Darn it, it's happening again...

I'm back to having SL periodically come to a grinding creep, eating all available CPU cycles. Moving it to another screen helps for a little, and then it happens again. Do that enough, and eventually it crashes. Back to the JIRA, and apologies to my friends for dropping out of the grid unexpectedly.

UPDATE: There's a JIRA entry for what I'm seeing, VWR-16750. If you are an SL resident using Linux, please take a look and vote for it if you're having the same difficulty.

UPDATE: This morning it happened and made my system reboot. After that, I fired it up and saved the logging output... and it ran fine far longer than it took to slow down before. So perhaps something other than SL is causing a problem. Excuse me while I beat my virtual head against a virtual wall.

DOUBLE TAKE: Was I awake when I wrote that? "grinding creep" sounds like an obnoxious guy working at a coffeehouse.

Foxbean Laboratories Releases Nadine 1.5

It's now official; Foxbean Laboratories has released version 1.5 of the "Nadine" prim breasts. Details at Pectoral Virtual Fashion.

My first peek into OSGrid

I've retrieved the Hippo Viewer and taken my first steps into OSGrid. It will take some time to de-Ruth myself, but it will be interesting to see what people are doing there.

UPDATE: It will take longer than I thought. Armed with a transcribed list of my avatar shape parameters, I went back to edit my appearance, and found I couldn't change anything. :(

Copper Canyon Dance Club

Minka Pearl has created the Copper Canyon Dance Club on the Isle of Aran sim near her store. It's a beautiful place, all copper (of course) and black and deep brown. Do check it out; photos are nice, but there's nothing like being there.

Firefox 3.6

It will be available today at 9:30 a.m. Linden Time... er, Pacific Standard Time. Read and see/hear about the changes and improvements.

In the past few days, Germany and France have joined the chorus of recommendations that people move away from Internet Explorer. If you haven't, consider making the switch today.

UPDATE: If that's not enough, one day after Microsoft released a patch to a security hole in IE, another one has turned up.

UPDATE: If that's not enough, I just heard Kim Komando, of all people, say on her radio show that if you don't take any of her other security-related advice, dump Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox.

In SL, you can't taste your foot in your mouth

Sigh. I made an inaccurate statement about editing SL objects. Lesson learned; check things out for yourself.

The Return of Miss Jane

I had to go back and try out Nanami's "Miss Jane" again now that Whimsy is once again green and blooming--after a foot or so of snow and horrible cold in RL, it was a joy. Shadows are on, and I wish I remembered the Windlight setting I used.

Hello, Mumbai!

Looking around on Google Analytics, I see that we've been visited by someone from Mumbai. Hello from cold Iowa... right now, the mid-eighties (Fahrenheit) high you're having sounds awfully good.

Sooner than I thought...

nVidia is showing off tablets based on a platform it calls "Tegra 2": ARM Cortez A9 CPU and nVidia graphics. $200-$300 noises are being made. There's already a "smartbook", the Mobinnova Beam, based on such hardware.

I hope somebody's trying to build the SL client for the ARM; I want to be mobile and on the grid!

Prediction Time

It's year's end/beginning, and that means it's prediction time.

I won't hazard predictions, but like art, I know what I like, and I'm hoping that several of those that Gwyneth Llewelyn makes come true.

The shoe dropped

It finally happened. One of the photos I put in the "What the Fug?" flickr group appeared in a What the Fug? blog entry, "Top 10 SL Fashion Disasters of 2009". Prim breasts, according to the author, are the number one disaster of the year, apparently worse than bling, sexualized child avatars, and jeans so shredded as to expose not-normally-exposed areas.

There are several example photos. All show women with varying levels of decolletage (in my case, the neckline only came down to the neck), but with none of the gratuitous nudity, oiled skin, or exposed nipples and areolae of the more usual targets of venom on that sort of web site... so I guess I got the result I was expecting when I first added a couple of photos to the flickr group.

Waiting for Baudot

If you wait for newer and faster hardware, you'll wait forever... but I'm inclined to this time. It's not been very long that netbooks using the nVidia Ion chipset have been out--but now, the claim is that there will be systems using the Ion 2 in Q1 of 2010. The Ion 2 will work with the next-generation Intel Atom chips, the "Pine Trail" version.

