I have a few more tidbits to share ...
The new viewer seems to be doing fine. A bit over 100 downloads within the first 24 hours, mainly favorable or even enthusiastic feedback and no known bugs that aren't in the official viewer also.
Mentioning downloads, I had a look at the server download stats and over the last six months almost 7500 people downloaded one of my versions (the majority went for BE-v), and that In the light of the fact that I have published practically no new builds since November 2007. We will have to see if the same is going to happen for the EC-e version.
In fact a few people have taken the opportunity to donate despite some quirks (donations page came up in German). I already mentioned that I will be on vacation (plane leaves tomorrow nine'ish) for 10 days and am happy to announce that all the beer is now paid for already, even a few cocktails and the odd dinner too ... YAY!
Before I distract you too much from your OwnExperience with my blurp here, let me just say thank for all the beer and fish and for the overwhelming feedback in general.
Enjoy your OtherLife with Eye Candy, while I will enjoy FirstLife with all it's nice features ... *waves cheerfully*
Nick
PS: If you saw a different post here yesterday, I deleted that, because I already had celebrated the first few donated beers (well wine actually) and when I looked at it today with a fresh set of eyes, the post seemed pretty irrelevant (some rant about something on sldev, I wonder what I found so interesting about that yesterday, but wine does that sometimes).
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
If you want to buy me a beer, a lunch or a Porsche ...
Yesterday's new viewer had 100 downloads in a bit less than 24 hours and no problems ... YAY!
A few people are so happy, that they have asked about donations or even about hiring me to do more work on the viewer. While I am very reluctant about working on the viewer on a commercial basis, because I really want to keep fun and business apart, donations are of course welcome (in fact I already had a few pleasant surprises when looking at my L$ balance).
The Nicholaz Edition viewer is free and will remain that way. But if you like it so much that you feel like buying me a beer, a dinner or a new pair of shoes (just to name something which girls can relate to :-)), then don't think twice about dropping a few Lindens into my SL account, or press the donate button on the right. It's not that I'm starving, but there is never enough free beer and there are always a few gadgets on a man's wishlist ...
Thanks ...
Nick
PS: I'll go on vacation (going to Spain for 10 days) on Friday, so please excuse if you're not hearing anything from me in the meantime, because I'll enjoy the sea there (if you buy me a meal, I'll say "thanks for all the fish" because that's what we (GF is with me) will be eating there mostly :-)).
A few people are so happy, that they have asked about donations or even about hiring me to do more work on the viewer. While I am very reluctant about working on the viewer on a commercial basis, because I really want to keep fun and business apart, donations are of course welcome (in fact I already had a few pleasant surprises when looking at my L$ balance).
The Nicholaz Edition viewer is free and will remain that way. But if you like it so much that you feel like buying me a beer, a dinner or a new pair of shoes (just to name something which girls can relate to :-)), then don't think twice about dropping a few Lindens into my SL account, or press the donate button on the right. It's not that I'm starving, but there is never enough free beer and there are always a few gadgets on a man's wishlist ...
Thanks ...
Nick
PS: I'll go on vacation (going to Spain for 10 days) on Friday, so please excuse if you're not hearing anything from me in the meantime, because I'll enjoy the sea there (if you buy me a meal, I'll say "thanks for all the fish" because that's what we (GF is with me) will be eating there mostly :-)).
Monday, April 14, 2008
Release: Eye Candy EC-e (Updated)
A bit surprising in the light of what I said last week, but as promised yesterday here is another Nicholaz Edition for Windows. It is based on Linden Lab's current SecondLife™ viewer (1.19.1.4).
This version somewhat completes the Nicholaz Edition series. You can now choose between the pre-voice version Old School, the pre Windlight version Bleeding Edge or, if performance permits, now the atmospheric rendering Eye Candy a la Nicholaz. And of course, should you prefer different flavors or platforms, please have a look at the links to the right of this blog and check the ones from Barney, Boy Lane, Henri or Marine.
EC-e is overall a bit closer to the Linden versions than my previous builds. The Reason is that the Lindens have caught up a bit with crash fixes, asstachments and user interface and also because I have only put into it what did still fit in with reasonable effort (which was more than I initially thought). There were no compromises in stability and performance though, those patches are all back.
