Yawny-face

I'm feeling meh and irritated this evening, which means a lot of time spent tossing and turning until I find something to do with this nervous energy. (Tried for three hours to get to sleep tonight, but it was a no-go).

So, here are my options:

• Finish my book on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's a very interesting analysis of the history of the scrolls and where scholarly debate stands on their meanings. Prolly not the best reading for 5 AM though.
• Work on Imprudence. There's a branch I need to finish as well as another small fix I need to put in, but I'm not feeling it tonight. (It's been bugging me, not having an actual deadline for RC1. I really want to get this release out there--I've put a lot of work into it).
  
• Indulge in some SL time. There might be a few interesting people on, or wandering by.
  
• Try to beat Cheney's Descent. For some reason, I've become addicted to this little flash joy. I'm sure if Cheney had infinite ammo in RL, he'd be always firing too.
  
• Catch up on the latest news and politics.
  
• Drool a bit.

I'll prolly go with secret option G: browse wikipedia until I pass out.

*stretch*

It's been a productive evening. While my viewer changes continue to compile, I've backported fixes for two of my personal favorite UI JIRAs (one just fixed today by qarl--go qarl!), and even found time to browse through the latest round of feature requests on the JIRA.

God, what a mess that was. Obvious issues not linked, issues in the wrong category, issues missing components. (Am I the only one who ever really cared about keeping the metas and feature requests organized, btw?) I had to stop after two pages, otherwise knowing me, I would have gotten sucked into bug reports and wasted my entire night organizing.

Anyway. Stumbled across two small patches that would prolly fit well in 1.1 if there's time and ahh, compile's done. Time to do some testing :D

TG + MG = Err

McCabe Maxsted says: hey
McCabe Maxsted says: here's a question for you, as a mother. How would you feel if your kids were 13 and on second life?
Indya Etchegaray says: teen grid...ok. main grid....not so good
Indya Etchegaray says: unless accompanied..there are a lot of great educational sites on the main grid.
McCabe Maxsted says: LL's planning on merging the TG and the MG
Indya Etchegaray says: and they bought slx
Indya Etchegaray says: well, there will be more kids who know about bdsm, beastiality, etc.
McCabe Maxsted says: heh

I like the idea of allowing TG accounts to enjoy some of the benefits of MG content, potentially through OGP teleports to verified PG estates (if nothing else strictly for educational use) and allowing the exchange of content-rated assets across markets, but I doubt LL will go that route. Historically, they do the least amount of work possible, meaning what is easiest for them gets done, while what is harder for LL but easier for the community gets pushed aside. (For example, it's easier for LL to just drop the TG completely and maintain one, more restrictive grid).

There are reasons for this (many lindens say how overloaded they all are) but ultimately, mixing an irresponsible and lazy company with minors, acres of adult content, and increasingly watchful government?

*shakes his head*

That's just asking for trouble.

1.1's moving forward

*rubs his eyes* man, I've been staring at the computer screen for a long time tonight. But, progress has been made!

• GStreamer now works again. Huzzah! I figured out what was going on and the issue is prolly rare, but it's corrected for.
• I've learned why people weren't hearing sound after installing. I'm not particularly proud of my fix for this, however. Rather than embedding something in the app, I attached a small console application to the installer (it takes ten minutes to compile/link a single source change, then logging on... logging off... was just faster to repro/make/test it this way). The fix works seamlessly on XP, but I'm pretty sure Vista will throw a wedge in that (goes to show how much I still have yet to learn in this area).
• My "small little ui fix" that I wanted to get in has turned into a major anti-cruft campaign. Looks like I'll have to hold off on finishing that until the morning, which is fine, really. My head's starting to wobble on its hinges.
  
• Obama gets inaugerated today (check the time, it's after midnight).
  

The last one really has nothing to do with me, but it's too exciting not to comment on. Finally, no more Bush.

Hubris and testing

Oh, how 24 hours changes things. Yesterday, Jacek and I decided on January 20th for a code freeze for RC1. I only had a few small bugs on my radar, so I spent the evening relaxing, indulging in a little UI cleanup before I went to bed. When I woke up this morning, here's what I learned:

• Somewhere along the way GStreamer had broken for streaming music (well, not so much broken as become annoyingly hobbled). I tried reverting to an earlier version, but it still didn't work.
  
• I packaged a test build to see if other people were seeing the bug or not, but it turns out that while GStreamer works fine on my comp, nobody can stream anything on the builds I sent out.
• Trying out various fixes has resulted in bizarre error messages, and even more head pounding on my part (although I did finally figure out what was up, there).
  

Lesson learned: don't think you've got it down until you actually do, and have the tests to back it up. In this case, "assumption" has just made an ass out of me.

The Linden Way of Thinking

While at Nyx Linden's office hours, talking about avatars and textures:

[12:15]  McCabe Maxsted: I have a question, if you don't mind

[12:16]  Nyx Linden: sure

[12:16]  MystiTool HUD 1.0.22: Entering chat range: limonov Verne (19m)

[12:16]  McCabe Maxsted: why can't rendering avatars be separated from the particle count setting, so they don't appear invisible?