But on the other hand, the ARM Cortex A9 netbooks will be coming. What to do, what to do?

Another dream coming true?

Another of my dreams may be coming true.

Cyanide Ember has been working on a product called BIGAVS, and from what I see it's the best giant avatar to date. I will be experimenting with it. (If you wish to look into it, head for the Royal Dragon Club and Mall.)

Many, many thanks to Susyn Stenvaag for the news and the link.

UPDATE: There's yet another project underway that looks like it will be better still. Watch this space!

Photo Contest

Over at Big Booby Girls in Second Life, Tenyene Beaumont has announced a photography contest. Check it out.

UPDATE: It's also on Tenyene's own blog, of course.

P.S. I'm a little bummed at LL; submissions have to be of snapshots uploaded directly, so that skill with Photoshop/GIMP isn't a factor... but the SL client has a bug that keeps snapshots from working with shadows enabled, so I'll have to turn it off. Darn it.

A plea to clothiers--"let me wear your coat"

So there I stood in wintry Whimsy, echoed in RL by the drifts of snow and chill winds outside the window, wearing what? A bare-shouldered ballroom gown, sheer fabric, stockings, and skirt open up to there, minimal protection against the cold.

What to wear? I rummage through inventory and find a cashmere sweater and super high-top jeans. There we go...

...or not. The sweater proves to be one of those midriff-baring numbers that might be nice for Indian summer in Florida, but in this weather?

So, to the growing number of clothiers who cater to prim breast users, I echo Roger Daltrey's plea. Make a coat for us, please. I realize there are issues--you can't just take it off; you have to switch a jacket-appropriate clothing texture on the prim breasts for a blouse-appropriate texture, and conversely for putting it on--but think of us out there in the snow, freezing our, um, extremities off! Please?

UPDATE: Tenyene has shown me an example of her adaptation of a mainstream coat, so I will give it a try. I will follow her landmark and hope that my fingers will stay flexible enough to let me do the job. :)

Back in the Shadows Again...

Now that I can run for a reasonable interval, I can do things like explore and take pictures again... and even turn shadows back on. (Thank you again, Laurana!)

Maggie Bluxome recently posted some photos of a new red latex dress that included some taken in the Unintended Water sim, and the flower-laden meadow was too lovely to pass up. That, along with a really nice Windlight full moon preset that comes with the Emerald SL client, and the beautiful and talented Foxbean Liebknecht (think of a young, blonde Anjelica Huston), made for a nice photo.



UPDATE: For those curious about the setting, and for me, because I'll forget it otherwise, it shows up in the listing under Emerald as "Mighty Moon".

Thank you, Tenyene

Today I had the pleasure of visiting EPIC and chatting with its owner, Tenyene Beaumont. She's doing some wonderful things for prim breast users, though I think the office she's set up for consultations with those who express interest in adjusting their bosom is the most wonderful.

(Simulblogging again... sigh. Got to avoid that in the future.)

UPDATE: She has a blog now!

Apologies to Malaise Maladay

Sigh. I finally noticed that in the list of blog links, I misspelled Malaise Maladay's last name. Oops.

It's fixed now. Sorry about that.

Frustratingly short stays

Aargh. Lately I've been unable to stay in SL for very long. The client dies spontaneously, or it starts to use every available CPU cycle and grind down to maybe 4 fps if I'm lucky.

Today after a crash I saw a process running SLVoice chewing up almost all the cycles, so I turned off voice, but that proved not to be the problem.

Does inventory drag performance down? I really should delete a vast number of notecards from Fashion Consolidated and Fabulously Free.

UPDATE: I've updated to the nVidia 195.30 driver, which appears to help some, but the major improvement, for which I am greatly indebted to Laurana Newell, came when I cranked down the draw distance. (Makes sense, because we're talking O(n**3) here, right?) Silly me.

A poor workman blames his tools

I'm surprised at the number of folks I know who are wonderful creators in Second Life but who have, or had, far from impressive computing facilities. You'll remember Cheyenne writing about how for some time Sweetie saw much of the virtual world in gray. Minka Pearl, a prolific creator of clothing for the well-endowed, says her computer is three years old and barely runs SL, and I have a very dear friend and creator of things in SL who I wish I could afford to send a sweet quad-core system to...

Maybe I should try to run SL on my netbook--nah, that's a logical fallacy. Darn it.