I did use it for a few hours now and am pretty satisfied with the result. The only slightly weird thing is that you will now have two different friend lists to choose from, but there are never enough ways to reach a friend and while Linden's un-docked friend list is far from being bad, I find mine still a bit more sleek and compact, so I took the liberty to exhume the friends button for the bottom bar.
Oh I amlost forgot: You will also notice a new icon, courtesy of Linden Lab's new trademark policy. I'm not sure if it was necessary (probably not), but for good measure other homebrewers are free to reuse it for their own purposes. I hereby declare it as now and forever being in the public domain with no strings attached (download here).
The main difference for the viewer however, and the reason why this release exists despite my earlier plans, is that it fixes a severe memory leak which was introduced in version 1.19 (not anyone to blame, it was just a case of Shit Happens™). But it's fixed now and unless you have an insanely powerful machine I am sure you will be able to feel the difference, because as far as I can tell there was absolutely no way to avoid it besides standing still and doing nothing.
Source code is also on the server (see the notes inside the archive). If you want to do builds based on this source (or if you do your own homebrews), feel free to post them here in the comments and I will let people know. (Update: Barney's version for the Mac is already available and now also Balp's for Linux).
Now, before anyone asks (and I am sure some will want to know), my stance towards continuing the work on the viewer hasn't fundamentally changed. My priorities are still my own business and real life, but I also must say that the leak hunt was a nice distraction. So I guess it will be best to make no plans and to allow myself to surprise me with whatever I may do next and that is all I can say about that.
After this short interruption from strictly version related information, we return you to the usual release blurp :-)
Disclaimer: This viewer is unofficial and although I am doing my best to make it better than the release viewer, it may contain extra bugs and you will have to trust me that there is no malicious code in it. Please also understand that it runs on the main grid with your real SecondLife account and inventory. Also read the disclaimer/header in the Install.txt in my archive.
First make sure that you have the Linden 1.19.1.4 viewer available or download and install it here.
Then download nicholaz-EC-e.zip from my server and while the download runs, have a look at the installation instructions and the change log. If you have trouble downloading or unpacking the file from there, here's a temporary alternate link. (In any case, the hash for the file should be "MD5 (nicholaz-EC-e.zip) = 448bb7ec74ec3e5a21b6597d17c327f0".)
After the download completes, follow the instructions and make sure they go into the right folder!
Enjoy ...
Nick
PS: There is an in-world group for announcements of my releases: Search, Groups, "Nicholaz" and on the top right of this blog you will find a link to a forum thread where I am sure that people will be able to help you if you have problems.
This version somewhat completes the Nicholaz Edition series. You can now choose between the pre-voice version Old School, the pre Windlight version Bleeding Edge or, if performance permits, now the atmospheric rendering Eye Candy a la Nicholaz. And of course, should you prefer different flavors or platforms, please have a look at the links to the right of this blog and check the ones from Barney, Boy Lane, Henri or Marine.
EC-e is overall a bit closer to the Linden versions than my previous builds. The Reason is that the Lindens have caught up a bit with crash fixes, asstachments and user interface and also because I have only put into it what did still fit in with reasonable effort (which was more than I initially thought). There were no compromises in stability and performance though, those patches are all back.
I did use it for a few hours now and am pretty satisfied with the result. The only slightly weird thing is that you will now have two different friend lists to choose from, but there are never enough ways to reach a friend and while Linden's un-docked friend list is far from being bad, I find mine still a bit more sleek and compact, so I took the liberty to exhume the friends button for the bottom bar.
Oh I amlost forgot: You will also notice a new icon, courtesy of Linden Lab's new trademark policy. I'm not sure if it was necessary (probably not), but for good measure other homebrewers are free to reuse it for their own purposes. I hereby declare it as now and forever being in the public domain with no strings attached (download here).
The main difference for the viewer however, and the reason why this release exists despite my earlier plans, is that it fixes a severe memory leak which was introduced in version 1.19 (not anyone to blame, it was just a case of Shit Happens™). But it's fixed now and unless you have an insanely powerful machine I am sure you will be able to feel the difference, because as far as I can tell there was absolutely no way to avoid it besides standing still and doing nothing.
