Archives for 2007

Come inside – it’s Prim School

As mentioned by Abi Goldflake on the SLOz forums, on May 16th ABC Island will host a Prim School at the ABC Sandbox.

abcsandbox.jpg

Hosted by Gizzy Electricteeth (who’ll be profiled on SLOz next week), it’s a free building school and it kicks off at 9pm AEST (4am SL time).

The Fake Doctor’s Association

“Ever wanted to impress someone by telling them you’re a doctor? Or have you ever wanted to be a doctor but lacked the time, money, and sheer will to go to school for it? Well not to worry! By joining The Fake Doctor’s Association, you get the title without all the fuss! Now you can finally tell people that you are in fact a person of medicine!”

fda.jpg

That’s the description you’ll find for the Fake Doctor’s Association, which I was offered membership of late last year after a conversation with an FDA member. This week I received a Group Notice from FDA’s founder (pictured):

“Hello Doctors,

I have an assignment for all members of the Fake Doctor’s Association. This week, I want you to commit malpractice at least once and tell me about it.

To help you, here is an axe.

Regards,
Janette Deakins
Founder, The Fake Doctor’s Association”

So if you see someone wielding an axe, they’re likely to be fake health professionals, so no need to be concerned.

Yoick to Linden Lab – be excellent or else

Rand Leeb-du Toit. the CEO of Yoick, the company behind potential SL-competitor Outback Online, has put forward three essential rules for a successful virtual world : building correctly from the start, ‘community first’ and integration (with other platforms / technologies). There’s some pointed criticism of the SL server model and emphasis on the importance of community.

Outback Online is an unknown quantity, as is the timeframe for public viewing, but Yoick are certainly not afraid to stake their claim.

Personal Boundaries in a virtual world

America’s National Public Radio (NPR) is running a story on SL called Don’t Stand So Close to Me. It looks specifically at the issue of personal space in SL and there’s some interesting, if not surprising results:

1. Male avatars tend to keep more distance from each other than when interacting with a female avatar

2. That there’s a natural tendency for users of SL to maintain real-life personal space boundaries

3. That the level of eye contact is intrinsically linked to personal space

npr.jpg

The premise is that these issues are both hard-wired and ingrained in our real-life social behaviour that they naturally flow over to SL. As the social behaviour expert says in the interview – we’re not as free as we moght think we are in a virtual world. It’s also another example of how SL provides ample opportunity for human behaviour research.

How to Please Your I.T. Department

(Yep, I’ve just replicated one of those endlessly forwarded email jokes but given I hadn’t seen this one before I thought it was worth the post)

======================
How to Please Your I.T. Department

1. When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and children’s art. We don’t have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.

2. Don’t write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.

3. When an I.T. person says he’s coming right over, go for coffee. That way you won’t be there when we need your password. It’s nothing for us to remember 700 screen saver passwords.

4. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what’s keeping you from getting it. We don’t need to know that you can’t get into your mail because your computer won’t power on at all.

5. When I.T. support sends you an E-Mail with high importance, delete it at once. We’re just testing.

6. When an I.T. person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.

7. Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.

8. When the photocopier doesn’t work, call computer support. There’s electronics in it.

9. When something’s wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T. person’s chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the problem. We love a puzzle.

10. When an I.T. person tells you that computer screens don’t have cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.

11. When an I.T. person tells you that he’ll be there shortly, reply in a scathing tone of voice: “And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?” That motivates us.

12. When the printer won’t print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.

13. When the printer still won’t print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.

14. Don’t learn the proper term for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by “My thingy blew up”.

15. Don’t use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.

ABC Island – meteor strike

The Unearthed Club on ABC Island had a slight facelift over the weekend. The unconfirmed report is that in the process of returning objects from the ABC Sandbox, the previous upper structure of the Unearthed club ended up a crater. If this was indeed the case then a great patch-up job has been done:

unearthed.jpg

The interior of the club has the meteor theme going, so even if the renovation was unintentionally instigated, its added something new. A thanks to Aussie SL resident Skribe Forti for giving us the heads-up on the meteor.

SL Best Practices in Education Conference

With recent media attention on performance pay for Australian teachers, it is fitting that SL has an event coming up on May 25th where “the educators in SL are gathering for the first 24-hour best practices conference in Second Life.”

bestpractices.jpg

The event is billed as having “REAL colleges and universities, and this is a REAL conference including keynotes, breakout sessions, and vendors.”

A 24-hour conference for education community members is indeed a first. This is but one example that highlights cutting edge approaches many educators, and a small number of Australian universities, are taking to integrate the technology of SL into teaching and learning.

A unique approach to this conference will be the use of multiple venues to cater for prim counts and avatar attendees. However the main venue is Hyperstring’s “Huge Conference Center” with a number of other venues used for breakout/overflow areas, poster sessions and vendors. Expect to teleport to various places as the conference progresses.

In-world you can contact Desideria Stockton for more information on this first for education or visit the Second Life International Best Practices in Education Conference website.

Australian SL servers on the horizon?

The transcript of the Town Hall held earlier today provides a small glimmer of hope for Australians frustrated with the lag in SL. In response to a question on internationalising the server locations, Corey Linden provided this snippet:

“We absolutely want to deploy servers overseas. We have an architectural quirk in how we talk to the dbs — a layer of single threaded dataservers – that would suffer in situations with greater ping latency, so we need to fix that problem first, which is being worked on. Once that is fixed, we will begin international deployments. This is critical since over 65% of our use is from outside the US.”

Of course, Australia is very unlikely to be part of the early expansion – Europe and Asia are the obvious targets. However, the combination of Australian SL servers and the next-generation architecture should surely provide some relief in the medium term. The challenge is delivering the goods before competitors do.

Town Hall transcript available

The transcript is now available here.

Our specific question on server models was not addressed – the closest was an answer on deployment of servers to Europe which is apparently something Linden want to do.

Further analysis later in the day.

Town Hall imminent and a question from SLOz

Corey Linden posted on the Linden blog today to pre-empt a number of likely questions at tomorrow’s Town Hall (being held 5am Friday morning Australian east-coast time).

Theoretically, the level in this Town Hall should be at an all-time high as the SL population has never been greater. Corey Linden’s pre-emptive information does provide some explanations, particularly around inventory loss but the larger issue of general performance is brushed over:

“Grid stability and performance

As an aside, problems like teleport failures and inventory issues are not related to either Havok or Mono. While both will bring improvements to individual sim node’s performance and stability, they have no appreciable impact on problems related to back end systems. Havok 4 is in testing prior to hitting the Beta grid and the Mono project has fixed the major blockers for us, so we are waiting for resources to free up from other projects there.

Teleport failures could be the results of many different problems, and are definitely exacerbated by problems in agent presence. We have a team currently investigating this problem. Again, additional data points and reproducible cases would help them a lot.”

The story over on New World Notes confirms the anecdotal evidence of a stalling in concurrency – people are spending less time in-world due to ongoing frustrations with performance.

The key question to be asked and answered is what Linden Labs’ plans are for improving scalability and performance using the current central server model. Additionally, is any work being done on alternative models that are likely to see the light of day this year? We’ve posted a question for Corey Linden on the SL Forums thread devoted to that purpose:

What plans (if any) does LL have to internationalise the server configuration currently used and are there any plans in place to move away from a central server model?

We’ll post the transcript of the Town Hall as soon as it’s available.

Previous Posts