-bit Linux, it freezes after a complaint about PCRE (a library that implements Perl-style regular expressions) not being compiled with UTF-8 (a common Unicode encoding, which some, me included, think should be used everywhere). On 64-bit Linux, it freezes after a complaint about /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/menuproxies/libappmenu.so being a 64-bit library.

People, me included, have been clamoring for full 64-bit Linux support for quite some time--we're coming up on the third anniversary of the JIRA entry asking for 64-bit support--with no result save for third-party clients such as Imprudence (and Kokua someday, I hope!) and ArminW's Teapot. Not having streaming media cuts one off from an important part of SL, i.e. live performance, but the existence of kludges, I suppose, lets one rationalize. Not being able to save snapshots, though, is a lot harder to ignore. If Linden Lab only fixes that problem for 32-bit Linux, pulling 64-bit Linux users out from under the bus and throwing us under again, at the very least they'll be guaranteeing we'll give up on the LL client.

Avis was #2, and tried harder...

...how about #3?

"Our own viewer users are a minority. A significant minority -- we're the number three viewer behind, behind [Phoenix and Firestorm]... Phoenix is far and away the number one viewer, although it's quite steadily losing market share these days, has been for some months now. And Firestorm is the newer technology viewer from your project, is the number two, and it's gaining market share... And our viewer is number three behind Firestorm." --Oz Linden, March 2012

Check out this article at New World Notes.

It would be even more interesting to know what the share is like if one doesn't count alts, and even better if one could exclude bots (or do they use some text-only client for efficiency?), but even so I'm surprised.

One of the comments on the article claims that it shows how few new users are coming to Second Life, since you'd think they'd start out with the LL viewer... but I don't know whether that's the case. I would suggest that it may mean that the newcomers who stay are those introduced to SL by friends who can guide them through that important initial interval, and that those friends are more likely to point their charges at the viewer they themselves use.

Double Bind

Hamlet Au asks why we put up with the technical problems of Second Life, and says that our putting up with them (and thereby letting Linden Lab get away with not fixing them) will doom Second Life.

Technical problems here are exemplified by the poor performance of the current Linden Lab SL client on Hamlet's roughly year and a half old Alienware laptop that  he refuses to do anything to like installing the latest nVidia driver--after all, that's doing LL's work for them. (It's not clear whether he puts adjusting the SL client's preferences in that category, but "Why should I spend an hour or two tinkering on software when it should just WORK BY NOW?" sure sounds like it.)

And to an extent, he's right. A lot of people can't be bothered to maintain their computers, and hence are unlikely to either have a reasonable first experience with Second Life or want to bother to take any action to improve that experience.

On the other hand...

• Linden Lab can't be blamed for inadequacies of the operating system (does Windows not nudge you when new graphics card drivers are available? Linux does) or of the computer user--and would you trust an application that tried to install system software, or changes your environment (maybe having Aero or Compiz turned on hurts SL performance because of the eye candy they offer), or like one that changes your SL client settings (maybe you have the graphics cranked for photography, or turned down for racing)?
• There are a lot more problems with that first experience than the purely technical--to only mention one, there's the way that the newcomers get their initial training and then are dumped into welcome areas infested with, shall we say, people who are less than concerned with the quality of the new user's experience in SL.
• Any boycott of SL has to be on a large scale; a few people going away won't make any difference. Indeed, the departure of much-loved sims in the past year or so doesn't seem to have made much difference. Vendors won't boycott alone--they'd be giving up income while their competitors do that much better in their absence.
• What was the old line? "We don't care. We don't have to; we're the phone company." Linden Lab is in that position. Where else can people go to create as they will or remake themselves in a virtual world, and still be able to interact with the friends they've made in SL?

So it's true. We're in a double bind. Second Life is the only place the existing user base can get what it wants; possible competitors are likely to be scared off by the media's predominant mischaracterization of SL as, in the ignorant words of Chris Pirillo, all sex and gambling. There's no such thing as mass media for Second Life in the way there is in RL; trying to organize the residents is a lot like herding cats, and the last name clusterflop is good evidence that it won't matter anyway.... so LL can continue with the assumption that the existing user base will continue to put up with whatever they get.