[12:17]  Nyx Linden: actually I fixed a bug a little while ago for that, so if you turn off particles anyone who is "ruthed" appears as a white sphere [link, for those who are curious]

[12:17]  Nyx Linden: don't think that's made it into the RC yet

[12:17]  McCabe Maxsted: I remember that; I wasn't a big fan

[12:17]  McCabe Maxsted: it was in the 1.21 nightly

[12:17]  McCabe Maxsted: at least, for a while

[12:17]  Nyx Linden: ah

[12:18]  McCabe Maxsted: why can't they just be particles?

[12:18]  BigPapi Linden: what do you mean?

[12:18]  McCabe Maxsted: I mean, not be affected by the particle setting. An exception

[12:18]  Nyx Linden: that's only used if particles are turned off. If you specifically change your settings so that you don't render particles, we want to use something else to represent a ruthed avatar

[12:19]  BigPapi Linden: The fix gets around that.

[12:19]  BigPapi Linden: However, we treat the two particle types as different

[12:19]  BigPapi Linden: Since we have a particle pool that we add the ruth particles to.

[12:19]  BigPapi Linden: The renderer doesn't know those particles are any different.

[12:20]  Morgaine Dinova loves BigPapi's raptor

[12:20]  McCabe Maxsted: it can't tell the source?

[12:20]  BigPapi Linden: Not really. We also don't want to add lots of logic to particle culling or particle budgets.

[12:20]  Kevin Paisley is Online

[12:21]  BigPapi Linden: Since for performance reasons we need each individual particle's rendering to be as fast as possible.

[12:21]  BigPapi Linden: But nyx's fix allows you to see ruthed avatars even if you set the particle budget to 0

[12:21]  McCabe Maxsted nods. Makes sense. Would it be possible to have two separate pools?

[12:21]  McCabe Maxsted: or is that too much of a performance drain?

[12:22]  Morgaine Dinova: A derived class with a parameter override wouldn't create a slowdown, other than the virtual dereference.

[12:22]  BigPapi Linden: Not that much of a performance drain, but it would require changing around more of the renderer. Nyx's fix is cleaner.

[12:22]  McCabe Maxsted: it creates more user confusion, though

[12:23]  BigPapi Linden: the white sphere?

[12:23]  McCabe Maxsted: yeah, having two different types of avatars that newbies won't be able to understand, multicolored IIRC based on your shader settings

[12:24]  McCabe Maxsted: simpler for the user to just have one avatar, one unrezed avatar

[12:24]  McCabe Maxsted: and always know what's what

[12:24]  Nyx Linden: it should be consistent unless you're changing your settings back and forth

[12:24]  McCabe Maxsted: which we are always doing

[12:24]  McCabe Maxsted: as residents

[12:24]  BigPapi Linden: Yes, but it does look similar, and that would also require adding another slider to allow you to budget avatar particles too. :)

[12:24]  Aimee Trescothick is Offline

[12:25]  McCabe Maxsted: I think it could safely be a default, without a preference

[12:25]  BigPapi Linden: Plus the engineering resources to change the renderer to allow you to it that way.

[12:25]  Aimee Trescothick is Online

[12:25]  MystiTool HUD 1.0.22: Entering chat range: Aimee Trescothick (1m)

[12:25]  Nyx Linden: I think this should be sufficient for now -feel free to create a feature request and gather votes if you feel that its a big issue though

[12:26]  Morgaine Dinova: I guess the LL manpower issue is the deciding factor. Short of providing a patch for them ...

[12:26]  McCabe Maxsted nods. I guess so

Not more than ten minutes later:

[12:34]  Aimee Trescothick: someone want to deal with the griefer objects?

[12:35]  Aimee Trescothick (turns off particles so she can see again)

I don't think the lindens there quite caught on to the irony, but I did. 

In the Linden dev mindset, sacraficing usabililty is justified because it's easier. In my mindset, that's a cardinal sin. Yesterday, while browsing their SVN, I could feel myself starting to get sucked back into the whole LL-viewer-JIRA bit, but witnessing this conversation has successfully killed any lingering desire for me to submit patches to LL again. 

Really, shame on me for being tempted by lipstick on a pig. 

Imprudence update

An update on my personal tasks for Imprudence v.1.1.0:

- Finally got GStreamer working with streaming music. Almost all the work involved getting my build environment right (ended up using OA's version of GStreamer 0.10.21, but not their Glib; learned to always put Glib before GStreamer and mix and match certain plugins). I still haven't updated CMake to use these changes, as I was waiting to make sure everything worked first, but I'll prolly hold off on that until we're close to releasing.

- Started working through my list of patches to implement (as well as 1.22/1.23 features to backport). There are also a few changes that have been swirling around in the back of my mind, such as layout fixes and adding a debug setting for wind. I just implemented Armin's minimap tp patch this morning and it's pretty rockin'.

- I've got way too many branches right now, at various stages of development. Now that I have a working baseline, my plan is to start merging them into various groups later today, if I make enough headway through my list. I'm also in need of a "next" branch.

I really hope we get a mac dev soon. It's so nice to see this release finally shaping up.

Brilliant UI parody of Apple:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/51092/onion-news-network-apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-laptop-with-no-keyboard