Ciaran Laval

February 14, 2011February 14, 2011

Kissing the Lindens

Being as it was Valentines day I decided to take my traditional tour away from my roleplaying sim and decided to let mere mortals feel my presence. I found myself at a busy event known as Kiss-A-Linden, yes your intrepid hero goes to events like this so that you don’t have to (although really you should if you have time). Now the first thing I noticed was that the event was busy, the second thing I noticed was that I wasn’t going to have subjects kneeling before me, as is expected custom, realising I’d left my guards at home I decided I’d just have to blend in as best as I could.

First up was Courtney Linden, winged and wonderful, now you’re going to have to trust me on this one because I don’t have any pics! Yes I know, pics or it didn’t happen, but trust me, I allowed Courtney to hug and kiss me. There was a queue for Courtney by the time I left.

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February 13, 2011February 13, 2011

Fear and Loathing in the Redzone

The current hot topic across Second Life forums is ZF Redzone, the device aimed at preventing griefers, copybotters and alts from causing mayhem and getting their hands on your wares. The aim at first glance is noble, the execution is far from it.

There are signs that all is not well with this system from its description, where it claims to eject and TP home intruders, often crashing them. That right there sets red flags. Another red flag manifests itself in the shape and form of the creator advising in the comments of the reviews that it’s a good idea to ban your competitors from your land because they will spy on your or send alts to do so….alarm bell city, this is getting into the realms of paranoia as a marketing point.

However, there are features of this system that would be useful, the fact that it can ban more people than the inworld tools being one, being able to manage access controls from a website being another.

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February 11, 2011February 11, 2011

The Jira Voting Charade

The blog post on improved communications, also had information regarding the Jira , they encourage people to use the Jira, they’re removing voting from the Jira. Encouraging people to use the Jira is good, although I remain unconvinced that it’s an easy to use customer facing tool, as an internal bug tracking tool it’s bloody useful, externally, not so good but it’s better than nothing.

However removing votes? This appears more and more to be a PR exercise to remove visible interest in long standing bugs or feature requests, none of the arguments in favour of removing voting stand up to much scrutiny, especially in light of Linden Lab representatives advising people that watching an issue will be a measure of interest…. which means people will watch an issue in future instead of voting, which achieves what exactly? Well the watch feature has a defence mechanism, it emails folk everytime there’s an update, even if that update is someone correcting a typo, beyond that, it’s not really that much different to voting and already people are posting threads on forums asking for people to watch an issue (rather than vote).

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February 10, 2011February 10, 2011

Rod Humble in Villa Fan Shocker

There’s a rather spiffing interview with Rod Humble over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. However, before you head over, a word of warning, it’s a general gaming site, they’re very cynical about Second Life and the comments are particularly cynical, but that cynical nature actually makes the interview somewhat interesting as you get questions from a different perspective to that of the average Second Life user.

There’s the shocking revelation that Rod Humble is an Aston Villa fan, so that’s Rod Humble, Prad Prathivi and me… of course, I’m more suave, sophisitcated, better looking, wittier and conceited than those two, they may have a headstart in the success stakes though, but you can’t have everything! Where was I? Oh yes, the Rock Paper, Shotgun interview, this gives a good sense of Rod being enthusiastic about Second Life.

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