Perhaps Second Life will manage to continue, with enough people willing to pay the outrageous tier fees to support an ongoing user base, though without new blood, eventually that user base will die off (barring the Singularity, but in that case nobody will care about SL save maybe as the moral equivalent of a "living history" site). Perhaps OpenSim will win out or at least allow an ongoing, if smaller, collection of users.

IMHO, to survive, a virtual world is going to have to use as much existing code as possible, preferably open source to avoid licensing issues such as have come up with kakadu, Vivox, and Havok, with "NIH" ("not invented here") verboten. Apologies for the repetition, but... how much better off would Second Life be if, rather than throwing together a homebrew scripting language, we'd had an existing language like Python or C# or Ruby from the beginning? We'd then have

• far more documentation and tutorials than LL could generate on its own
• far more work on optimization than LL could ever manage
• already existing IDEs
• an existing talent pool and source of help for newbies
• a market for skill in said language outside of LL (seen any postings for IT jobs that have LSL experience as a requirement lately?)

For examples, take a look at the Lua Wiki's "Lua Uses" page. Let's see... SpringRTS, SimCity 4, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, CryEngine2, FarCry, Supreme Commander, Garry's Mod, Psychonauts, Heroes of Might and Magic V, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, Impossible Creatures, Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas, Homeworld 2, and others... Oh, look! There!

Last chance to see Whimsy Kaboom

Whimsy Kaboom is going away. Visit it while you can. For more details, read Cheyenne's post on the subject.

I am perpetually amazed that as many people pay the insane tier costs of land in SL as do. Grateful, but amazed.

UPDATE: Hooray! Whimsy Kaboom is saved! More details on Cheyenne's blog.

Calling all mesh clothing makers

If you want the mesh deformer to become official, please head over to VWR-28846, see what mesh clothing is being requested for help with testing, and provide it. If you don't, there's a good chance that the mesh deformer code, after all the hassle, brouhaha, and shaming of LL by crowdfunding the deformer code, won't make it into the official SL client, and therefore, by the infamous 2(k), nobody will be able to have it. Here's Oz Linden on the topic, from the JIRA:

Perhaps this issue really isn't all that important, or worth the trouble to integrate. 

So far, only one designer has responded with one test garment. 

Let me be clear - the lack of test material is a major blocker for testing, and therefor[sic] accepting, this proposed feature.  If you want it, step up and do it soon.

I have to wonder why LL doesn't have such items left over from testing, but that's irrelevant. Please don't give them an excuse.

UPDATE: Designers have already commented that five days four days and not quite sixteen and a half hours, the time between the request for clothes in the JIRA and the above thinly veiled threat, is a pretty short interval, and it is. I just want the feature to be adopted.

UPDATE: Do read Nalates Urriah's post on the subject.

Taking the plunge...

I'm now on Google+. Should issues about my identity come up, I'd like to think that a blog that's been around over five and a half years would be good evidence. We'll see how it goes.

A dream come true?

I got a message from Cheyenne urging me to go immediately to New World Notes. I did... and I'm dumbfounded.

Ceri Quixote has created a 62-meter mesh avatar.

There are other reports. There's a video... watch it in 720p mode and full screen.





Shadows are enabled, and the positions are such as to rule out forced perspective.

Note also the quality of the avatar; giant avatars built from prims have improved over time, but at the joints it's obvious that they are built up from multiple prims. Look at Ms. Quixote's shoulders and abdomen; they are smooth and the body is a single unit.

So... we have an existence proof. (The NWN article says Ms. Quixote will be selling (somewhat shorter) giant avatars on SL Marketplace.) I think I will go IM Bart Seymour...

UPDATE: Be sure to read the comments on the NWN post. Ms. Quixote is not alone in creating giant mesh avatars, breathtaking as her work is. Indeed, if you have read past articles and comments here, you'll recall that Aliasi Stonebender has done so and mentioned it back in mid-February.

I hope I don't have to drop back to screenshots...

