Archive for the '-Miscellaneous' Category
Studio Wikitecture and Virtual Ability are the winners of the 1st Linden Prize! Both projects will receive $10,000 USD–the largest award in the virtual world industry–in honor of their achievements. After 230 applications and two rounds of deliberations, the judges decided that these two projects were “like comparing Tuesdays and Oranges”, so they will share the award!
“How do you measure the value of a project? Should making a deep impact on a select group of individuals weigh heavier than making an impact on a large population? Ultimately that wasn’t a question we could answer, so we decided to celebrate and honor both projects,” said M Linden. “The reach, scope and success of all the entries – exemplified by the winners – demonstrates how individuals and organizations are using Second Life to improve the overall human condition, something Linden Lab has strived for since day one. Heartfelt thanks and congratulations to the winners, finalists, entrants and every Resident and organization that continues to demonstrate how Second Life is fundamentally changing the way people learn, play, communicate and collaborate.”
Studio Wikitecture
Studio Wikitecture explores how a geographically dispersed design team can simultaneously work on the same architecture or urban planning project. This includes sharing ideas, editing the contributions of others and voting on the success or failure of proposed design iterations. To help guide and manage collaboration effectively, Studio Wikitecture built a version tracking Wiki that it calls the “Wiki-Tree.” Unlike conventional wikis that track text documents in a linear history, Wiki-Tree tracks versions of 3D models and saves them within a continually evolving digital tree structure. Studio Wikitecture’s most recent project saw a number of different participants from varying disciplines come together and collaborate on the design of a health clinic in one of the more remote parts of Nepal.
Judges comments: “A brilliant social and technological evolution of the use of virtual worlds.” “I can see a potential application to creating affordable housing in developing nations.”
Virtual Ability
Offering a series of courses and resources to help people with real-world disabilities get acclimated and start using Second Life, Virtual Ability helps realize the documented medical and psychological benefits offered by virtual environments. The organization has developed a unique orientation process that assesses individual skills, provides customized training and makes recommendations for assistive hardware as needed. Once users are comfortable in the virtual world, Virtual Ability offers a series of daily field trips, including everything from mountain climbs, skydiving, fishing, dancing, and countless other activities that are difficult or impossible in the real world.
Judges comments: “The orientation experience and resources are excellent.” “It is a powerful, personally transformative experience for people.”
A big thank you goes to the judges and vetting committee, applicants and testimonial writers. You have made the inaugural Linden Prize a rewarding testament to the creativity, and hard work of the Second Life community.
Congratulations to the winners, Studio Wikitecture and Virtual Ability!
For summaries of all the finalists and special mentions, please go here.
Coming from Australia and working for Linden Lab in our San Francisco office, I am always keeping an eye out for the activities that are happening in my home country. My focus at Linden Lab is in the enterprise space, so I generally see the great work that has come out of several Australian corporations. This week, however, my attention has been focused on the amazing Second Life community that has rallied in support of the devastating bush fires that have hit Australia.
As many of you are aware, these fires are one of the worst natural disasters to hit Australia in over 100 years. In response, Residents have created several inworld campaigns to raise funds to donate to relief efforts, from donation boxes to concerts to vendors selling clothing to support the cause. There’s already been some great coverage of these efforts from outlets including Massively, the Metaverse Journal, and New World Notes.
Seeing Residents come together like this is another powerful reminder of the breadth and strength of our global community and another great example of how Second Life is being used in ways that can really make a difference in the real world.
I’d like to thank those who have initiated fundraising efforts or given their support to this cause. Please describe/link to your inworld relief efforts in the forums.
Chris Collins (AKA Logan Linden)
Ok, I admit it. When I first joined Linden Lab to head up Enterprise Marketing three months ago, I wasn’t 100% convinced that working in virtual worlds really works. I mean, intellectually, immersive environments make perfect sense. We’ve all heard the key messages and I’ve been hard at work writing them. Meeting in Second Life allows global and mobile teams to collaborate in ways that aren’t possible other ways—improves efficiency, creativity, communication, and keeps travel costs in check. But, seriously—does working in the virtual world work?
