Ciaran Laval

March 2, 2012March 2, 2012

The Shared Experience Needs Linden Lab Leading It

March! Wonderful month as opposed to February, which is basically a month of Tuesdays. March brings hope, colour, warm air and for those of us in the UK, weather forecasts of wintry showers. March should also be a month where Linden Lab themselves decide to engage in some spring cleaning with their communications.

Rodvik has blogged on last names not returning, I’m not going to blog about that, Inara Pey and Hamlet Au are doing a fine job on that front. However there are aspects of that blog post that do tie in with this blog post, communications, consistency and discussion.

Rodvik invites discussion on his Second Life profile on the issue, other Lindens use mailing lists, the forums, user groups, which will always be Office Hours to me but they like to call them user groups these days. There’s a distinct lack of consistency, it’s not that Linden Lab don’t communicate at all, it’s that their communications are fractured, inconsistent and missed by way too many eyes. I don’t like posting on Rodvik’s profile, unless it’s along the lines of bemoaning Darren Bent’s injury that means he won’t play for the mighty Villa again this season. However Rodvik likes discussions on his profile.

I’ve long been criticial of Linden Lab’s lack of communication, however now that we have the new TPV policy upon us with Linden Lab taking up the baton of shared experiences, it’s about time that Linden Lab realise what sharing is all about too. Sharing means posting stickies in the scripting forum to the LSL Portal and pages on functions and events. The functions page is an excellent resource, it tells you about new functions, depreciated functions and poular requests for functions that haven’t been implemented, this is extremely important stuff. Kelly Linden does engage quite well to be fair, in the mailing list and the forum but links such as those I’m talking about point people in the right direction, I’ve stumbled across these links, they should be being promoted in large letters for people who want to script and it shouldn’t have to be Kelly who posts links to useful resources.

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March 1, 2012

Received Items Update and Survey

I was about to write a blog about communications and shared experiences, but that is on hold as I rush out the news that Linden Lab have updated their blog post on Received Items with the following information:

“UPDATE: Feb 29, 2012

We’d like to thank everyone who has provided feedback on the Received Items Beta. We will be launching Direct Delivery without redirecting any other objects to the Received Items folder. (Direct Delivery purchases will still be sent to the Received Items folder). We will be soliciting additional feedback on Received Items by contacting Residents who respond to this survey by 5pm PT March 1, 2012. We will do our best to speak to as many of those who participate as possible as we move forward with work on this feature.”

The survey is quite brief, which is just as well as because as I’ve just discovered it I’m hearing in my head “FLASH! FLASH! I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the earth!”. Actually in this case it’s around four hours! OMG! Dispatch War Rocket Ajax!

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February 29, 2012February 29, 2012

These Really Weren’t The Droids I was Looking For

Second Life has a very diverse community, or should I say collection of communities, because we’re not all one big happy family, some of us loathe each other … actually like a real family, but much larger! Anyway it’s not hard to see why Linden Lab want to tap into this wide ranging appeal of different experiences by asking people to submit blog posts. However it’s also very easy to accidentally stumble into matters you weren’t expecting, which is what happened to me yesterday, this was not what you’d call a Daniel Linden predictable experience.

So there I was keeping up with the latest news on the third party viewer policy discussion and reading a post over at New World Notes, which linked to a post by Emilly Orr. Now this is where degrees of separation get awfully short, because whilst being a nosey parker and reading other posts on Emilly’s blog, I found myself going to another blog of Emilly’s, which is all about massive boobs .. from what I could make out! Prim boobs for clarity and it looks pretty mature rated rather than adult rated. From third party policies to boobs in three easy clicks, this is what makes Second Life great.

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February 27, 2012February 27, 2012

Oz Linden “We hear what you’ve all said”

The ongoing hoo-ha over the proposed solution to revealing a resident’s true online status has generated a lot of feedback over the weekend on Jira SVC-4823. The issue, about online status being respected has morphed into something else with lots of use cases being cited for keeping this function alive. Oz Linden has now made a plea to try and help improve feedback as well as assuring people that The Lab are listenting:

“Everyone…. I don’t know if this will help or not, but I’m going to give it a try and see….

We hear what you’ve all said, we understand the issues, and we’re going to discuss what we can and should do about them.

Nothing is final.

We appreciate that Phoenix is moving appropriately to remove the privacy violation from their next release, and hope that they’ll do that soon, but we understand that these things take time.

In order to help us to have a better understanding, I appeal to the many of you who are posting messages that essentially say “I agree – this will be bad for me too” as opposed to describing a specific use case not already described here (and thank you to the many posts that have done a good job describing use cases): please stop with these “me too” posts – they just make it harder to read the full stream (and yes, I at least am reading all of every comment). We know that for every use case there are many users… we don’t need each of them to post something.”

I would advise those concerned with this issue to help Oz here, because filtering feedback becomes difficult when the same use case keeps getting cited, but what are the reasonable use cases?

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February 27, 2012February 27, 2012

Received Items Beta Testing

So I decided this evening to dip my toes into the received items beta testing, if you are unaware about this, there’s a blog post, a forum post, a wiki article and a very brief knowledge base article. I would suggest the Wiki article is the most important to get you started as it tells you how to login to the Beta Grid (AKA Aditi). You will also need to use the beta viewer or a TPV that supports the new received items folder, I went for the beta viewer.

Basically this is a new way of receiving items, it will be released in conjunction with marketplace direct delivery but this folder will be for all new received items, not just marketplace deliveries.

First things first, they don’t make things easy do they? I downloaded and installed the beta viewer, followed the instructions, and couldn’t see a received items panel. I then went and downloaded the direct delivery project viewer, thinking the beta viewer wasn’t the right one, and found no received items panel. I eventually found out what the problem was because I saw a post over at SLUniverse about it, Innula Zenovka explained:

“I eventually got the beta viewer to show me the received items folder by going to the “Quick Return” parcel, rezzing a prim and and waiting for it to be returned. That created the folder and then it worked pretty much as expected.”

So three cheers for Innula! This did indeed work, the quick return parcel Innula talks of is listed on the wiki page, it’s a green parcel. So finally I could get on with the show.

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