Lately I've been crashing every time I try to save a photo to disk in Second Life. Firestorm, the LL client... they both do it. Could this be related to my Ubuntu upgrade? I hope not; it's hard to believe anything would change about the file save dialogue.

Aargh.

UPDATE: VWR-28846. Linux users, please vote for and follow this one; it's serious proctalgia. Also, if you use 64-bit Linux, please leave a comment here and let me know (1) which distribution, release thereof, and windowing interface you use and (2) whether you have this problem? Maybe it will help narrow things down.

UPDATE: There may be two issues. When I look at the log, I see a message in which the client gripes about a library being 64-bit; someone running 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 sees a message about PCRE (a library that does regular expressions in the style of the Perl scripting language) being compiled without UTF-8 support.

belated celebration: Stand Tall Week

I hope that, unlike me, you didn't miss Stand Tall Week, "an initiative to encourage women to embrace their height." Don't slouch... stand tall!

Less than a week...

...until Ubuntu 12.04 aka "Precise Pangolin" is officially released, if all goes according to plan. Shame on me. I haven't paid attention to the countdown graphic.

Looking forward to it.

UPDATE: Took a chance and upgraded. Happily, the Wacom driver appears to be fixed!

A Very Merry Unbirthday?

Take a look at this SL blog entry. A quote:

This year we will focus the spotlight on community events.  No one throws a better event or party than the Second Life community! If you’re having an event to celebrate Second Life turning nine, we want to know about it! 

Submit your event or party information to the Second Life Destination Guide by emailing editor@lindenlab.com with the subject line “SL9B Event.”

Outstanding by its absence: any creation of SL9B sims for builds as in past birthdays, or any mention of effort on LL's part aside from their possible selection of photos of community events shared on Facebook (need we mention the issues about Facebook and SL avatars?) as the "Pic of the Day".

I have to admit that my immediate reaction is: if they don't care, why should I? I will do my best to fight it off.

UPDATE: Some folks do seem to be coming around, judging by the comments on Tateru Nino's blog post on the subject.

Must-read from Penny Patton

i'm not sure whether there will be more parts of the "Beautiful SL" set of articles on Penny Patton's Digital Pasture blog. I hope there will. In any case, you really should read the two parts that are there now.

In it, she writes about why parts of SL, notably the infohubs, welcome areas, and other public works areas, are not beautiful and what can be done to fix that.  Whether or not one is of the "Second Life is not a game" persuasion--funny how that's reminiscent of the FIAWOL/FIJAGDH division in SF fandom--people have very high expectations of graphics quality set by games, and Second Life had better at least come close (which it can, as Penny shows) if it's going to survive.

I want it to be a proud thing to be an SL resident, but let's try to keep it from being lonely, please.

What the Heck is Kerbango, Anyway?

Like Billy Joel, I don't know why I go to extremes... but I'm off on another quest, namely one for an insanely long prim tongue. Not split, not pierced--just very long. Not reptilian, either. A long human tongue.

I found one resizable tongue, but it's only changeable with a script that grows it uniformly by a given percentage. I need to stretch it, so I'll get another one that I think will let me do so.

What can I say? I'm being silly again. Or still.

Foot, Meet Bullet: The Disadvantages of DRM

Read "Another Reason Why DRM is Bad -- for Publishers" at Techdirt.

Thank you, Kaseido

I wish to echo Maggie's sentiment. I'm honored to be mentioned in Kaseido Quandry's work on the Second Life prim breast community. Thank you!

Most of all, I'm glad that there are people who are interested in Second Life as it really is, and overjoyed at the notion that such people will be letting others know what they find.  

If you have not been keeping up with The Spathic Files, I think you'll find them very interesting. Kaseido has asked for feedback from the prim breast community on a first draft of an article.

More Mesh Hair

If, as I hope, you read the comments on posts here, you'll know that Eira Kalil of Tiny Things pointed me in the direction of Wasabi Pills hair as another source of mesh hair. Thank you very much, Eira. There I found some lovely hair that gave me a serious 60s flashback.

I like its asymmetry and the stray unruly strands that add realism (the sort that we may wish we could do without when trying to arrange our hair in RL, but in SL are welcome refinements). Alas, one does have to be selective (though won't mesh hair that falls on the front of the torso intersect even stock avatars when they turn their heads?), but when it does work, it works beautifully.

