NexisONLINE Status Blog

FlexLife has been successfully compiled using the Emerald Viewer codebase. I’ve incorporated some patches from a friend of mine, Twisted Laws, as well. I’ve also replaced Thomas Shikami’s Lua engine with my own, though I still need to fix threading. LL should be happy to know that the first thing I did was remove the bandodging mods.

Next up: Windlight water on a prim.

Group chats have been completely screwed up for a few weeks now and finally a Linden had enough balls to acknowlege, 3 weeks later, that there is, indeed a problem.  Thanks Sardonyx, everyone already fucking knows that aside from the people who work at the company that’s supposed to be maintaining the damn game. He also mentioned that they’re working on it, but it’ll be ANOTHER COUPLE WEEKS.  Great, so while everyone in SL is flailing around, unable to get support for their products or ask for help with some newbie crap, everyone at LL is busy giving each other congratuatory blowjobs over Viewer 1.23’s release and the unveiling of the new adult ghetto while everything burns down around them.  Great job, guys.  Great fucking job.

I can’t wait to see the reaction from LL to the economic report for next quarter, when they suddenly realize they’re rushing headlong towards bankruptcy like a retarded dog rushing at a combine harvester.

Finished the upgrade from gentoo to debian on all production and backup servers.  As expected, it was bumpy as MySQL was a bit different on Debian.  However, updates are now much faster and RAID 1 was already installed for the hosting directory. MySQL is back up and running, PHP5 is running, and pretty much the only thing to do now is get lighttpd reconfigured with all the redirects, which will take about 5 minutes.

Tomorrow, I’m going to be migrating my primary webserver to Debian from Gentoo. This is going to be very fucking bumpy, so I’m going to take everything offline.

Because of issues having to manually run updates on 2 very finicky servers whilst on a tight time schedule, I am migrating the primary webserver to Debian this summer.  In order to ease the upgrade process, I will be running a test migration on the backup webserver.  This means that any service depending on the test webserver (IE memcache, etc) will be fucking up.  FlexMarket should not be affected, but you never know.

So, during the late-night lull on my TV, I decided to watch some Glenn Beck since CNN was blubbering on about some cancerous actor and he’s actually somewhat entertaining. As soon as I changed the channel and read the title of the segment, I nearly chipped a fucking tooth raging at the TV.

Glenn Beck was interviewing the CEO of motherfucking GM.

The same GM CEO who claimed to Glenn Beck to have his hands full with GM.

So why the fuck are you on TV talking to some paranoid talkshow host if you’re so damn busy? Maybe you should go back to fucking Detroit and delay the bankruptcy of your shitty car company that was apparently worth a couple billion dollars to our braindead politicians?

The other day, I was cleaning up the leftovers of another failed PN attack when suddenly, out of nowhere, I hear that familiar DING, followed by the old “YOU HAVE BEEN LOGGED OUT BY AN ADMINISTRATOR” dialog, indicating I had done something wrong to piss off a Linden somewhere.  I checked my email, to find I had been banned for five days due to assaulting someone.  After some head-scratching, I realized the only people I had done anything to were the morons spamming self-replicating shit in the sandboxes.  Even though I know it’s against the terms of service agreement, I still attempt to crash or orbit shitheads conducting serious violations of the ToS, if it will slow them down and keep the sandbox running longer so I can either escape, AR, or remove objects.   This recent ban is still a reminder that LL needs to do some serious policy reviews.

In the real world (at least in the State of Washington), you have the right to defend yourself with deadly force IF you feel your life is in immediate danger.  It only makes sense to apply a similar train of thought to Second Life, particularly to griefers.  For instance, if some shithead is caging you (in a safezone like a sandbox), you SHOULD have the right to use a weapon to either disrupt that user’s ability to cage you or remove him from the immediate area.  In another case, one should be able to crash the client of a user who is trying to conduct serious violations of the Terms of Service, such as a sim crash attempt.  That is not the case, as shitheads can and do report for countering attacks, which is purely bullshit.  Those arguing “YOU HAVE LANDOWNER TOOLS FOR A REASON” should realize that, in the sandboxes and other public sims, the landowners are asleep or busy 90% of the time.  ARs filed sometimes take hours to be read (one instance took 5 hours), so by the time the Linden goes through your ARs, the sim’s already been crashed and 3 morons have been running around caging people.

On the other side of the equation are the people who get caught in the crossfire.  When orbiters and bullets and shit are whizzing around, third parties are going to get hit eventually.  The same happens IRL.  In Second Life, there’s the option of using smart weapons that try to attack only a certain key, but some weapons throw their targets in a random direction (particularly the blitzers I use to remove large physical prims from a sim), creating a shrapnel effect.  Unfortunately, this cannot be avoided, as even key-targeted orbiters will occasionally orbit the person standing next to the target.  In laggy situations like a server crash attempt, the chances of collateral damage are even higher as fine control is lost.  Pretty much the only way to get around this is to distribute freebie shields in an attempt to reduce the number of users affected by a retalitory attack.  One could also wait for the line of fire to be clear, but especially in laggy situations, someone could run out in front of you before the weapon realizes you’ve hit fire.  Before retaliating to an attack, one should weigh the risks and benefits.

</rant>

Open beta began yesterday.  Click here for more details.

Sardonyx Linden released a blog post today explaining why a lot of shit in SL will continue being broken, despite the usual outrage at LL’s services and falling resident retention rates.  Allow me to translate some of the bullshit this man seems to be spewing from all orifaces.

Linden Lab, according to Sardonyx, has evaluated a metric fuckton of IM alternatives in order to attempt to fix IMs and group chat.  They tried Jabber, an open-source application for voice and text messaging between users.  However, even though it would fix a lot of shit, they deemed it was too “immature” to implement.  In other words, Linden Labs is lazy and won’t change a bunch of shit to fix a lot more shit.  Hell, it’s simple to fix:  Fire all the fucking retarded coders currently at the lab,throw away the corporate coding bible, hire a bunch of people who know what they’re doing AND LET THEM THINK OUT OF THE BOX, and start getting down to business instead of fucking around on the grid like a bunch of stupid kids.

In addition, LL is using their database server as a file server (for assets), which is a major no-no, as database servers are horribly inefficient for file storage, as we now see.  A easy way to fix this:  Implement lighttpd, which Google uses for serving stuff on Youtube, across multiple servers.  You can use PHP-based authentication checks using pre-shared tokens if you need to, but nothing else is needed.  You can run them behind a lighttpd front-end webserver to balance the load if required.  Lighttpd is VERY scalable, too, so don’t whine about scalability.  In addition, instead of downloading one asset at a time, one could potentially download 3 or 4 at a time through this system, and asynchronously.

Linden Lab can’t run a production grid, and we are now are now seeing the effects of this lack of knowledge.  If they cannot pull their shit together, then we are going to see Linden Lab quietly go bankrupt within the next year.  I guarantee it.