Source code is also on the server (see the notes inside the archive). If you want to do builds based on this source (or if you do your own homebrews), feel free to post them here in the comments and I will let people know. (Update: Barney's version for the Mac is already available and now also Balp's for Linux).
Now, before anyone asks (and I am sure some will want to know), my stance towards continuing the work on the viewer hasn't fundamentally changed. My priorities are still my own business and real life, but I also must say that the leak hunt was a nice distraction. So I guess it will be best to make no plans and to allow myself to surprise me with whatever I may do next and that is all I can say about that.
After this short interruption from strictly version related information, we return you to the usual release blurp :-)
Disclaimer: This viewer is unofficial and although I am doing my best to make it better than the release viewer, it may contain extra bugs and you will have to trust me that there is no malicious code in it. Please also understand that it runs on the main grid with your real SecondLife account and inventory. Also read the disclaimer/header in the Install.txt in my archive.
First make sure that you have the Linden 1.19.1.4 viewer available or download and install it here.
Then download nicholaz-EC-e.zip from my server and while the download runs, have a look at the installation instructions and the change log. If you have trouble downloading or unpacking the file from there, here's a temporary alternate link. (In any case, the hash for the file should be "MD5 (nicholaz-EC-e.zip) = 448bb7ec74ec3e5a21b6597d17c327f0".)
After the download completes, follow the instructions and make sure they go into the right folder!
Enjoy ...
Nick
PS: There is an in-world group for announcements of my releases: Search, Groups, "Nicholaz" and on the top right of this blog you will find a link to a forum thread where I am sure that people will be able to help you if you have problems.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Three Tidbits ... (Updated)
I have a few tidbits which I want to share or which I want to get off my mind:
First: A few people have pointed me to the Linden 1.19.1 Office Hour where the issue about my patches was raised. I've read it, but there's nothing much I care to say about it. The Lindens (or more precisely some Lindens) mahave their views, I have mine -- and they differ.
However, since the issue was mentioned in the office hour and because through a pointer from someone, I did notice that VWR-374 (asstachments) is marked as closed and fixed on the Jira. I did not see it in the release notes but for sure it is there in the source code. And given what Brad Linden says about the patch in the office hour, I must admit that I can't help but point you with considerable smugness to the source code (see line 169/170).
Second™ thing on my mind is a comment made by Prokofy last week. He was asking about my view of Open Source (see the comments to the Moment of Truth post, somewhere in the middle). I've often seen Prokofy as being quite insightful and ironically the longer I have been in this, the more I tend to agree with him, even on views which I found utterly ridiculous when I first heard them (oh, and btw, I found his coverage of VW08 excellent, especially the parts about OpenSim).
But regarding his comment and Open Source: I now think there's Open Source (truely cooperative ventures, which are for lack of a better word, democratically organized) and there's open source which merely means that the source code is available to the public. To mistake one for the other has been the root of many of my frustrations with this little adventure and I guess I am not alone there. I would be tempted to blame some of it on the Lindens for talking like Open Source and acting like open source, but there is nobody to blame except myself, because I failed to do what I thought I learned long ago, that is, to look at what people do rather than to listen what people say.
As Proky says in his comment: Coders are free to come to a project and they are free to leave. He's right there and also in saying "It [LL] is a proprietary group that isn't showing its hand." Nothing of this is new, but sometimes there is a difference between seeing and hearing something and taking it to heart. I have no problem with a commercial operation (I'm running a commercial closed source business myself), nor do I have a problem with idealistically inspired ventures. My only problem with commerce is, when it's sold under the guise of idealism. But as I said, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Did I mention that I find Prokofy insightful? Oh I guess yes :-). He correctly picked up my vibrations about the screen estate of "Your world. Your imagination" vs. "Linden Lab and IBM" and "CSI:NY". It took me a while to figure it out myself (the biggest blind spots are always about oneself), but their website is not about what I think they should be, but it is simply what they do which, like avatars, reflects what they are.