(Note to self: antialiasing is your friend. sigh...)

The Argument Against Achievement Systems

If you read New World Notes, one of the things you'll see Hamlet Au suggest as a way to improve Second Life (aside from point-and-click avatar movement :))  is some kind of achievement or ranking system (do read the followup, too; the link to Kanomi Pikajuna's parody of the idea in the article is now broken, but you can see it here).

The curious thing is that game makers are questioning the worth of achievement systems. In that regard, I highly recommend Chris Hecker's "Achievements Considered Harmful?" (One interesting datum Mr. Hecker mentions: "extrinsic motivations", e.g. achievement/ranking systems, tend to kill off intrinsic motivations more in women than in men--and Second Life, it is said, has a larger proportion of its user base that are (actually) women than other virtual worlds, so would an achievement system actually hurt Second Life, I wonder?)

I can't help thinking of a possibly analogous situation someone pointed out to me long ago. Back in the days when newsgroups flourished, there was one such newsgroup for Renaissance fairs, alt.fairs.renaissance. The folks who posted there typically signed their posts with their (persona's) name followed by an extensive list of self-assigned titles: "Joseph of Blowshire, Keeper of the Duke's Spittoons, Chief Cat-Herder of the Bloviate Empire, Lord High Pooh-Bah of Hand-kissing Certification..." I'm sure that it was in jest, but how different from the awards and orders in the Society for Creative Anachronism! In the SCA, one scrupulously avoids the presumption of assuming a title; such things are earned by right of arms, excellence in the arts and sciences, or service to the realm. They actually mean something. Game achievement systems, IMHO, don't.

Mesh hair

While we wait for the issues around mesh avatars and mesh clothing to be solved, you might want to give mesh hair a look.

There are a lot fewer relevant head sliders--your nose and mouth don't affect how hair fits, and does anyone really make his or her skull skew to one side or the other?--so the combinatorial explosion clothiers and avatar makers face doesn't bite quite as hard. I trundled over to Magika (one of the places Busted magazine recommends on its page for potential models) and looked around... and was blown away.

Mesh hair typically comes with a number of sizes in the package so you can pick one that works for you. As with anything else, try the demo first, to make sure you'll be happy with what you buy. Large worked fine for me.

Now, there is one thing that I wish for: if you look at mesh hair, you will find a lot of it has hair that falls forward over one's chest. That leads to obvious issues for those of us who use breast attachments. I hope that hair makers will take us into consideration and offer versions that accommodate us. For now, though, I'm very happy with the mesh hair that I can use.

The April 2012 Busted is out!

What can I say but that the photography is breathtaking, and Maggie's "Art of Editing" article is not to be missed. Get it in world or via the web.

Creative Response

Be sure to read this post from jessamyn Smith's blog.

It turns out that there's a joke schema:

1. Straight man says something that can, in some way, be interpreted as risqué.
2. Alleged comic responds with "That's what she said" with eh-eh-nudge-nudge intonation or facial expression.

Maybe it's funny the first aleph-null times, but someone where Ms. Smith works created an IRC bot that monitors text and looks for situations that might benefit from a "TWSS", and sends it out in response.

I love what Ms. Smith did in response--it's a very geekish thing to do.

UPDATE: Ouch! The bot sends out quotes from famous women in response. I got that very wrong, and I apologize to everyone, Ms. Smith especially!

Not Now

(I'm showing my age. That title makes Harry Chapin's harrowing song "Sniper" go through my head--but is that important? Not now...)

I don't think it's going to be any time soon that well-endowed mesh avatars (or any of a bunch of other mesh avatars) will work with sliders such as breast size, based on experimentation. The slider behavior is, I think, too tied to the specifics of the stock avatar and the limits its designer(s) imposed on it. The way the avatar is modified for different non-skeletal slider settings will have to be a function of the avatar.

To have a chance of getting what we want, we have to ask for something that has what we want as a subset and will benefit a lot of people. How many mesh avatar users are out there? Unfortunately, limitations on such avatars will mean the answer is "fewer than there might be", which in turn means fewer who would benefit from a proposed change, the usual loop that works against change.