My first official meeting in Second Life was an important and jarring experience for me—waking me up to how powerful the medium really is. The meeting took place in the Isabel conference room, here at the Battery Lab. The physical conference room—Isabel—has a virtual counterpart that is an exact replica—Virtual Isabel. A camera in Isabel captures what’s happening in the room and displays it in the virtual space. Simultaneously, the participants in Virtual Isabel are projected on the wall of physical Isabel. The result is a seamless experience—two conference spaces, one real and one virtual, merge into one. At first, it was a bit strange, but then I became absorbed into the discussion and the lines between the physical and virtual spaces blended. Then, in Virtual Isabel, I saw someone floating outside the window with a box on his head. What was my first reaction? I looked outside the physical window of the conference room to see if there was really someone floating outside. My colleagues caught me—in a completely confused state about what’s real and what’s virtual–and we all burst out laughing. I learned something very important that day. The virtual medium is extremely powerful and the ‘sense of presence’ is real—and that’s the magic ingredient that makes a meeting truly productive.
 Virtual Isabel To that point, I believe that the only good alternative to virtual meetings is a face-to-face meeting. It would be a hard to argue the teleconference calls or WebEx can create as immersive an experience. I mean, how many wasted hours have we all spent staring at a Polycom or ‘multi-tasking’ (i.e. barely tuning into the meeting) during a WebEx presentation? Don’t remind me.
Video conferencing is increasingly being used as an immersive meeting technology, but there are some psychological aspects that limit its potential. Caleb Booker recently blogged on this very topic. He posits two very interesting theories. First, usually when you’re in a video conference, the camera is zoomed in on the speaker and—unconsciously—we pull back because we feel we’re in a conversation with a ‘close talker.” (Anyone remember that Seinfeld episode? A classic.) He makes the case for virtual worlds and says, “The entire virtual world phenomena works because it accomplishes one simple thing: the perception of space. This is one of the most underestimated and wildly powerful tools of the past decade. Without even needing 3D glasses, a virtual space moves another person’s “presence” to a comfortable distance while still creating a sense that you are somehow physically together.”
His second point is even more compelling. As you know, there are three types of learners—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (or experience-based). The virtual world is a perfect mix that accommodates all three. He says, “Visual folk can look around the room to ’place‘ the voice they’re hearing or the text they’re reading (critical for them if they want to remember anything that happened!). Auditory people can just sit back and chat, occasionally glancing at the typed text. As for the kinesthetic people, well, they’re in absolute heaven.”
In fact, there really isn’t any other collaboration platform that can successfully do all three for distributed teams—except for a physical meeting. And, with travel budgets completely decimated these days, the luxury of a physical meeting is no longer a viable option for day-to-day interactions.
These days, I’m spending at least 2-3 hours a day in Second Life, meeting with my colleagues distributed all over the world—collaborating, brainstorming, learning, and decorating my new office space in LindenWorld. Using Second Life as an enterprise solution is helping us get our enterprise solutions to market smarter, cheaper, and faster than we might otherwise.
Ok, I’m the Marketing gal who drinks my own Kool-Aid—true. But, I’m also a believer, and if you’re not already—you will be, too. Just try it and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Hi all!
For those wondering generally what I’ve been up to, I said in earlier transition announcements from CEO to Chairman that I wanted to get back into engineering and the design of Second Life in a more hands-on way. So I am now working with two other great engineers as one of Linden Lab’s technical teams. In early December we decided that a good first project to work together on would be improving the performance and experience of using the web-based SL map, and also changing the architecture to be able to handle a much larger number of sims/servers. And, I have to say I’m having a great time getting back into development.
Hopefully, the general direction we are going with the map can help to make place and proximity more meaningful in SL. It should be fun to explore the map: to look at what is near your home, to drill down for more detail, to randomly surf around and jump to places that look interesting from the air. We always felt that this would be a big part of the appeal of SL, but the practical challenge of rendering things far away combined with the weaknesses of the existing web and in-world maps have made this more an aspiration than a reality.