I now remember something which I had forgotten. The first time I really questioned my involvement with SL was last autumn, when I saw the CSI:NY covering the whole screen and more importantly, when hearing that their OnRez viewer had closed source improvements based on the open source version. While I have no problem with spending free time on an idealistic venture (let's say something like OpenSim, although that doesn't work for a variety of unrelated reasons), I have absolutely no intention to work for CBN (or now IBM) for free ... hourly rates or flat rate pricing per project upon request, thank you for your interest.
As long as I saw Linden Lab as an idealistic venture, I did not mind if they cashed in a few fruits which fell from my tree. It's not so much that I need to be paid for what I did here, because my business always had provided me with more than I need. This is similar to Prokofy not needing to get paid for writing his blog or newspaper, because these activities (blogging and OS coding) are quite similar, in that they have their return in intangibles, whatever these may be for the individual person.
Prok says: "Ultimately, you have not persuaded me that somehow opensourcing and crowdsourcing people's labour for free is preferable to proprietary code managed by companies that take into account many other considerations than whether you find something interesting."
I fully agree, nobody could persuade me about that either. It is not preferable. It's merely different. As I said, my own business runs on proprietary closed source and so do many successful ventures. Equally successful ventures run on Open Source and voluntarism. I'm running Firefox on Microsoft XP here, I'm not using Open Source operating systems, neither am I using commercial browsers. It's not how they are made, but which result I prefer.
Mixing both approaches also works sometime (there is a project called Wine which does it with great success), but it requires skillful management and communication, two traits which Linden Lab is distinctly lacking. To me, Open Source isn't an ideology (although I admit that there are people for whom it is one). It's just a means of organization and if there is involvement bordering to self exploitation, it is because people are getting something else back, something which mostly can't be paid for with money anyway, like a sense of community, interesting exchange, the opportunity to do something you enjoy (many open source programmers have a different daytime job, so it gives them a chance to do some meaningful coding). Once the rent is paid, it does not matter if you get those intangibles from going to a bowling club two times a week, or to a rabbit breeder club, or if you work with others on a software project which you find appealing.
My rent is paid, but getting intangibles from catering patches to Linden Lab™ has become increasingly hard, so I'm putting an end to that part of the involvement.
Now third™ but not last, the following may come as a surprise to you. You can believe me, it came as much of a surprise to myself: Despite of what I said and thought I would do last week, and despite what I say above, the idea of looking at the recent memory leak kept bugging me (it seems that I still enjoy solving puzzles or I guess I'm just a pervert coder).
Last Friday I had downloaded the source code because I was looking for the asstachment fix (see above). Somehow one thing led to the other and before I knew I was looking at leak dumps. I swear I didn't intend to do it, really it was just an accident :-)
Well, I guess I don't need to mention the outcome *grins broadly*. Then, because a result like this is too good to go unused, especially for a guy with an ego as big as mine, more things led to one another ...
I'll spare you the details, but unless something goes very very wrong, you can expect the fruits of Friday night to appear at an Open Source (capital letters) outlet near you pretty soon (Update: see the comments for a first download link).
First: A few people have pointed me to the Linden 1.19.1 Office Hour where the issue about my patches was raised. I've read it, but there's nothing much I care to say about it. The Lindens (or more precisely some Lindens) mahave their views, I have mine -- and they differ.
However, since the issue was mentioned in the office hour and because through a pointer from someone, I did notice that VWR-374 (asstachments) is marked as closed and fixed on the Jira. I did not see it in the release notes but for sure it is there in the source code. And given what Brad Linden says about the patch in the office hour, I must admit that I can't help but point you with considerable smugness to the source code (see line 169/170).
Second™ thing on my mind is a comment made by Prokofy last week. He was asking about my view of Open Source (see the comments to the Moment of Truth post, somewhere in the middle). I've often seen Prokofy as being quite insightful and ironically the longer I have been in this, the more I tend to agree with him, even on views which I found utterly ridiculous when I first heard them (oh, and btw, I found his coverage of VW08 excellent, especially the parts about OpenSim).