UPDATE: I went ahead and asked about this issue and another in passing on the SL Forums (and thanks to the moderator who moved it to the appropriate forum!), and the responses have started. I am glad that people who know a lot more about these issues than I do are commenting. The thread is over in the mesh forum.

Back to Abnormal

Alas, the current Niran's viewer didn't seem to activate the mesh deformer alpha code, so I went back to my gangly, pale-skinned non-mesh avatar self. I will give Exodus a shot tonight or tomorrow, and see what happens to the mesh avatar when I twist the non-skeletal knobs (not to mention that I will get a pale skin suitable for the mesh avatar as well). Eventually we'll get that darned chrysalis open... though we'll have to see whether there will be a wide selection of clothing.

(Despite that issue, which isn't crucial at the moment, and despite Niran's viewer still having the problem of weird half-planes of differing intensity on high-res photos, I have to say I'm very impressed with Niran's client's performance, even with a bunch of graphics knobs cranked. Give it a try.)

I have to admit to feeling some relief. Eventually I will have a mesh avatar that is "an engine fit for my proceeding", to borrow a phrase from Ordinal Malaprop's wonderful, though sadly now inactive, blog. Until then, though, I'll feel a little weird with it. That's just me, though; to me an avatar isn't like a suit to put on or take off. Your mileage may vary, and I am in awe of the work of mesh avatar makers.

Puzzling error message

I was trying to visit a sim this morning. I entered its name as my signon destination and logged in... only to find that the login failed, with a message saying something like "we don't understand why, but your login failed". I double checked my password--it was fine. Finally I gave up, told the client to take me home, and poof--there I was.

When I tried to teleport to the sim, I found the cause. The sim is premium users only.

I suspect this is a new situation, and clients either aren't written to recognize the situation or whatever the results are of trying to sign on to a premium-only sim when you aren't premium can't be distinguished from some other failure case. I hope that's corrected eventually, but should this happen to you, I hope my example will save you some bother.

Yay tinies!

The Tinies of Raglan Shire have made their funding goal! (That said, their Kickstarter page will still be open for the remaining two weeks, should you wish to support them; it will help.) Best of luck to them, and I hope that their expansion into the greater world might provoke some to explore the Tinies' home turf in Second Life.

Read more at NWN... thanks to Hamlet Au for spreading the news.

A Visit with Bart Seymour

(UPDATE, placed at the head before the page break so everyone can see it: Be sure to read the comments on this post, especially those from Maggie Bluxome.)

I signed on for a bit this morning (RL is keeping me pretty busy these days) and was IMed by Bart Seymour. He'd been talking with Reine, and had some of his mesh avatars on display. We chatted for a bit, and it turned out he was making one model that he thought I'd like. I did indeed, and I bought it on the spot.

He helped me, clumsy as I am, with setting it up. I will have to seek out a pale skin (of the sort I prefer) in texture form; the avatar is set up so that such textures (which, if I understand, are packaged together to comprise an SL skin) can be applied to it--for testing purposes, I used a tan skin. (Let's pretend that I spent some time on one of those nude beaches in SL. :))

I had to tweak my shape to work with it--somewhat broader-shouldered, a little shorter (*sob*). (I made my torso a bit longer, which in SL shortens your thighs. I'll experiment to figure out the best settings, and see what's really necessary to work best with the avatar.) I took some pictures, but having just downloaded the Firestorm FUI beta (more on that later), I hadn't twisted the graphics knobs. Bart was already set in that respect, so here are the photos that he took, behind a break as there are some NSFW mannequins in view:

Blogger frustrations

Blogger is a very pleasant (and free as in beer) place to start a blog. Some outgrow it, or decide they want features it doesn't have, and go elsewhere, but I've yet to do so. I'm still here and blogging since September 7th of two-oh-OMG-six. They've steadily improved it, and for that I am grateful, but...

...one thing really bugs me about it.

It's the way the WYSIWYG editor deals with line breaks and what I'd like to think of as paragraphs in one's posts. I like a blank line between paragraphs, so I type away until I've finished a paragraph, hit ENTER twice, and start the next paragraph.