More specifically, we’ve just released some improvements to the SL web-based map (http://www.slurl.com) that should be immediately noticeable. First, the map should load faster and be smoother when you use it. Secondly, you can now single-click on any location on the map and teleport directly there. The map is also accurately updated much more rapidly then the former map – so changes to the Second Life Grid or content should now be visible within about 2 days. Finally, the map images themselves look smoother and are more accurate when compared to the actual in-world content, and you can now zoom out and see how big SL has really become!
We’re not done with this project! We also intend to update the SL viewer to read its map tiles in the same way as the web map, meaning that you will be able to zoom and move around on the in-world map in a manner similar to the webmap, with much better performance than before. Look for a viewer release candidate next with those changes.
For SL developers, and the more technically interested: We are now serving map tiles directly from Amazon S3, and have changed the file naming convention to hopefully make it much easier to develop other 3rd party maps based on the tiles we are generating. More documentation on using the webmap API is available on our wiki. The map generation process is much more scalable than before, and is able to image the entire SL grid of about 30K regions in less than 2 days with just 4 dedicated machines. In general, the architecture approach of generating tiled images on sims into a public repository like S3 seems like the right approach for both performance and openness – it anticipates the ability for individual sim owners/operators in the future to create their own maps (or not make them at all!) and upload them to a common shared filespace on which multiple mapping systems can then depend.
Note: If you have built a map that depends on the old mapping API, we will leave the old tiles accessible for another few weeks, but will not be updating them in the future. You will need to switch to reading tiles directly from S3. We will post more information about this changeover on the wiki.
Also, here is a link to the forum for more discussion or any questions.
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 by: t linden
Xstreet SL and OnRez to Join Linden Lab!
Today we are very happy to share some exciting news with you: Linden Lab has acquired Xstreet SL and OnRez – the two leading Web-based marketplaces for buying and selling creations for Second Life. Over the past few months we’ve been working with the folks at Virtuatrade and the Electric Sheep Company to hammer out the details, and today is the first day that we’ve been able to talk openly about this next step in our evolution.
The Next Chapter for Xstreet SL and OnRez
First off, we’d like to congratulate both teams for their vision, passion and commitment. Xstreet SL and OnRez succeeded because they provided great opportunities for merchants, built delightful experiences for shoppers, and fostered dynamic and creative communities. Hats off to them!
We’d especially like to welcome Apotheus Silverman and the Xstreet SL team. Apotheus and key members of his team will be joining Linden Lab to integrate the Xstreet SL platform deeply into Second Life. This new team will shape our future plans and will continue to provide the high standard of service and support that Xstreet SL customers have come to expect.
Welcome Xstreet SL and OnRez merchants and shoppers!
Our second order of business is to extend a warm welcome to the merchants and shoppers of Xstreet SL and OnRez. The Xstreet SL and OnRez communities are (and will continue to be) critical to the success of those marketplaces, and we look forward to partnering with you and providing a fun and engaging shopping experience. As we go forward towards a single, unified Second Life marketplace, we are excited to build on the work that you, along with Xstreet SL and OnRez teams, have done.
I am an Xstreet SL/OnRez merchant or shopper, what should I do now?
Our goal is make this transition as smooth as possible for you in the weeks ahead. Because our plan is to build on the Xstreet SL platform, so this will be a painless transition for Xstreet SL merchants: your business will continue as usual. Check out the FAQ here for more details.
For Xstreet SL shoppers, no action is necessary as your balances and account information will be unaffected.
We will continue to operate the OnRez marketplace until February 11, 2009. Before that date, OnRez merchants who don’t already have an Xstreet SL account should create an Xstreet SL account and move their assets, balances and account information over to it. We apologize in advance for the inconvenience. Details on creating an Xstreet SL account are here.
