Just few days ago I read a rant about new architecture of the Second Life servers announced at official blog:

Additional internal web service infrastructure work to remove dependencies on central databases (initially disabled, we’ll then slowly start flipping services on). In translation, network under the grid will not be centralized anymore. 

Not that this is not bad as aforementioned rant is suggesting. It is good. Instead of having a central asset database that will serve all the grid, all of the 50.000 residents active at the same time, that huge job of distributing data will be divided on thousands of smaller servers, those that "hold" sims as well. But let's go a bit under the hood. It won't be painful, I promise. Read more »

After my initial enthusiasm for 3D cameras that will map human's moves and face expressions on the avatar, I feel like turning back and look at things once again. As any new technology it might turn out as both a good and a bad idea. It's about how we use it and what do we expect from it. Read more »

In the comments on post about what one can do about griefing one of the soggestions passed almost unnoticed. I wasn't sure if something so obvious and simple is making any sense, wasn't proposed earlier and found ineffective or whatever so I let some time pass. But, the more I think, the more I'm sure I need to fill one JIRA ticket. It won't solve all the problems, but could help us prevent a large percent of them.

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One of the annoying stuff in every griefer's inventory are objects that emit particles around. Be that images of Super Mario, Ninja Turtles, genitalia or zombies, it is not interesting nor fun. It is called spam. But you can have hard time to find the object and to delete it. Here's a little how to. There are two ways to do that. Sometimes one is better than the other. Read more »

After several days, I got back, logged in and got drowned in a pile of blue envelopes thrown at my head. Read more »