Blogger's WYSIWYG editor does the following:

1. Creates a span with my font specification that encloses my paragraph and appends a br (line break) tag after the close of the span.
2. Creates another span that encloses only a br, with a br appended.
3. Creates a third span that encloses the next paragraph.

That empty span in the middle, as far as I can tell, causes the browser to have two blank lines between paragraphs when the smoke clears. It doesn't display that way on the supposedly WYSIWYG page; you have to click "Preview" to see what really happens, and then go into HTML mode to pull the br-only spans.

Perhaps Blogger wants very much to encourage just one ENTER between paragraphs. I'll have to experiment to find out.... but more than that, I have to wonder why is it that the editor doesn't use real live paragraph tags instead of just spans? HTML tags are supposed to represent document structure, after all.

While we're talking about pet peeves, if Blogger wants the WYSIWYG editor to resemble a word processor, it would be nice for it to do "smart quotes" and conversion of -- into an em dash. (The knob would have to be twistable; sometimes you don't want it to do that for you.)

There's a good blog post on making Blogger work and play well with Google Web Fonts. I'll be experimenting with it. Verdana's nice, but there are other good fonts out there that aren't overused.

The Return of Aporia

Aporia, Kaseido Quandry's blog, has returned to the web. (Someone managed to break in and do something to it that got it disconnected for a while.) If you haven't been following the "Spathic Files" posts there, you should--check out the latest entry. Things are getting even more interesting.

Must-view from Cheyenne Palisades

Don't miss her blog post featuring beautiful photos she took at the new Africa sim. I'm headed there ASAP; take a look at her photos and you will be too.

Change of pace

Every so often you decide to rearrange things, and I decided to do a little of that to the blog, or at least put up new wallpaper and change the painting over the mantelpiece. I'll update my profile photo soon, too. (Actually, that's what nudged me over the edge. A while back Crap Mariner pointed out problems with a profile photo leaning towards orange, and while I dearly love that picture I took by Minoan firelight, it is very orange. So I said to myself "Self, you should change that--and why not redo the blog a bit while you're at it?"

I hope it meets with your approval. I toyed with Scriptina, but kept my tilt towards simple elegance in type.

A plea to 64-bit Linux users

Please do the following:

1. Head to the Dolphin SL viewer web site.
2. Download the Linux viewer (there's what I presume is an RPM file for OpenSUSE, and a gzipped tar file for other distributions) and run it.
3. Go back to the web site and respond to the "I'm on 32-bit Linux"/"I'm on 64-bit Linux" poll.

I doubt that you can even buy a new x86-based computer these days that doesn't have a 64-bit processor; peeking at newegg.com, one sees the majority of the netbooks on sale have 64-bit CPUs.

There are a bunch of us running 64-bit Linux out there; Ubuntu Community documentation says that unless you have some special reason to run 32-bit Linux, run 64-bit Linux. and I suspect people are following that advice--including non-geeks. Canonical, for example, is working hard on giving Ubuntu a user interface that will appeal to the average user, and while geeks like me don't care for Unity and despise the arrogant, high-handed approach that the GNOME 3 developers are taking, I have to admit that usability is at least their stated goal and respect the work being put into it.

Unfortunately, with the exception of Imprudence (and someday, Kokua?) and omvviewer, the latter not having updated their Ubuntu PPA since Lucid Lynx, the SL clients for Linux are 32-bit. Running them requires not only the ia32libs packages, but hackery to put 32-bit gstreamer libraries in place if streaming media are to work--and remember that non-geek portion of the Linux user population? They aren't going to go to that trouble, and will probably just blow off Second Life.

64-bit mode does have advantages. The x86 architecture is infamous for having a limited, highly non-orthogonal register set. For those whose response to that is "Huh?", a brief explanation:

The 32-bit x86 (80386 and newer) CPUs, or 64-bit x86 CPUs in 32-bit mode, have the following integer registers (a register is a place in the CPU that holds a value, upon which one can do various operations (add, subtract, and the like); the CPU can access the registers faster than anything else in your computer): EAX, EBX, ECX, EDX, ESP, EBP, ESI, and EDI. That's eight altogether.