But regarding his comment and Open Source: I now think there's Open Source (truely cooperative ventures, which are for lack of a better word, democratically organized) and there's open source which merely means that the source code is available to the public. To mistake one for the other has been the root of many of my frustrations with this little adventure and I guess I am not alone there. I would be tempted to blame some of it on the Lindens for talking like Open Source and acting like open source, but there is nobody to blame except myself, because I failed to do what I thought I learned long ago, that is, to look at what people do rather than to listen what people say.
As Proky says in his comment: Coders are free to come to a project and they are free to leave. He's right there and also in saying "It [LL] is a proprietary group that isn't showing its hand." Nothing of this is new, but sometimes there is a difference between seeing and hearing something and taking it to heart. I have no problem with a commercial operation (I'm running a commercial closed source business myself), nor do I have a problem with idealistically inspired ventures. My only problem with commerce is, when it's sold under the guise of idealism. But as I said, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Did I mention that I find Prokofy insightful? Oh I guess yes :-). He correctly picked up my vibrations about the screen estate of "Your world. Your imagination" vs. "Linden Lab and IBM" and "CSI:NY". It took me a while to figure it out myself (the biggest blind spots are always about oneself), but their website is not about what I think they should be, but it is simply what they do which, like avatars, reflects what they are.
I now remember something which I had forgotten. The first time I really questioned my involvement with SL was last autumn, when I saw the CSI:NY covering the whole screen and more importantly, when hearing that their OnRez viewer had closed source improvements based on the open source version. While I have no problem with spending free time on an idealistic venture (let's say something like OpenSim, although that doesn't work for a variety of unrelated reasons), I have absolutely no intention to work for CBN (or now IBM) for free ... hourly rates or flat rate pricing per project upon request, thank you for your interest.
As long as I saw Linden Lab as an idealistic venture, I did not mind if they cashed in a few fruits which fell from my tree. It's not so much that I need to be paid for what I did here, because my business always had provided me with more than I need. This is similar to Prokofy not needing to get paid for writing his blog or newspaper, because these activities (blogging and OS coding) are quite similar, in that they have their return in intangibles, whatever these may be for the individual person.
Prok says: "Ultimately, you have not persuaded me that somehow opensourcing and crowdsourcing people's labour for free is preferable to proprietary code managed by companies that take into account many other considerations than whether you find something interesting."
I fully agree, nobody could persuade me about that either. It is not preferable. It's merely different. As I said, my own business runs on proprietary closed source and so do many successful ventures. Equally successful ventures run on Open Source and voluntarism. I'm running Firefox on Microsoft XP here, I'm not using Open Source operating systems, neither am I using commercial browsers. It's not how they are made, but which result I prefer.
Mixing both approaches also works sometime (there is a project called Wine which does it with great success), but it requires skillful management and communication, two traits which Linden Lab is distinctly lacking. To me, Open Source isn't an ideology (although I admit that there are people for whom it is one). It's just a means of organization and if there is involvement bordering to self exploitation, it is because people are getting something else back, something which mostly can't be paid for with money anyway, like a sense of community, interesting exchange, the opportunity to do something you enjoy (many open source programmers have a different daytime job, so it gives them a chance to do some meaningful coding). Once the rent is paid, it does not matter if you get those intangibles from going to a bowling club two times a week, or to a rabbit breeder club, or if you work with others on a software project which you find appealing.
My rent is paid, but getting intangibles from catering patches to Linden Lab™ has become increasingly hard, so I'm putting an end to that part of the involvement.
Now third™ but not last, the following may come as a surprise to you. You can believe me, it came as much of a surprise to myself: Despite of what I said and thought I would do last week, and despite what I say above, the idea of looking at the recent memory leak kept bugging me (it seems that I still enjoy solving puzzles or I guess I'm just a pervert coder).
Last Friday I had downloaded the source code because I was looking for the asstachment fix (see above). Somehow one thing led to the other and before I knew I was looking at leak dumps. I swear I didn't intend to do it, really it was just an accident :-)
Well, I guess I don't need to mention the outcome *grins broadly*. Then, because a result like this is too good to go unused, especially for a guy with an ego as big as mine, more things led to one another ...
I'll spare you the details, but unless something goes very very wrong, you can expect the fruits of Friday night to appear at an Open Source (capital letters) outlet near you pretty soon (Update: see the comments for a first download link).
