LDPW – Ciaran Laval

February 5, 2015February 5, 2015

Dwarfin In A Winter Wonderland & Getting Ready For A Snowball Fight With The Lindens

Linden Lab’s latest venture in providing attractions for Second Life residents comes in the shape and form of a Winter Wonderland that offers snowy views, ice skating, gifts, a ferris wheel, a snowmobile and most importantly of all, a snowball fight arena which you may want to get yourself along to in order to practice before tomorrow’s snowball fight with The Lindens!

Oh I should also mention there’s photo contest. Linden Lab blogged this information yesterday : Join a Snowball Fight with Lindens & Enter Our Photo Booth Fun Contest. Budding Second Life photographers may want to know that the contest offers the opportunity to win L$10,000 :

PHOTO BOOTH FUN CONTEST
Share your silly photo booth style pictures with us for a chance to win L$10,000, L$5,000, L$3,000, or L$1,000 for your snapshot! Props encouraged! Winners will be selected by a panel consisting of both Lindens and Residents.

For inspiration we’ve created a Pinterest Board on our Official Pinterest Page for you to view.

Rules and more information are available on the contest page.

Enter between now and March 4th, 2015. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

I didn’t even know Second Life had a Pinterest page! Now when it comes to a photo contest in Second Life my first port of call would be to beg Strawberry Singh for assitance, however I can see she’s way ahead of me and off gallivanting around with Xiola Linden already!

As for the rules of the contest, there’s a twisty turny path to find them but if you can’t find them, here’s a shortcut. The contest has a deadline of March 4th, so there’s plenty of time to enter, or beg Strawberry Singh for assistance. Here’s the gist of it :

1. DURATION. The Contest begins at 10:00am PST February 4, 2015 (the “Start Date”) and ends on 10:00am PST March 4, 2015 (the “Deadline”).

2. ENTRY. Participants must have active Second Life® accounts prior to their participation in the Contest.

The Contest is looking for images of Second Life avatars in a Photo Booth type scenario (actual booth not necessary)(the “Photo Booth Fun”). Solo and group images are welcome, and silly costume props are encouraged. To create an entry, entrants must:

Log on to your Second Life® account between the Start Date and Deadline.
Take a Photo Booth Fun snapshot.
Access the Contest landing page located at http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Photo-Booth-Fun-Contest/con-p/Photo_Booth_Fun_Contest and log in to the Second Life community forum with your Second Life account.
Upload and submit your snapshot between the Start Date and Deadline.

Oh and the photo must be General rated but please read the rules in full before entering. However if a photo contest isn’t for you, how about that snowball fight with The Lindens?

Continue reading “Dwarfin In A Winter Wonderland & Getting Ready For A Snowball Fight With The Lindens”

November 7, 2014

CDN Teething Problems & Meauxle Bureaux Should Be In Destination Guide

I recently blogged about Meuxle Bureaux in Second Life, home of Michael Linden and The Moles of The Linden Department Of Public Works. I’m not alone in admiring the beauty of this sim, as can be seen from a quick glance on Flickr.

Maddy Gynoid has been there too and blogged about it : Meauxle Bureaux: Neue Heimat für das LDPW. There are some impressive pictures in that post as well as a shout out to someone in a language I’m not familiar with, but I don’t think it’s rude :

Gestern hatte ich im Blog von Ciaran Laval gelesen, dass Linden Lab in den vergangenen Tagen eine Reihe neuer Regionen im Second Life Grid gestartet hat. Eine davon heißt “Meauxle Bureaux” und dient nun allem Anschein nach dem Linden Department Of Public Works (LDPW), sowie den dort arbeitenden Moles und ihrem Chef Michael Linden, als neue Heimat.

I saw Marianne McCann flying off in a helicopter and I also saw Uccello Poultry there. Uccie has also blogged about Meauxle Bureaux. However this brings me to a matter of a technical difficulty I experienced there. I planned to take my snapshots of Meauxle Bureaux last Sunday. Alas the sim would not fully load and what did load, was taking a very long time to do so.

I did the teleport in, teleport out, in, out, in, out, shake it all about trick, but the sim still wouldn’t load. Textures were grey, signs and objects were missing. The problems I was experiencing were not localised to Meuxle Bureaux either. I’m a lot more patient in my old age, I put it down to one of those things and returned on Monday, performance was fine then and has been for me all week. I don’t know if my issues were related to Linden Lab’s new Content Delivery Network but Linden Lab have blogged an update on CDN where they state :

For most users most of the time there has been a big performance improvement in texture and mesh data loading, resulting in faster rez times in new areas. The improvement has been realized both on the official viewer and on third party viewers.

However, we have also seen that some users have had the opposite experience, and have worked with a number of those users to collect detailed data on the nature of the problems and shared it with our CDN provider. We believe that the problems are the result of a combination of the considerable additional load we added to the CDN, and a coincidental additional large load on the CDN from another source. Exacerbating matters, flaws in both our viewer code and the CDN caused recovery from these load spikes to be much slower than it should have been. We are working with our CDN provider to increase capacity and to configure the CDN so that Second Life data availability will not be as affected by outside load. We are also making changes to our code and in the CDN to make recovery quicker and more robust.

Some residents have been feeding back the problems they’ve been experiencing on the official Second Life forums. Some of those problems sound very much like the problems I experienced but I really don’t know if my problems were due to the CDN wobbles.

Continue reading “CDN Teething Problems & Meauxle Bureaux Should Be In Destination Guide”

November 3, 2014

The Meauxle Bureaux – Home Of The Moles

In her regular update on the number of sims on the grid, Tyche Shepherd pointed out that Linden Lab had added a couple of sims this week, one of which is named Meauxle Bureaux, home of the Moles, the busy bees of the Linden Department Of Public Works. Now if you’re wondering who the Moles are or what the LDPW is, let’s just take a quote from the wiki page :

The Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW) is a program focused on improvements related to the experience of living on, or visiting the Linden Mainland. The LDPW will organize teams of Resident builders, artists, and scripters (the Moles!) to create new content on Linden Lab’s behalf and to the benefit of all. Rather than divert company resources from areas of development that contribute to important issues like stability and usability, Linden Lab is choosing to go to the experts…

The experts being residents. So I set off to explore this brave new world and found it’s an oldie but a goodie.

The sim may look familiar, indeed it will look very familiar to anyone who roamed the Lumenaria sim at Fantasy Faire 2013 because that’s where most of the build is from. However that was an impressive build and I’m pleased to see it given a second life by the Moles… second life, get it? Haha ok ok I’ll stop.

On the sim itself you will find buildings with a sign indicating which mole occupies the building. They may be moles, but they don’t seem to live in holes. Michael Linden also has a place there as well as a central building which has posters for attractions in Second Life such as portal park.

Continue reading “The Meauxle Bureaux – Home Of The Moles”

February 9, 2008January 12, 2014

LDPW Coming To A Sim Near You Soon?

Jack Linden’s blog about the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW) has certainly raised interest. This seems on the face of it, a project with real potential.

This is also a project that incorporates a bugbear for many of us, Jack has actually acknowledged that ad farms are an issue within the comments: “Yes, we are actively discussing ad farms at the moment, we’re very aware of the impact they have but we don’t have anything concrete to share as yet. Keep reading the blog.”

Now I’m sure there will be plenty of people who will be cynical about this but I’m going to take a wait and see approach to this. Land prices for builds around these projects could significantly increase because there’s no doubt about it, these builds will (initially at least) attract visitors and gain free publicity via the blog no doubt, so get your stores ready. Continue reading “LDPW Coming To A Sim Near You Soon?”