ESP and EBP have dedicated uses to keep track of memory allocation and function calls; they can't be used for anything else, so in practice you just have six... and every single one of them is magic--that is, there are x86 operations that can only work with values in that particular register. That limitation is why we call it non-orthogonal, and it means that a lot of x86 code is taken up with moving a value into the magic register it needs to be in for a particular operation that the program has to perform. The limited number of them means that a lot of x86 code consists of moving values between them and memory, which is a lot slower to read or write.

Compilers try to minimize these moves wherever they can by evaluating expressions into the registers they know the results will have to be in for the next operation, but they can't get rid of them all.

In 64-bit mode, x86 processors have eight additional integer registers, and all sixteen of the registers (eight old and eight new) can hold 64 bits of data and can operate on 64 bits at a time. They can also use a register we haven't mentioned yet, IP (the "instruction pointer") to reference memory, which makes what's called "position independent code" easier, and simplifies access to tables of constants.

All this leads to a performance improvement--how much depends on what you're doing. That Ubuntu Community page points at a Phoronix study that showed no loss, and some respectable gains, in performance with the move to 64-bit code.

So... [pauses to catch her breath] there really should be a 64-bit Linux SL viewer. With that poll, Dolphin appears to be listening... and this is a kind of innovation that LL hasn't forbidden, at least not yet. Please let them know you're out there.

UPDATE: I took my own advice. The Dolphin Viewer 3 worked very nicely for me!

If the Velveteen Rabbit can do it...

The Tinies of Raglan Shire want to expand to the greater world via other media, with an eye to being able "...to fund ideas [they] have for humanitarian projects that help people in health and art related areas."

They have a page on Kickstarter; as I type, they're about halfway to their goal with thirty-one days to go. It sounds like a good cause... and I have to think that if they succeed, people curious about their origins may be inspired to come to Second Life, which would make it win-win all around.

More details at New World Notes, the Tinies' Kickstarter page, the Raglan Shire blog, and at the utterly cutely-named Jazz Paws site.

UPDATE: Twenty days to go, and they are almost 80% of the way there. That's great, but it's not a time for complacency. Please help if you can.

"SL on the Go?" Thanks

First, thanks to Maggie... and thanks to the people who have IMed me since the release of the March 2012 Busted to chat about the notion of a Second Life client for mobile devices--I hasten to emphasize chat only; I know of no current plans for a full mobile SL client. Some SL mobile clients already exist, though they don't give you a view of the world around you:

• Pocket Metaverse, for i{Phone, Pad}
• Sparkle IM for iPhone and iPod Touch
• Mobile Grid Client for Android

I'd love to see it happen someday, and I think it will as low power processors become more powerful. I couldn't help noticing a post on the Muktware blog (and if you are interested in Linux or Android, you really should follow it) this morning: "Android Aims to Become a Gaming Hub? Increases App Size to 4GB from 50 MB".

Smarter?

Kaseido Quandry sent me a link to an interesting article. (Thank you, Kaseido!)

We all know the stereotype of the stupid well-endowed woman... but here's an article about an interesting study. "A study by a Chicago university sociologist of 1,200 women found that large-breasted women tend to have higher intelligence."
(I presume the author meant to write "A study of 1,200 women by a Chicago university sociologist..." or "A Chicago university sociologist's study of 1,200 women...")

The article is from March, 2011. The study itself was done in 2003, as one of the article's linked sources show--which makes me wonder, did it get much publicity back then? I guess word did get out; there's a page from 2004 mentioning it.

Alas, I've yet to find a link to the paper I expect the sociologist wrote... and of course, all that's claimed is a tendency, and independent confirmation would be nice. (For that matter, none of the articles mention whether the test included women who had plastic surgery.) That said, it's nice to have some data contrary to the stereotype.

Must-read at Prim Perfect

Thanks to Crap Mariner for pointing out this post at Prim Perfect about the name debacle. Be sure to read the comments; they're insightful and make some interesting proposals.

Excelsior!