If you are an OnRez shopper with a current balance, please transfer your account balances to a Second Life account before February 11, 2009.
New Opportunities
For many residents, shopping inworld is one of the most engaging parts of Second Life. But as many Xstreet SL and OnRez users already know, having a web marketplace to browse and search is a great way to find new designers, keep up with the latest creations, or just find that perfect gift/texture/dress/home/weapon/couch. Our goal is to make the web marketplace a wonderful complement to inworld shopping and a great benefit for all Residents.
Bringing these marketplaces together under the Linden Lab banner will unlock new and exciting opportunities for merchants. We can make it easier for new Residents to discover the wealth of products that can enrich their Second Life experience, and this in turn offers the opportunity for new users to become more invested in Second Life. We look forward to helping you reach new customers, promote your businesses, and build your sales.
There is also potential to evolve the shopping experience with new tools (sharable wish lists, anyone? Gifting to non-Residents? Scheduled deliveries?) and capabilities. But like Amazon or Ebay, the core of the experience will always be about efficiency. Kitting out your avatar, buying a house/castle/skybox, or getting your inworld business off of the ground can be done in minutes. The range of offerings is both impressive and accessible and the goods are delivered inworld quickly. And because the shopping experience is browser-based, it’s easy to shop from work (on your lunch hour, naturally!)
If you haven’t visited Xstreet SL yet, check it out.
Let us know your thoughts
While there are many exciting features to contemplate, we’re in the very early stages of this project and we have plenty of work ahead of us just to get the basic integration done. We will have much more to say about what to expect in the coming weeks and months.
In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts about what you would like to see or what would be the most beneficial to you and your inworld business. We invite you to join us in the forums, check out the acquisition FAQs, or simply browse for something to buy.
It’s officially time to do a reality check on all of your passwords.
Did you see the chaos when high-profile Twitter accounts were recently hijacked and used to send out messages in the names of those folks? How embarrassing.
Creating a Great Password
So, how many of us are using passwords from the list of 500 worst passwords?
Now that you know that “password” isn’t a good choice, here are a few tips for creating a password worth using.
- No real words = important. As you saw on the list of 500 worst passwords, most of them are real words, which can be cracked by fraudsters with very little effort. Avoid real words that can be found in a dictionary (in any language) or any proper nouns.
- Long passwords = essential. The fewer the characters, the easier it is to compromise. Choose a memorable password that’s at least 8 characters long. To make it even stronger, make it a “pass phrase” instead of a password. “brownfox” is borderline. “thequickbrownfox” is better.
- Mixed case = good. This adds another level of difficulty for fraudsters to guess your password. Try changing “thequickbrownfox” to “TheQuickBroWnFox.”
- Misspelled = better. While your English teacher wouldn’t approve, misspelling your passwords is a great way to add complexity: “ThuhQueekBroWnFoxE.”
- Added numerals and symbols = best. You could mix some numbers in there like “ThuhQueekBr0WnF0×3″ or-even better-use the first and/or last letter of each word, mixed with numbers. For example, the full phrase: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs” becomes “TQbF70TLd$.”
Keep it Secret!
Now that you’ve got a worthy password, be sure to keep it safe.
- Don’t use the same password for everything. If someone happens to crack your code, you could suffer serious compromises across all accounts.
- Avoid typing your password on shared computers. Keyloggers and other programs can allow others to harvest typed data from any computer to which they have access. So, consider your environment when logging in to anything from Internet cafes, libraries, or other shared computers.
- Don’t save your password anywhere. Most of us know better than to write it on a Post-it and stick it anywhere near the computer, but some of us may save passwords on sites or in files on networked computers-which isn’t safe.
- Change it from time to time. The better the password, the longer you can keep it-but that doesn’t mean it should stay static forever. Set yourself a reminder to update your passwords on a regular basis. If it’s been awhile since you changed your Second Life password, you can do so here.
- Don’t share your password. Do not give your password to anyone. This means friends, family, loved ones or Linden employees. Pets too, you never know.
