It's live, and its... broken

Voice Chat is now live in SL.

It recognizes the existence of my Logitech USB microphone on my XP-running desktop, but doesn't seem able to use it. I click to test and nothing. Completely dead. I've checked that it's the default input device in control panel, and I know it works because Skype is quite happy with it... but SL doesn't work with it at all.

My bang up to date laptop came with Vista (ugh) - guess what... SL's voice chat doesn't work with that either. I know for a FACT that this works, because Teamspeak - which I use for World of Warcraft - is happy with both systems.

So well done again Linden Labs. You know a feature is live when it's broken.

Vote for my bug!

Please vote for this bug in the SL Jira

The other day when SL was experiencing major problems due to the power outage problems that happened in their area, I lost something from my inventory which originally cost me in total, around L$2,500 (including the additional scripts)

The problem occurred because the item was set nocopy, a not uncommon occurrence when you buy something from a vendor, and it occurs because of the way SL deals with rezzing items.

Currently, when you drag an item from your inventory into the world, SL removes the item (if it's nocopy) or a copy of the item (if it's not nocopy) from your inventory, then it attempts to rez that item inworld. The difficulty comes when the asset server is on the fritz, because then the error "failed to rez item" is dealt with after the item has been removed from your inventory. If that item was nocopy, then it is lost. Permanently.

If LL (or an enterprising open source programmer) were to change this around so that errors rezzing the item in world are checked for before the item or copy of the item is removed from the avatar's inventory, and if an error is detected abort removing it from the inventory, then people would not suffer inventory loss in this way.

Simple perhaps... but it doesn't appear to have been thought of. Please go to the Jira using the link above (you may need to use your SL avatar name to log in) and use the voting link on the lower left of your screen to vote for this issue to be resolved.

Thank you.

Attention Sony USB Microvault owners

A few days ago I bought direct from Sony a 512Mb USB MicroVault stick. When I first put it into my USB port it claimed that it could compress data on the fly to make the capacity much greater, and asked me if I wanted to install the on-the-fly compressor/decompressor as part of the startup. Suspecting nothing, I agreed.

The next time I started Windows I got a Windows "Data Execution Prevention" warning saying that Windows Explorer had caused a DEP problem and would be closed. I acknowledged that, and the system seemed to work fine.

Until I went to start Second Life. Then I got the error above. For those whose monitors can't make out the dialogue box, it says "Second Life cannot be run from this machine. If you believe this to be an error, please contact support@secondlife.com"

The first thing I thought was that I'd been banned. So I went to the second life account page, and it said everything was in order. Next billing date, end of February, account status active. So I tried it on my laptop - and got in without a problem.

Reasoning that the DEP was the only thing to have changed in my configuration, I opened the startup group and deleted the Sony compression utility. Then I rebooted, and hey presto - no DEP. I tried Second Life again, and it worked fine.

So, to anyone who has recently bought, or may plan to buy, a Sony USB Microvault storage stick - take heed. You'll need to STOP the decompressor working at startup or you might find programs working unpredictably.

In a final footnote, before I took action myself, I did write to Second Life support to ask about this, and got an email back this morning saying they'd reviewed the situation and found that after I'd emailed them I had apparently connected without any problems (which is quite true) - so, an easy close ticket there. Can't help wondering if they'd have been so quick replying if I hadn't solved the problem!

To be private, or not to be private

Being part of various support groups leads me to find a new bug in the system, which I was told about by a friend. A while ago, SL changed the Friends list to be able to use a tickbox option to allow or forbid people on your friends list from seeing you online. The idea, no doubt, was that someone who was feeling like they didn't want to drown under IMs from people on their friends list could, if they wanted, turn off the ability for others to see them online.

The problem is, that hasn't kept pace with the "publicity" function of the website, which shows who is on your friends list when you view your account. That will continue to show EVERYONE on the friends list, regardless of whether they've selected the privacy option again.

There are some vulnerable people on SL who quite value the privacy option, Linden Labs, if you're reading this - There was a good reason you introduced the friend list visibility option in the first place. Can you now make sure your own website follows the same ruleset?

Login issues

Second life crashed. Spectacularly. So spectacularly they had to close the grid for a while. While it was down I noticed something which they REALLY need to work on as a matter of high priority. While the status page said "Grid Offline" the client was still happily saying "Grid Online" and giving logged in numbers. Something isn't right here. The blog said that everyone was logged out when the asset server issues became serious, yet as you can see from this quick movie I made the client failed to notice the entire grid was down for almost 12 minutes after it went down.

Because I'd been online at the time the grid crashed, I knew it wasn't online, but really this does surprise me that there should be such a long discrepancy between the client and the actual status. I'd have thought that would be high priority to try and correct... maybe that's just me thinking too logically again.