When I go to Formal Night at Bosom Buddies, I have the delightful difficulty of keeping up with the others who are there. I swear that every time, they are all more beautiful and more beautifully dressed.

Busted Magazine is like that, always outdoing itself, but this month is even more so. The photography and models are magnificent, and the first part of Maggie's guide to tweaking one's clothing for the best fit possible, "The Art of Editing", is very helpful. I'll be studying it seriously.

You can find it at the web site linked above, but you can also subscribe, and I recommend doing so. Check it out.

The Residents

There's a good chance that you've never heard of The Residents. (I really wish they'd continued with the American Composers series; if you have a chance to hear Stars and Hank Forever!, which features the music of John Philip Sousa and Hank Williams, don't pass it up! WARNING: it's an acquired taste.)

Part of The Residents' shtik is anonymity. They started out all performing in the eyeball masks you see in the image; after someone stole one of the eyeball masks, they made a golden skull mask to replace it, so now it's three eyeballs and a skull.

I can't help thinking of The Residents when I think about the absurdity of the Second Life resident name clusterflop (thanks to the folks who made the TV-friendly version of Heartbreak Ridge for that euphemism). As I'm sure you know, along with display names came the end of choosing a first and last name for newcomers to SL. Places that displayed a last name always displayed "Resident" for them.

The results? Having to be unique in just one name led to a lot of the Joe231235 style of name that everyone used to warn against, and concatenating multiple words or names into one contiguous string. "But that's what display names are for!" Perhaps, but they're not unique, and scripts take the "real" name; you can't type "/1 hug Display Name" and have it work, so everyone's nose is perpetually rubbed in this mess. It also created a divide between the folks with two names and those with one, and breaks verisimilitude. (OK, the hacker (in the original sense) community tends to refer to a few famous people by their loginids, but it's a buzzkill in a virtual world. "Hey, it's Joe231235! How ya been, Joe231235?")

Rodvik Linden raised our hopes when he posted that LL was looking into a solution. Hosannas were raised (and I think I did some of that). We were promised word on what LL intends to do... and now the word has come.

They'll make it possible to put a hyphen in the one name, so if you had hoped for "Joe Blow", you can be joe-blow. On to the next round table! (UPDATE: or not. "rodvik.linden Hey folks, as I mentioned to some of you over the weekend I am going to do the next roundtable stuff in private one on one's [sic] rather than as a free for all. That makes it more low key and doesnt [sic] turn it into something which is contentious. Thanks for all the feedback.")

People are not happy. That unhappiness is compounded by the knowledge that if you go in via one of the still-extant (for now, at least) educational portals, you can in fact still choose a first and last name; someone did it in the past few days as I type this. That means that all the code for handling a first and last name is still there; it's just not accessible save through those portals.

First the TPV policy change, now this. I hope things improve soon.

Thank you, Crap Mariner

While looking around for more reactions to the TPV policy I happened across something I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't noticed: this blog is on Crap's blogroll.

That Crap is, at least when blogging, a curmudgeonly sort who doesn't mince words makes such a thing doubly precious, like a compliment from that teacher who drove you hard and who you'll never forget. (I hasten to add there's a huge gulf between being curmudgeonly and being Greatly Disturbed.) I will do my best to live up to the honor.

Thank you!
/me curtsies, blushing

"I feel happy! I feel happy!"

I noticed in one of Emilly's posts on The Train Wreck Love Life a reference to a web site I'd not heard of, urlai.com. It's a site that lets you enter the URL of a web site and then displays an "analysis" of that site.

I succumbed to temptation. According to that site, "vidasegunda.blogspot.com is probably written by a female somewhere between 51-65 years old. The writing style is personal and happy most of the time." Whoa... I guess I am happy, at least among the sites they've been handed: "vidasegunda.blogspot.com is the 11th most happy blog of 582 ranked." Good thing I wasn't blogging during my teen angst years back in the early Pleistocene.

UPDATE: apparently as I keep writing, things fluctuate. Now it thinks that I'm between 26 and 35, and I've gone way down in the happiness rank, 123 out of 586. I'll peek every so often... but I won't keep writing about it. :)