Friday, April 11, 2008
If you're looking for alternatives ... (Updated)
So far it looks that Bleeding Edge v is still running fine and I'm even hearing that there are stil people out there running Old School. If you follow the links and read the instructions carefully (and follow the links on these pages to download the original versions from You-Know-Who which are required to run mine) I guess the will be of some use.
Basically, those two can continue to remain usable for a long time. They won't give you stuff like Mono scripting or Windlight, but as long as the Lindens don't mess with the protocol in which the viewer talks to the server and as long as the keep legacy functions (like old search) in place, these versions will be fine.
A note regarding mandatory updates: The viewers are grouped into so called channels (you'll notice the channel name is displayed in the lower right corner of the login screen). Update notices and mandatory updates these days are mainly organizational and not technical decisions and they are only enforced based on specific channels. Viewers from other channels (like mine) are unaffected. Also, you can change the login channel for any user by modifying the icon and using the -channel parameter.
Anyway, what I actually wanted to say is the following: If you want to try other viewers, there is Henri's Cool Viewer for Linux and Boy Lane's Windows version of the CoolViewer. These are obviously not identical to Nicholaz Editions, but Henri is a good integrator and like me he is pretty religious about stability, so he has incorporated many fixes from other open sourcers, many of mine included. From what I know, all the essential memory and crash related stuff is there. So if you are interested running an 1.19 version with old style interface and better stability than You-Know-Who's, then CoolViewer is definitely worth checking.
Other than that, again I appreciate all the comments and support which I got on my last post ... I hope you will continue to be able to enjoy your OtherExperience (actually I was about to wish you smooth sailing, but that idiom seemed pretty misplaced because smooth sailing and OtherExperience are really two totally different things ... anybody who ever crossed a sim border in a boat after 2005 knows that).
Enjoy ...
Nick
Update:
Barney sez: "Well, just to let people know, I am back in the client building game and leveled up to the Cool Viewer (minus Restraint Life due to patch-apply-problems there): (link). It's the first build of the cool viewer on mac, so I don't have much ideas about it's stability, but people might want to give it a try. I doubt it will be worse than the official client ;)"
Nick sez: "Hey Barney, welcome back :-)"
Basically, those two can continue to remain usable for a long time. They won't give you stuff like Mono scripting or Windlight, but as long as the Lindens don't mess with the protocol in which the viewer talks to the server and as long as the keep legacy functions (like old search) in place, these versions will be fine.
A note regarding mandatory updates: The viewers are grouped into so called channels (you'll notice the channel name is displayed in the lower right corner of the login screen). Update notices and mandatory updates these days are mainly organizational and not technical decisions and they are only enforced based on specific channels. Viewers from other channels (like mine) are unaffected. Also, you can change the login channel for any user by modifying the icon and using the -channel parameter.
Anyway, what I actually wanted to say is the following: If you want to try other viewers, there is Henri's Cool Viewer for Linux and Boy Lane's Windows version of the CoolViewer. These are obviously not identical to Nicholaz Editions, but Henri is a good integrator and like me he is pretty religious about stability, so he has incorporated many fixes from other open sourcers, many of mine included. From what I know, all the essential memory and crash related stuff is there. So if you are interested running an 1.19 version with old style interface and better stability than You-Know-Who's, then CoolViewer is definitely worth checking.
Other than that, again I appreciate all the comments and support which I got on my last post ... I hope you will continue to be able to enjoy your OtherExperience (actually I was about to wish you smooth sailing, but that idiom seemed pretty misplaced because smooth sailing and OtherExperience are really two totally different things ... anybody who ever crossed a sim border in a boat after 2005 knows that).
Enjoy ...
Nick
Update:
Barney sez: "Well, just to let people know, I am back in the client building game and leveled up to the Cool Viewer (minus Restraint Life due to patch-apply-problems there): (link). It's the first build of the cool viewer on mac, so I don't have much ideas about it's stability, but people might want to give it a try. I doubt it will be worse than the official client ;)"
Nick sez: "Hey Barney, welcome back :-)"
Sunday, April 6, 2008
The Moment of Truth
A very insightful person once told me to look at what people are doing rather than listening to what people are saying (which more or less is a variation of "actions speak louder than words").