Learn More
Below are a few other sources online to help increase your password protection and general password safety knowledge.
(please note: The “blank password” option should NOT be used for Second Life.)
If you’d like to discuss this further in the forums, join in the discussion here.
Thank you for your outstanding participation with both unique
and seasonal snowmen entries in our contest. As you may be
aware, there is a 1st place prize awarded to the “best of the
best” in this competition. We Lindens have had a very difficult
time voting for which entry should receive the 1st Place Prize.
Let me present the proud winners! Congratulations!
Main Grid 1st Place: kims Hyun
Main Grid 2nd Place: Monalisa Robboiani
Main Grid 3rd Place: Guu Nishi
TSL 1st Place: Oliver Sion
TSL 2nd Place: Tallie Emms
TSL 3rd Place: MagEE March
Seasons Greetings to all contestants and thank you for participating. We look forward to seeing you at future events!
Happy New Year!
Monday, September 29th, 2008 by: M Linden
I recently celebrated my fourth month at the Lab and it has been a terrific adventure so far. As the leader of this amazing company, what have I been focused on? Leading the company’s efforts to make Second Life more relevant, more usable and more reliable.
How are we doing?
We wrapped up a very busy and productive Summer here in the Northern Hemisphere with great results to report. First off, each week since August 31st has brought a concurrency high. Yesterday, the peak hit 71,232 – that’s an increase of 6% in less than a month. Year-over-year, peak concurrency has grown more than 38%. An even more impressive figure is the number of Residents who logged-in during the prior seven days. For the week ending September 19th, we had 505,839 unique log-ins – another Second Life record. Plus daily user-to-user transactions in Linden Dollars continue their steady climb.
What can we attribute this to? We simplified the registration process to make it easier for Residents to join, registrations are continuing at a healthy clip, existing Residents are spending more time inworld, viewer crash rates have declined, teleport failures have declined and database/network/simulator outages are down substantially (for the past three months, simulator outages were 24% of what they were the prior three months).
All are indications that Second Life is becoming more relevant, more usable and more reliable.
What’s next?
(more…)
Update 2008-07-30 07:48am : But for a small amount of residual clean-up, the rolling restart is complete.
Update 2008-07-30 05:45am : The second-half rolling restart has begun. Today, all regions still on 1.22.4 will be restarted, upgrading them to 1.23.4.
Update 2008-07-29 09:08am : The first-half rolling restart is complete, but for a small amount of cleanup.
Update 2008-07-29 05:09am : The rolling restart of even numbered hosts has begun.
Update 2008-07-25 10:04pm : Those regions (about 1/10 of Second Life) that had been running server version 1.23.3 are now running server version 1.23.4. (90% of the grid remains on 1.22.4.)
Update 2008-07-25 03:32pm : We have found and corrected some bugs in the code. These were very rare crash modes (the crash rate on 1.23.3, even though a bit higher than 1.22.4, still corresponds to a mean time between server crashes of nearly a month). As such, they’re not easily reproducible, and we’re not 100% sure that the bugs found were responsible for the crashes we saw (although it’s likely). Our plan is to roll out 1.23.4 to the pilot group of hosts and regions currently running 1.23.3; that will happen tonight at 7:30 or 8:00PM. The full roll will happen early next week. The schedule below has been updated.
Update 2008-07-25 05:21am : We have decided to delay further rollout of 1.23.3, but we are not going to roll back the regions currently on 1.23.3. The simulator crash rate is not alarmingly higher, but we have seen a couple of new crash modes that we want to investigate before rolling out 1.23.3 further. We will update more as we know more.
Update 2008-07-24 01:22 : The rolling restart to deploy 1.23.3 to 1/10 of the grid is now complete.
We have found and fixed the bug that was causing an increased crash rate in Server version 1.23.2, the version that was initially rolled out earlier this week.
