Second Life – Page 2 – The Kind Healer

Heading to the Modern (WebLog) World / Migration Guide

Just spent the last two hours doing many upgrades on the main site:

-> WordPress 2.3.x (I’d give 2.5 a whirl but Fantastico is not allowing that yet). Removing the two offending lines per the upgrade note fixed the issue of my earlier attempt.

-> Upgrade and/or removal of a bunch of the existing plugins/widgets (the most notable of which were Bad Behavior and Akismet).

-> Upgrade the theme (blog.txt) from 1.1 to 4.01. Again, latest can’t be grabbed due to WP 2.5 incompatibilities (though the idea of having gravitar support irks me – as the theme selection suggests, I prefer simple). One plus is that this version of the theme now can be done in three-column format, which I’m taking advantage of; With a few other tweaks, it now nicely fits the entire width of my old 19″ LCD with no bottom scrollbar (and still readable!).

I suppose the T_S_Journal should have the same treatment done, but I’m still debating its takedown. A peek at the UruBlogs page (my first look in about five months), shows that it has focused back to ‘external’ content *salutes to Whilyam and Tweek* and that is swaying me back to maintaining it again. I’m also an immediate fan of Tweek’s ‘markup’ for KI images and will be using that if needed.

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Oh, side note: I’m finally planning out the ‘guide’ for SL that I mentioned in the MOUL forum, and that some folks had approved on. The big thing that I wanted to have was something similar to Wikipedia’s NPOV (or as close to it as possible), so I’m crafting a notecard to drop on certain residents asking if its OK to include their weblog or other links on my document. This will probably include a couple established sites that are critical of the ‘Labs and have reasonable arguments.

Also – at some point – I hope to include There.com and the MMOs that most have interests in – but either with external help or lots of personal free time. I will track down a new plugin for external contact in a little bit (probably within the hour of this post) so that anyone curious can ask directly.

–TSK

OK, What’s Next?

Anyone who’s been a die-hard fan of ‘West Wing’ should recognize that quote: It’s from President Bartlett, of course, said an uncountable number of times.

I bring it up because it’s what I’ve been thinking all weekend. What, really, is next for us all?

Cyan has not said anything yet, that I’ve seen as of now anyway. Most feel that this to them is the end, and perhaps also a beginning. I don’t know; I’m personally not fond of speculation when there’s no information at all to speculate on. It’s something I learned the hard way during my busier time in SL, and has helped me keep my head in times of stress at work.

The community as a whole is en-route to another diaspora, a course to what I’ll term Interregnum II (like SuperGram, I just won’t say its the end either; I’ve invested and even sacrificed too much – far, far too much – to just think that its been for naught). A large portion of the group are looking at the two virtual worlds, Second Life and There. I still intend to help with that (a welcome guide tailored for the community), as the writing exercise will do me good in more ways than one. Another portion is looking at the more traditional MMOs – of those, Guild Wars and Eve Online appear to be at the top. I can’t comment on either as I’m not interested in spending any more money right now; That’s going to RL endeavors now, such as my health, and the health of my mother.

For my own plans, they have not changed. I’ve had my final fun at the Parade. I spent time yesterday finishing Prime for what may be the last time, and I now have every spark except two: K’Veer and Myst. Other than some final, quiet meanderings, I’d like to quietly fade out. I’ve been retired from virtual worlds and other Massive environments, and have no intent of getting back into them now (though I still like to poke my head in from time to time). For me, there’s still new things ahead of me in the Real World, challenges that I know I can meet now.

All because of the power of community. Because its not just about one person changing many; It’s also about many inspiring one. :)

Shorah B’shemtee, and best of luck of all of you.
/salute
–TSK

Three Years in Second Life

The evening of this past friday (6/29) marked exactly three years since I registered the ‘Alan Kiesler’ account in Second Life. Though officially I left the Orientation island today (7/2) due to a bad crash and RL stuff, I logged in that night to hop around my old haunts.

Upon reaching the ‘Myst Online’ island sim (the GameTap sponsored replacement for Telador, btw), I found a group of folks playing ‘Heek (sort of – no less buggy there than it is in MO:UL ;) ). It was really cool to be able to walk in for the first time in a LONG while and just talk about Uru – especially while in SL, since that kind of ‘bridging’ is what I like to do best.

Imagine my surprise then, when I find out one of the folks at the table is Brad’li from the UO forum. He’s not been able to login to GameTap or MO:UL since it left the new beta, so I find it slightly ironic to learn that it was my own pics that got him over to SL as an alternative; My main calling in SL was (and still is) promoting Uru.

I ended up spending the next half-hour or so helping with the expected gaps in detailed documentation that SL is well-known for, as well as a small amount of L$ to start out with (which brings up the economy questions Gwyn brought up recently, but that’s a different rant).

I’m always happy to run across cool life coincidences like this, so it was particularly fitting to have one in SL at the 3-year mark.

–TSK

Update on the Site

I’ve been perusing my site logs to see who’s been hitting the place lately, and why. Brought up some interesting subjects, which I’ll begin to address now:

“Does Second Life work on an ATI Radeon Xpress?” – Last I checked with the notebook, yes, but slow. There is a ‘first look‘ version of their client that you may want to participate running a live beta from – but be warned, you’re connecting to their live/production grid with this, so anything really bad happens you may need to rebuild/rescript/etc. I’ve not tested it, not worth my little time online to possibly make it even worse for wear. :)

Status on my Debian Linux box, aka the NSLU2 ‘slug’ – It’s been shutdown for almost two months now; I’ve not had the time to maintain it for awhile, and once the DST hell is over with I’ll possibly poke at it again.

Numbakulla – I’ve had no recent time to visit there in SL, nor anywhere else. :( One query was looking for a walk through; There was some brief discussion about creating a ‘for sale’ item that would allow this (to generate revenue for the island), dunno if that’s been done.

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In other news, DST has come and passed, and we appear relatively unscathed (and after 8 hard weeks, it damn well should have!). There are still things to check, but so far, so good…

–TSK

Certain Blogs Hate Me…

I’ve been trying to comment on Chucker’s blog (regarding JPEG-2000) for the last four days, and it just won’t let me. I give up…

Anyway, what I’ve been trying to say is that Second Life uses JPEG-2000 as its image storage medium in the backend. IIRC its because of both the streaming and image compression benefits (they use the kakadu libraries).

I’m not sure how it’s being done for their new FOSS client source, since I’ve not looked at it (though trying to create a Solaris/SPARC compile would be amusing – if the equipment were available).

–TSK