I can't ignore any longer the gap between what I'm actually doing compared to what I've been planning to in regards to the SL™ viewer. If you look back over my last posts here, I said that I wanted to build something based on the 1.19 version, but if I look back what I actually did in over the last weeks, I see that I just didn't. Not that I didn't want to, it's just that I did not spend time on it after making an initial attempt with an 1.19.0 RC.
Today, after I heard through the blog comments here that 1.19.1 went gold, I wanted to give that a shot, but seeing that there isn't any up to date source and hearing that a couple of people had trouble getting it to run out of the box, was the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back. I just one time too often stumbled over LL™'s inability to support their open source in the most basic way.
I could write a nice little rant here, but the point is that I'm having too little time at the moment to do all the things I'd like to and when multiple ideas or projects are competing for time, the most attractive ones win.
What I am doing these days in my own business is quite thrilling ... and one of the most rewarding points about it, from a programmer's perspective, is that I don't have to deal with entropy or outright chaos originating from other people.
And I hate to admit, that despite the wealth of positive feedback which I'm still getting about my viewer builds, the idea of getting into the treadmill of bringing the official viewer up to speed once again is utterly appaling.
Working on the viewer always had had it's treadmill components, but they were outbalanced by rewarding parts, like the perspective of contributing to a larger project, making other people happy and last but not least scratching my own itches because I spent a lot of time inworld, so I fixed issues because I wanted them fixed and because I could.
When I started, I thought LL™ folks were just a bit overworked and with some outside help from a group of friendly open sourcers and code sorcerers the viewer would turn into a solid, stable and even sleek piece of software.
The realization took me some time, but eventually it did dawn even on the optimist which I am, that it was not going to happen. Not through the Linden™s themselves, and certainly not through contributions from the coding community, because the Linden™s were increasingly ignoring the contributions.
There was a time when code submissions were readily accepted, then they were more and more cherry picked and these days, as far as I can tell, they are ignored at large, even if they are addressing the most basic and obvious problems like crashes (and I am not at all speaking of GUI changes).
The way I see it now, the best I could hope to achieve here would be to build a fork (spawning an independent viewer) and trying to keep up with their server side changes. This would be a time intensive and tedious task, which would require inspiration and a vision.
If there is something that has changed over the last year, it is a loss of faith and a loss of the feeling of being inspired. Noting all the changes which happened to the platform on a meta level (governance™, management™ and the like) this 2nd™ experience got more and more trivial and in my view. It merely turned into a pixelated copy of the real world.
Is it just me or did they shrink the size of the "Your world. Your imaginantion" slogan on the web site over time? At the moment it's covering little less space than the text "IBM™ and Linden Lab™" and about one tenth of the space of "CSI:NY™". Is it just me or did the showcase images on the Second™ Life™ website got more and more meaningless over time, now essentially just showing ordinary people standing around or shopping?
Remembering the time when I started, I envy everybody who is still inspired by what SL™ is offering. I had a hell of a time there and I wish I could make it come back.
But these days when I look at the blog, or the Jira or when I occasionally browse over the mailing list, more often than not I'm irked or shaking my head in disbelief or both.
In technical terms, with the current state of the 2nd world, like daily outages on the server, new leaks in the viewer, other problems, it would be like starting all over and probably even worse because now the binary crash reporter is removed from the viewer (this was the tool which I used to locate 90% of the crashes I found).
*sighs*
Putting off this decision and hoping things would change again did work for some time, but eventually I can't ignore the facts. So let me be straight and say that they way things look now there won't be any new builds from me.
At the moment I simply don't have the time, but to be true to myself and you, probably even if I had, I'd be no longer willing to put up with Bullshit™ any more.
*sighs again*
I am grateful for all the feedback I have gotten and also that I had the honor to help you people out there to have a better time in this alternate experience. I guess many people will be disappointed and I'm truly sorry for that.
But things have changed a lot over the last few months and I want to move on. In fact I guess I alreay have ...