We will be doing a pilot roll to about 1/10 of the grid very shortly. We will watch the crash rate of servers, and look for other problems, throughout the rest of the day. If all goes well, we will deploy 1.23.3 to the rest of the grid according to the schedule:
Schedule Updated
- Fri evening 07/25, 7:30-9:30PM : the 1/10 of the grid running 1.23.3 will be updated to 1.23.4.
- Tue morning 07/29, 5-10AM : one half of the grid;
- Wed morning 07/30, 5-10AM : the rest of the grid.
Please see the earlier blog posts (here, here and here) for a list of fixes and upgrades included in server version 1.23.
As with all rolling restarts, regions will receive warnings starting five minutes before they restart. Regions will only be down for 5-10 minutes. If your region stays down for more than 20 minutes, please contact support.
Update 2007-07-22 12:30 PM : The reversion is done. The investigation begins.
Update 2007-07-22 11:56 AM : The reversion is 80% complete and should finish soon. Also, thanks for the reports (via JIRA and comments) about performance issues with sims running 1.23. We have a hypothesis that the server build erroneously included additional debug information, which could lead to memory bloat (and thus crashes) and reduced performance. We’ll be doing additional experiments later today to try and confirm that hypothesis and see if that is the cause of the problems. At this point, though, it’s not much more than a hunch.
Update 2007-07-22 10:04 AM : Okay, you probably saw this coming… Now that the 1.23.2 update is out to half of the sims, we’re seeing a greatly increased simulator crash rate relative to 1.22 – nearly 10 times as high. This was not seen during previous 1.23 deploy attempts, nor on the Preview Grid, nor was this behavior seen on the pilot roll hosts – we’re baffled. Call stack analysis doesn’t point to a single smoking gun, either.
Between sobs and gnashing of teeth, we’re going to revert the 1.23 regions to 1.22 with another rolling restart already underway (expected to complete within about 4 hours), while the dev team attempts to understand what happened.
Please direct any positive karma towards the engineers working on this. When I was a fresh new Linden two years ago shepherding releases, a planned Wednesday downtime deploy – which stretched to 6 hours – would often be followed by additional hours of unplanned downtime and subsequent patches pushed out over multiple days to address show-stopper issues with new features and regressions. And then we’d often live with critical issues until the next iteration. We now have the means to push changes out much more slowly and with limited downtime per region, and in a non-monolithic fashion. For example, the central systems have been happily running 1.23 code for several weeks now. As the code complexity and size of Second Life has increased, the system as a whole is more sensitive to changes – and we also have better monitoring. Since we value the stability of Second Life, this has made us approach the roll-out of recent releases with more caution. It certainly causes more visible action, and angst within Linden Lab, but we believe the stability and quality of Second Life is improved.
Update 2007-07-22 08:56 AM : The first-half rolling restart is complete.
Update 2008-07-22 06:00 AM : The rolling restart for the first half of the grid has begun. Today, we are deploying to odd-numbered hosts.
Update 2008-07-21 09:06 PM : the pilot roll to 304 regions has been completed. Regions which have been updated are running version 1.23.2.92647.
The “fun” (here, here) continues – the issue found that prevented the rollout of 1.23.1 has been fixed and verified, and sat on the Preview Grid over the weekend, along with a couple of security fixes for previously outstanding issues. We plan to roll out 1.23.2 this week, starting with a “pilot roll” on Monday followed by updating the reset of Second Life over Tuesday and Wednesday. See the original 1.23 blog post for a full list of issues.
Here’s the schedule in detail:
- Monday evening (PST): a pilot roll to 150 regions
- Tuesday morning, 5AM-10AM : we will deploy server version 1.23.2 to half of Second Life.
- Wednesday morning, 5AM-10AM : we will deploy server version 1.23.2 to the rest of Second Life.
As usual with rolling restarts, this is a change on the server side; there will be no required client udpates associated with this rolling restart. Regions will receive warnings starting five minutes before they are restarted. There is no way to delay the restart of a given region. Regions should restart within 10 minutes of going down. If your region stays down for more than 20 or 30 minuets, please contact support.
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