Nick
PS: Leave me an occasional comment here if you like, or if you are a coder, then use the comments it to advertise your viewer builds.
I can't ignore any longer the gap between what I'm actually doing compared to what I've been planning to in regards to the SL™ viewer. If you look back over my last posts here, I said that I wanted to build something based on the 1.19 version, but if I look back what I actually did in over the last weeks, I see that I just didn't. Not that I didn't want to, it's just that I did not spend time on it after making an initial attempt with an 1.19.0 RC.
Today, after I heard through the blog comments here that 1.19.1 went gold, I wanted to give that a shot, but seeing that there isn't any up to date source and hearing that a couple of people had trouble getting it to run out of the box, was the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back. I just one time too often stumbled over LL™'s inability to support their open source in the most basic way.
I could write a nice little rant here, but the point is that I'm having too little time at the moment to do all the things I'd like to and when multiple ideas or projects are competing for time, the most attractive ones win.
What I am doing these days in my own business is quite thrilling ... and one of the most rewarding points about it, from a programmer's perspective, is that I don't have to deal with entropy or outright chaos originating from other people.
And I hate to admit, that despite the wealth of positive feedback which I'm still getting about my viewer builds, the idea of getting into the treadmill of bringing the official viewer up to speed once again is utterly appaling.
Working on the viewer always had had it's treadmill components, but they were outbalanced by rewarding parts, like the perspective of contributing to a larger project, making other people happy and last but not least scratching my own itches because I spent a lot of time inworld, so I fixed issues because I wanted them fixed and because I could.
When I started, I thought LL™ folks were just a bit overworked and with some outside help from a group of friendly open sourcers and code sorcerers the viewer would turn into a solid, stable and even sleek piece of software.
The realization took me some time, but eventually it did dawn even on the optimist which I am, that it was not going to happen. Not through the Linden™s themselves, and certainly not through contributions from the coding community, because the Linden™s were increasingly ignoring the contributions.
There was a time when code submissions were readily accepted, then they were more and more cherry picked and these days, as far as I can tell, they are ignored at large, even if they are addressing the most basic and obvious problems like crashes (and I am not at all speaking of GUI changes).
The way I see it now, the best I could hope to achieve here would be to build a fork (spawning an independent viewer) and trying to keep up with their server side changes. This would be a time intensive and tedious task, which would require inspiration and a vision.
If there is something that has changed over the last year, it is a loss of faith and a loss of the feeling of being inspired. Noting all the changes which happened to the platform on a meta level (governance™, management™ and the like) this 2nd™ experience got more and more trivial and in my view. It merely turned into a pixelated copy of the real world.
Is it just me or did they shrink the size of the "Your world. Your imaginantion" slogan on the web site over time? At the moment it's covering little less space than the text "IBM™ and Linden Lab™" and about one tenth of the space of "CSI:NY™". Is it just me or did the showcase images on the Second™ Life™ website got more and more meaningless over time, now essentially just showing ordinary people standing around or shopping?
Remembering the time when I started, I envy everybody who is still inspired by what SL™ is offering. I had a hell of a time there and I wish I could make it come back.
But these days when I look at the blog, or the Jira or when I occasionally browse over the mailing list, more often than not I'm irked or shaking my head in disbelief or both.
In technical terms, with the current state of the 2nd world, like daily outages on the server, new leaks in the viewer, other problems, it would be like starting all over and probably even worse because now the binary crash reporter is removed from the viewer (this was the tool which I used to locate 90% of the crashes I found).
*sighs*
Putting off this decision and hoping things would change again did work for some time, but eventually I can't ignore the facts. So let me be straight and say that they way things look now there won't be any new builds from me.
At the moment I simply don't have the time, but to be true to myself and you, probably even if I had, I'd be no longer willing to put up with Bullshit™ any more.
*sighs again*
I am grateful for all the feedback I have gotten and also that I had the honor to help you people out there to have a better time in this alternate experience. I guess many people will be disappointed and I'm truly sorry for that.
But things have changed a lot over the last few months and I want to move on. In fact I guess I alreay have ...
Nick
PS: Leave me an occasional comment here if you like, or if you are a coder, then use the comments it to advertise your viewer builds.
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